Mission to Oslo - The first English detective story in Sri Lanka
by H. L. D. Mahindapala
One day in 1987 Gunnar Larsen, 36, a Norwegian gemmologist, flies out
from Gademoen air port in Oslo to finalize one of his business
assignments in Sri Lanka.
After a long flight and an equally long road journey he arrives at
Paradise Hotel in the Eastern coast at 1 p.m.
He goes out for a walk on the beach, taking in the majestic beauty of
the setting sun, around 6 p.m. By 6.15 p.m. he is a corpse lying on the
lonely beach. Someone had shot him between the eyes, leaving a “third
eye” bleeding on the forehead.
Inspector Ravi Ranavaka, from Tangalle Police, arrives on the scene
and is puzzled. Nothing has been touched. Larsen’s transistor radio and
purse are intact. His task is to find out who killed Larsen at a time
when Norway-Sri Lanka relations are at a sensitive point. But there are
no eye witnesses.
There is no visible motive. It certainly is not robbery because his
possessions are with him. And there are no traceable clues.
Inspector Ranavaka’s detective work of finding the killer runs
through this gripping book, Mission to Oslo. It is the first Sri Lankan
detective novel I’ve read since I was thrilled, as a teenager, by
Piyadasa Sirisena’s Wimala Tissa Hamuduruwo’s Mudal Pettiya.
It is a genre that has not been used by Sri Lanka writers. S. W. R.
D. Bandaranaike, who harboured ambitions of writing an epic novel on the
scale of War and Peace ended up writing Maha Henay Riri Yakka - quite an
intriguing detective story which was staged later at the Lionel Wendt
when he was prime minister.
Apart from that nothing in this genre comes to mind. Prof. D. C.R. A.
Goonetilleke, authority on Sri Lankan English literature, too confirmed
to me that no adult has written a detective fiction as far as he knows
though he remembers a youngster writing something on these lines. This
makes Mission to Oslo the first ever, full-length detective fiction
written in English.
Perhaps, my pleasure in reading Mahinda Weerasinghe’s Mission to Oslo
also may be due to the absence of any Sri Lankan detective fiction in
English. Not being able to lay my hands on a printed copy - it has just
come out of the Vijitha Press — I’ve read only the electronic version of
Oslo Mission.
It was e-mailed to me by the author whom I first met in the streets
of Oslo, opposite a hotel within walking distance to his gracious house
located close to King Harold’s Palace. He was one of the organizers in
Oslo who ran the conference of the World Alliance for Peace in Sri
Lanka.
The attendees were in the safe and campable hands of Weerasinghe who
paid attention to details. He is a structural engineer who has
specialized in offshore steel structures. He is often away from home
working in distant Norwegian offshore drilling industry.
But that has not prevented him from running a one-man battle of his
own against the ill-informed Norwegians on the Sri Lankan issue. He
pours his intimate knowledge of Norway into Inspector Ranavaka’s
investigations which take him to Oslo.
This opens a window for Weerasinghe to go beneath the surface of
Norwegian society and look deeper, particularly into the Sri Lankan
community domiciled in that cold climate. His barbs are reserved mostly
for the Norwegians who are meddling in Sri Lankan affairs.
Weerasinghe’s life experiences in Norway and Sri Lanka provide him
the necessary insight to straddle both societies with ease.
He sees the hypocrisy of Norway, which is brash enough to criticize
Sri Lanka’s treatment of minorities, with that of the Sami people, the
indigenous Norwegians who have been marginalized and denied their
fundamental rights for centuries.
The following snippet of converstion between Inspector Ranavaka and
his travelling companion, Patrick, the American, illustrates how
Weerasinghe weaves politics into his who-dun-it:
“The Sámi people, whom we used to call Laps”, he (Patrick) explained
“speak a totally different tongue from those of Norwegian Danish or
Swedish. If anything their language is closer to Finnish, which is a
relative of Finno-Ugric languages. These Sami have been often called
Norway’s Indians.
