Anuk Arudpragasam’s award-winning debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage was set in a refugee camp during the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war. It told the story of civilian casualties caught in the crossfire of fighting between the country’s army and the Tamil Tigers rebel forces, giving a sharp and harrowing picture of the repercussions of war.
The Sri Lankan writer returns to this subject matter for his second novel, which is an altogether more reflective affair, a disquieting and contemplative book that seeks to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Whereas Arudpragasam’s debut had a sense of urgency and immediacy – people’s lives reduced to the bare essentials of eat, sleep, survive – this book is light on action. The present-day storyline sees the narrator, Krishan, take a long train journey from his childhood home in Colombo to a war-torn northern province for the funeral of a carer, Rani, who looked after his ageing grandmother in recent years.
Trauma and loss surface in various ways through character, most obviously with Rani who has lost two children – an adult son soldier and a young boy killed in a bomb blast – because of the war. Krishan’s grandmother, Appamma, is suffering the loss of her independence from old age and illness. Krishan is back living in the family home after dropping out of postdoctoral studies in Delhi following a painful break-up with the mercurial Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier. His musings on his own losses and on those of his friends and family form the bulk of the book.
On finishing A Passage North, the reader comes away feeling wiser. The political landscape of a genocide that killed between 40,000 and 160,000 Tamil people in the course of two years, 2008 and 2009, is starkly related. Particularly affecting is the guilt – survivor guilt – that Krishan feels as he considers those who have died to make his country a better place, or his sense of shame as people, such as his ex-girlfriend, commit their lives to the efforts of rebuilding while he watches from the sidelines.
The aftermath of the violence, the post-traumatic stress disorder prevalent in the community, is witnessed through Rani’s battle with mental illness, which sees her take antidepressants, sleeping pills, blood pressure tablets, liver medication and receive increasingly regular bouts of electroshock therapy. It is an eye-opener for Western readers unaccustomed to war, or to thinking about the consequences. When Rani’s son is killed by the bomb, “they’d had no choice but to keep running . . . since the shells were continuing to fall. She wasn’t able to bury her son’s body, her daughter had been with her, and she couldn’t put her at risk by staying there any longer.”
Digressive sections
These learnings are also at times the book’s downfall. In early sections, the story gets lost amid lengthy passages of political context and digressive sections about famous works, such as the Sanskrit poem The Cloud Messenger or a recording of the Tamil song Sivapuranam, which are certainly relevant thematically but dull the vibrancy of the narrative with their academic tone and explanations. This stultification is heightened by a prose style that favours long paragraphs and chapter breaks that don’t bring much in the way of change or momentum.
The book is more successful as a novel when steeped in character and the enlightenments that come to Krishan as he observes those around him. The characterisation of the women in his life is deft and complex. Although his mother is mysteriously absent from the narrative, mentioned only in passing, the portrait of the grandmother is outstanding. A cantankerous, fearful women who refuses to go gently into the night. Krishan speaks of “her habit to ask more questions when she knew he wanted to leave, as a way of postponing or prolonging his departure . . . If she ever woke up after a nap and discovered that someone had come into her room she would strenuously deny that she’d been sleeping.” Yet crucially, we feel sympathy too for this ageing matriarch and “her unwillingness to compromise on what she took herself to be entitled to”.
Anjum is an equally multifaceted creation – the impact of her bisexuality on her relationship with her parents is particularly interesting – and although Krishan comes close to deifying her in their initial encounters, his realisations over the course of the book rectify this.
Arudpragasam's work has been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and broadcast on the BBC. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University, which is put to good use in A Passage North. With considered thoughts on everything from smoking to meditation, life and death, his new novel is a treasure trove of insight and wisdom, a reminder of "how large and unknown the world was, how much it seemed to contain."
