Cyclic Metaphor

There is a kind of deliberate, even Aristotelian unity to this novel. Thus, the novel starts at daybreak, and the successive chapters are located at different times of the evolving day—noon, twilight, midnight—and ends at the end of the 24-hour cycle, dawn again. It is another matter that this diurnal cycle is actually spread over many years and several generations. But despite this appearance of formal ordering, the novel itself seems to use its very formlessness, its sense of fated drifting, as part of its narrative argument.

At an obvious level—reinforced by elaborate family-trees—Gunesekara's Sandglass is a sort of Sri Lankan Khandaan, a tale of rivalry and intrigue between two business families, the Vatunases and the Ducals, whose destinies are grotesquely intertwined over several generations. This plot is generously provisioned—there is a rapacious patriarch and a vast property which drives his greed; many women who are, in varying combinations, beautiful, pampered and/or neglected; there is a mysterious would-be tycoon who, equally mysteriously, commits suicide. His son is convinced, indeed determined, to prove that it was in fact a murder, but is apparently overcome by fatigue come novel-end, and no longer cares. Neurotics, defectives, criminal beings abound. But, for my money, this energetic, action-filled plot is the least interesting part of the novel.

Because while all this furious action is happening in the background—and in flashback—the bulk of the novel is actually concerned with the lives of people who are living in conscious exile from all that purpose-filled violence. These people are all, in their different ways, inheritors of a violent past—but they are also seeking, without conspicuous success, to free themselves from the consequences of their poisoned legacy. Drifting through the depthless worlds of exile, even in their own eyes, they are irrevocably damaged. And the upbeat note that Gunesekara ends the novel on seems both feeble and forced. There is no way back to Arcadia, the name of the property at the centre of the struggle, and when at last the narrator, a friend of the Ducal family, finally gets to the mansion that he has heard so much about, it is about to be demolished: "...a large hoarding proclaimed the future: 'The New Arcadia'. The proposed flagship hotel of the Great Sands Corporation... There was an artist's futuristic drawing of an elegant garden hotel, shimmering in glass, with bougainvillaea cascading over every recessed balcony and a column of starred features in bold red letters: air-conditioned honeymoon apartments, fantasy love suites, an Eros cinema and a subterranean ice rink with a Japanese snow machine. " The burden of the future is quite as horrific as the burden of the past.

Gunesekara is a sensitive and gifted writer—hints enough of that here—but what is he doing with this TV-serial plot—Khandaan, Dynasty? Could it be that he intends that destructive struggle to be a metaphor for the bitter, fratricidal contention, the oxymoronic (and moronic) civil war that has ravaged his homeland: a process that is irredeemably, unendingly tragic, irrespective of whether one stays or flies into exile, far away from the bombs and the guns?