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| Sunday, 16 April 2006 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Characters
Vanish, Fixate on Cricket, Build a Brooklyn Bridge
The sound of leather on willow is never far away in Romesh Gunasekera's "The Match". by Hephzibah Anderson
Leather on Willow Sunny Fernando is the product of a more global age. Born in Sri Lanka and reared in Manila, he lost his mother to a mysterious illness at age 8, only to learn at 16 that she actually committed suicide. Sunny blames her unhappiness on his father, a disenchanted journalist, and heads to London to study engineering. Cricket becomes the only thread connecting the patchwork of his life, and the sound of leather on willow is never far away in Romesh Gunesekera's "The Match" (Bloomsbury, 308 pages, 14.99 pounds). As a teenager, Sunny had sought to use his batting prowess to impress Tina, a fellow Sri Lankan. Washed up in England, a country where "Ceylon was only ever a cup of tea, and Manila a type of envelope," cricket seems something to avoid. The sport only reminds him of his father and his failure with Tina. Sunny flunks out of university and eventually drifts into a career as a photographer, looking for a single perfect picture that will make sense of his life. He finds it one day while watching the Sri Lankan team play at London's Oval Cricket Ground. While his story lacks drama, Gunesekera writes with poise, panache and wry emotional insight that more than compensate for the novel's gentle pace. Onto Tina Humber, a British marine biologist living in Massachusetts. Happy in marriage and doting on her 10-year-old daughter Poppy, Tina is sure she has put a dark past behind her. Two incidents soon suggest otherwise in Jill Dawson's fifth novel, "Watch Me Disappear" (Sceptre, 260 pages, 12.99 pounds). On a working holiday off the coast of Malaysia, Tina experiences a moment of panic that triggers a vision of a childhood friend, Mandy Baker, who vanished three decades earlier when both girls were 10. Then Tina's brother calls to invite her to his wedding back home in the Cambridgeshire Fens.
Dawson evokes the haze of passing years to heighten the queasy tension that makes her novel so compelling. She sharpens the disquieting edge by setting the past in the Fenlands, a place whose lonely lanes are stalked by folkloric creatures like the "lack Shuck," a spectral dog, as well as more modern dangers. It all adds up to a disturbing meditation on how society conditions girls to please. 'Brookland' Bridge Sinister family secrets also simmer in Emily Barton's second novel, "Brookland" (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 478 pages, $25). At its heart stands Prudence Winship, a plucky 18th-century businesswoman determined not to let the constraints of her gender thwart her vision of a bridge spanning New York's East River to link Manhattan with Brooklyn, or Brookland, as it was then known. Through letters to her pregnant daughter and a series of sharp memories, Prue describes how she inherited her family's gin distillery, married a surveyor named Ben Horsfield and set about finding financial backers for her bold dream. Prue is an intriguing character, made all the more so by a certain cold-heartedness. As a 6-year-old, she curses her unborn baby sister. As a mother, she's more interested in the distillery than in her children. As a wife, she lets her husband take the blame when delays and accidents befall the bridge, though its design is largely hers. Barton writes with brio, conjuring up a time when ripe corn and horse dung scented the Brooklyn air. She infuses her prose with period images: A realization hits Prue like "a clapper strikes the side of a bell." Energetic and intelligent, "Brookland" ranks among the finest historical fiction. Courtesy Bloomberg.com |
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| Produced by Lake House |
The past intrudes on the present for characters in three new novels, from
a Sri Lanka-born man whose identity turns on the game of cricket to an
18th-century woman determined to build a bridge across New York's East
River. 
Returning alone, Tina finds childhood memories flooding back and begins
to think more closely about the events surrounding Mandy's disappearance.
She remembers catching her father cavorting on a riverbank with her teenage
babysitter. She recalls finding him in the back of his van with a pigtailed
child on his lap. Gradually, the clues spell out a sickening suspicion. 
