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Romesh - a unique voice

Set between Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Britain, The Match (Bloomsbury; ISBN: 0-747-58024-3) is an ambitious work which spans four decades. The story parallels the journey that Booker-nominated author Romesh Gunesekera has made in his own life, but how far is the book autobiographical?

I had the chance to ask Gunesekera in a telephone interview last week, catching him in Singapore, on his way back from the Melbourne Writers' Festival. "I wanted to use real places for the skeleton of the story because I know from personal experience that they can be connected," he says, describing the book as "autogeographical" rather than "autobiographical", since it explores a geography that is personal, but uses invented characters.

Cricket is, of course, a recurring motif in the novel. Gunesekera said he used the sport as a way of exploring a sense of belonging, and also because it is an integral part of the Sri Lankan experience that he seeks to explore in his work.

Romesh Gunesekera... the rumble of violence 'nags at the back of our minds'. Much of the early part of the novel is taken up with a very funny account of a match which takes place in the 1970's Manila.

Sunny has moved from Sri Lanka to join his journalist father, Lester. When his best friend Robbie declares that he'd like to learn to play cricket, Sunny approaches his father for help. Lester takes up the idea with enthusiasm and pulls together a scratch team to play against a Hong Kong side.

The team includes a neighbour's daughter, the luscious Tina Navaratnam, who Sunny has a terrible crush on but fails to impress - on pitch or off. Sunny distances himself from his father when he learns that his mother died by her own hand, and that the truth has been concealed from him. He moves to London to take up an engineering degree and like most foreign students, finds himself lonely and adrift at first.

"Sunny doesn't have huge problems adapting," explains Gunesekera, "but he is uneasy, which is what I suppose a lot of people feel when they move between countries. He starts off not wanting anything to do with the past, he cuts himself off and then ends up having to somehow create a past for himself."

Indeed, the novel explores the need for connection on several levels: with the places we live, with those we love, and with our own histories. In London, Sunny makes friends with divinity student Ranil, and his Sri Lankan family. He falls in love with Ranil's English girlfriend, Clara, who eventually becomes his long-term partner and mother of his son, Mikey. The novel's title could probably apply equally well to the unconventional love story at the heart of the book. "I wanted to write about a man trying to work out what love means," says Gunesekera.

"I wanted to explore a kind of married love, especially a long-term relationship which is not working most of the time."

In this novel as in Gunesekera's other works, there is a recognition of what is going on in the wider world and a rumble of violence through the newspaper or television reports.

"These things become the background of modern life," he adds. "Most of us don't know quite how to deal with it, but it nags at the back of our minds."

Despite the seriousness of the novel's subject matter, there's often gentle humour in the turn of a phrase and some parts of the book are marvellously comic. "I tried very hard to make it funny and sad at the same time," Gunesekera admits.My favourite scene is the tea at the run-down Lake View Hotel in Sri Lanka, where a sudden gust of wind causes the waiters to chase after the food, with disastrous consequences.

One of the biggest delights of The Match for me was the way that even the most minor of characters emerges fully-fleshed. Mr Stan Ladek, the old watchmaker who sells his shop to Sunny, and Piyansena, the taxi-driver who takes him round Colombo, may both have walk-on parts but one can imagine pasts and inner lives for them every bit as interesting as those of the main characters.

The Match is a wonderfully complex and multi-layered novel which will repay patient reading.

 

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