As with the American Indians, these Sami were already established on
what in time would come to be known as Norway, the land of the
Norwegians!
“In time zealous Norwegian missionaries laboured hard to eradicate
Sami cultural heritage but evidently failed. Until the last world war
all education for the Sámis was conducted in Norwegian, the official
language of Nor way.”
“Strange that, I thought, considering the present Norwegian media’s
drive to destroy the Sinhalese people’s reputation. The popular media
here, I was told, routinely use demeaning language to describe the
Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan Government.
The majority people in the Island were termed, the ‘Sinhalese
Buddhist chauvinist’, ‘Sinhalese and their apartheid Government’, the
‘Sinhalese insufferable nationalism’, to name a few. But the Sinhalese
never practiced nationalism the way Norwegians had done to the poor
Sámi.
The Sinhalese had been merely trying to save their country being
split by a group of Tamils, who reject living in a pluralistic society
due to their inbuilt apartheid mentality.
“In the end the Sinhalese will fall, I thought, due mainly to a
historical tolerance of theirs.
In fact when compared to the Sámi experience at the hands of
Norwegian nationalism, the historical Tamil invader of Sri Lanka had a
peaceful time culturally speaking.
They have always practiced and continue to practice their language
and culture without any interference from the Sinhalese. If an average
Tamil in the north of Sri Lanka could utter a few words of Sinhalese or
if there were any Tamil Buddhists in existence then this would amount to
a miracle.”
This is only a minor aside in a detective story that is packed with
suspense and action. He writes with ease focusing on the thread of the
story unfolding on each page. Ranavaka is a miniature mixture of Agatha
Christie’s Poirot and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe.
The English detective, starting from Sherlock Holmes, and the
American detective, starting from Edgar Alan Poe, ran in two different
directions. The mystery adventures of Miss. Marples and Poirot were
purely cerebral.
But when it crossed over to the other side of the Atlantic the
Americans packed it with action and brawn that goes with it.
While Agatha Christie focused on the British upper class where
murders took place in lovely lawns or neat drawing rooms, the American
writers, born and bred in the live-fast-die-young-and-leave-a-good
looking-corpse-behind culture, focused on the seedy underworld. Both
explored the dark side of humanity.
The detective novel is primarily concerned with the machinations of
the mind and society obsessed with greed, lust, ambitions,
avariciousness - in short the seven deadly sins. By and large, the
Western mystery writers were cynical critics of their societies at
large.
They dived into the cess pits of their societies to bring to the
surface the muck hidden below. They did not focus on politics overtly,
though later Ian Fleming and Len Deighton added the new dimensions of
international intrigue and the competing values of Cold War politics.
Weerasinghe makes no pretensions of aspiring to be in that class.
Mission to Oslo is a straightforward narrative running from A to Z —- Z
being the triumphant moment when Inspector Ranavaka reveals the hidden
mystery.
Occasionally, without disrupting the flow of the narrative, he takes
snide shots at the Norwegians and even the Sri Lankans. But those cracks
are intertwined as integral parts of the story.
His characters are delineated with the credible characteristics of
both cultures. His language is colloquial and easy-going. And the
narrative runs fast. The politics running through it is relevant to our
times. What more can we expect from a detective fiction?
It is a book that should be translated into Sinhalese and Norwegian,
perhaps even to a film. I missed reading the hard copy though. I would
have appreciated it more if I read it curled up in bed in these wintry
nights, down under.
The texture you feel in the hands and the turning of leaves, with the
hardly noticeable rustle, enable me to relate more closely to the
characters on the page than the faces hidden in the depths of cyber
space.
They don’t come out of the cold screen as warmly as they do on the
pages in your hand. It is absolutely irritating to read fiction on the
screen.
It takes away half the kick you get when you read it in bed. I hope
I’d get a hard copy next time Weerasinghe writes a book. |