Book Review:
Action And Romance (Postcolonial Style)
The Road From Elephant Pass
Nihal de Silva
Colombo [Sri Lanka], Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2003
359 pp. paperback, Rs. 500
For many years colonial Africa provided British writers with a background and setting for popular romantic novels. Its desert sands, for instance, figure vividly in Beau Sabreur, P.C. Wren's celebration of the heroes of the French Foreign Legion, in which the brave Major Henri de Beaujolais, man of destiny and pride of the Spahis, unwillingly escorts a feisty American girl by camel caravan across the Sahara, offering gallantly at the last to die that France (and his lady) might live. Rider Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines memorably celebrates the African bush, into which white hunter Alan Quartermaine leads a safari in order to locate the missing husband of an attractive and truculent Englishwoman. Between them Haggard and Wren manage to confront their heroes with every type of savage beast associated with the African wilderness. Henri de Beaujolais fights off marauding Touareg and licentious Arab sheikhs, and Quartermaine deals briskly with lions, leopards, rhinoceros, snakes, elephants and crocodiles, not to mention “native” cannibals and white desperadoes on the run from British justice. With each victorious encounter, the antipathy of the ladies towards their respective protectors thaws by degrees, finally melting away altogether so that the novels can close on suitably happy endings.
Both these works (and others like them) thrilled readers to the core at the time of their publication. Readers of The Road From Elephant Pass will probably recognize in the novel's plot certain elements they have met before in popular English fiction. Nihal de Silva gives the romantic formula of captor-turning-protector in an exotic tropical setting a new twist by deftly setting his story in the war-torn paradise of postcolonial Sri Lanka. For the benefit of the multitudes of readers unfamiliar with the island's geography, his narrator supplies on the second page an account of what and where precisely “Elephant Pass” is, and its strategic importance to the civil war that continues to plague the country:
For seventeen years the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE, had been fighting the [Sri Lanka] Government to establish a separate state for the Tamil minority of the country. The peninsula of Jaffna is the stem end of our pear-shaped island. It was the home base of the Tamils but now was occupied by our forces. The rebels held the heavily forested region called the Wanni, the landmass south of Jaffna extending up to the centre of the island. The camp at Elephant Pass controlled the isthmus between the Wanni and the Jaffna peninsula.
Captain Wasantha Ratnayake, who has already seen action in the war, is about to embark on a new assignment, the task of verifying the credentials of an LTTE woman activist turned informer. She has offered to trade valuable information to the Government in exchange for a passport and a visa that will take her to Canada. If Ratnayake is satisfied that she is a genuine informant and not a “plant," he has orders to escort her under armed guard to Jaffna, from which army stronghold she will be flown to Colombo for further interrogation. The plan goes awry when the Tigers launch a massive attack on the peninsula and the camp at Elephant Pass. With their transport destroyed, their escort slaughtered and Jaffna beyond reach, Ratnayake and his hostile charge must alter course. To reach the capital they must find their way together through the rebel-held Wanni and later cross the abandoned Wilpattu National Park on foot.
The young army captain, unashamedly macho in the Sinhala style to begin with ("I like my Tamils deferential"), is tempted at his first meeting with arrogant Kamala Veleithan to "take her to the back of the hut and slap some respect into her." By the end of their journey together he is willing to sacrifice his career to guarantee her safety, and is ready "to crawl on broken glass for a chance to talk to her." Wasantha acquits himself with credit in the tropical jungle, proving himself a resourceful and vigorous soldier, as gallant in love as in war, a veritable “Beau Sabreur” of the Sri Lankan army. Kamala, for her part, overcomes her hatred of the Sinhala people who had persecuted her family during the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 and learns to respect and trust her companion. Humour is needed on both sides as the two characters struggle to surmount the various obstacles nature and humankind place in their way, hotly debating as they go the issues that keep their races apart. They are an attractive pair, and it is not surprising to learn that The Road From Elephant Pass is presently in its second printing, and that a movie based on the novel is in the pipeline.
The adventures of Kamala and her “Captain” on the road to Colombo provide a gripping plot, but action and romance are not all that this novel has to give. There is much more to be said, especially in the context of postcolonial Sri Lanka, where the quest for peace has become the principal item on the national agenda. The novel's major theme arises from the realization on the part of the fleeing couple that survival is only possible for them if they are willing to trust and support each other. Their predicament mirrors in microcosm the predicament of their estranged communities and the larger, embattled nation. In developing this theme, Nihal de Silva brings his characters convincingly to life: their words and actions linger in the mind long after the last page has been turned.
The Road From Elephant Pass is a first novel, and like many first novels it has its flaws. One of these arises from the author's deep interest in Sri Lanka's magnificent and variegated bird-life: Wasantha and Kamala are conveniently revealed to be wildlife enthusiasts themselves, having in common an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the literature available on the subject of Sri Lankan avifauna. Consequently, they pause at nearly every turn in their journey in order to observe, and comment on, the appearance and behaviour of birds they encounter in their travels. This happens so often that it strains the reader's credulity: these characters are, after all, running for their lives and have only nine days in which to accomplish a long and extremely dangerous journey — can they possibly spare the time to “stand and stare," however attractive the prospect before them? An experienced literary editor would have picked up such a contradiction at once and advised the author to moderate an enthusiasm that threatens the credibility of his story.
Unfortunately, experienced literary editors appear to be thin on the Sri Lankan ground, and competent proof-readers practically non-existent in Sri Lankan publishing houses. Outwardly presentable, with a well-designed cover suitable to a novel which has won the Gratiaen Prize for fiction, the book is marred by numerous printing errors and sports no fewer than eight blank pages. It deserved a better deal. A third printing will, one hopes, remove these blemishes on one of the most satisfying works of fiction to emerge from Sri Lanka in recent years.
