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Paradise Revisited

Shane Joseph

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Oct 16, 2013 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: general-fiction, short-stories

Note, March 14, 2017: I just edited this review to correct two minor typos.

Canadian author Shane Joseph grew up in the 70s and 80s in post-colonial Sri Lanka (formerly called Ceylon), immigrating as a young man. His boyhood and youth have apparently furnished grist and inspiration for his fictional vision before (though this is the first of his works I've read), and it certainly does here, with all seven of the stories set wholly or mainly in the island nation. The Goodreads description simply r Note, March 14, 2017: I just edited this review to correct two minor typos.

Canadian author Shane Joseph grew up in the 70s and 80s in post-colonial Sri Lanka (formerly called Ceylon), immigrating as a young man. His boyhood and youth have apparently furnished grist and inspiration for his fictional vision before (though this is the first of his works I've read), and it certainly does here, with all seven of the stories set wholly or mainly in the island nation. The Goodreads description simply reproduces the back cover copy verbatim. That may have been designed more to sell than to describe, and arguably overstresses the immigration theme; most of the main characters do, or have, immigrate(d), but two of them don't, and in any case the focus isn't on the immigrant experience. It's on the mother country, in all of its particularity; but its particularity is, as in all great fiction, a setting for universal themes.

Shane and I are Goodreads friends, and he offered me a review copy of the collection last month, with no conditions on the quality of the review. I don't automatically give five stars to friends' books, or even necessarily ever read their books; and I warned him at the outset that my impression was that this wasn't the type of fiction I usually read, and might be of a type I wouldn't like. He was game to take a chance that the latter wouldn't be true, and he guessed correctly!

Of course, statistically, most of my reading is speculative and genre fiction. Mainstream, descriptive, general fiction hasn't bulked large in that corpus, comparatively speaking, and the kind set in our own time is an even smaller subset. So, truthfully, this isn't the kind of thing I usually read. To be sure, that partly has accidental causes, and doesn't mean I don't like well-done contemporary general fiction. But I avoid self-consciously "literary' fiction like the plague; "experimental" or "meta-fictional" style, aversion to plot, and cultivation of hack "political correctness" and bored nihilism are NOT keys to my literary heart, and I initially feared that was what this collection might be. That, however, proved to be far from the truth. It's certainly serious, realistic fiction, with an interest in tackling significant psychological, moral and social themes (it could define what the term "literary fiction" might have meant today if the critical community hadn't made the term a not humorous joke). But the author presents this by creating a real story, with well-crafted, vivid characters and careful attention to literary technique. These are stories that are actually very much in the tradition of what Conrad and Kipling wrote, allowing for the facts that the setting is more recent, that Shane has his own style and vision, and that his style incorporates much more grittiness than a former generation of editors or readers would have accepted.

Grittiness is indeed present in spades. The violence born of civil war and domestic terrorism is a factor in several stories; coarse, bad language (including the f-word) isn't uncommon in the dialogue, though I'm guessing that this actually reflects the speech the author heard growing up, rather than being dragged in unrealistically; and sexual references and situations also appear, most prominently in the title story and in "A Lie Oft Repeated." (In both stories, some of these scenes involve what we could call "explicit sex," but they're very brief, not detailed.) Darkness is a very real, omnipresent factor in all the stories. We have plot elements like the horrors of a violent, war-torn, oppressive political order where the unaccountable "haves" treat the "have-nots" like dirt, and the latter respond with viciousness of their own; government-sanctioned murder; old-fashioned private murder (or is it justifiable, defensive homicide?); exploitation of humans by others in all kinds of ways, including sexual (and including what's essentially homosexual prostitution --the narrator protagonist of "Inheritance" is also homosexual, though there's no described homosexual sex in that story); patriarchal sexism and loveless marriages; infidelity; poisonous family dynamics and lousy parent-child relationships. But the stories aren't about darkness in a nihilistic way (though the slightest story, "Nombera Eka [Number One]," a character study of a tourist-swindling, predatory con artist sociopath, could be mistakenly read as one; I think, though, that we're really to take him as a negative example who inspires revulsion, rather than as a role model). Rather, they're about positive steps and choices against the background of darkness -about love, courage to do what's right, constructive relationships; hope.

A reader who knows very little about Sri Lanka (which describes me; I'd vaguely heard of the Tamil insurgency, but that's about all I knew when I opened the book) could painlessly learn a lot about the country from these stories. (A glossary of Sinhala-language terms in the back is a helpful feature, though a few more could have been included and some definitions are less than clear. A map would have been useful, too, for those who don't automatically place city/locality names). The country, its culture and its ethnic groups --European-descended Burghers like the author; the Buddhist Sinhalese majority; the more disadvantaged Hindu Tamils-- come alive here in a real way. There's a strong cross-cultural theme in most stories, an exploration of the interaction of South Asian and Western/Anglo ways. (Except for "Inheritance," all the stories have Burgher protagonists, but there are major Sinhalese characters as well.) You learn more than you might want to know about the legacy of colonialism, and the social injustice that's still continuing. Shane's an excellent story-teller, captivating you with a desire to find out what will happen to these people you've come to care about, and endowing scenes like the old-style reading of a deceased family patriarch's will with real drama and suspense. The natural beauty of the Sri Lankan countryside is evoked with the skill of a painter in some places, as well.

If you're interested in serious short fiction, Canadian literature, or cross-cultural literature with a South Asian flavor, this is definitely a collection you should consider. And Shane's definitely become a writer whose work I want to explore more fully! ...more

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