The author and the book cover of the 10th anniversary edition
Chinaman The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, published by Penguins in 2010, price Indian Rupees 450 Sri Lankan Rupees 1350
Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is so far the best work of fiction to come out of Sri Lanka, and I wonder why it failed to get into even the long list of the Booker Prize.
No Sri Lankan writer has so far achieved that feat except for two writers who were born on the island but became international stars on foreign soil. I am talking about Canadian superstar Michael Ondaatje whose The English Patient won a booker in 1992 and Romesh Gunasekera whose Reef was shortlisted in the prestigious award in 1994. Karunatilaka must have missed the target by a whisker, but I am sure we will hear more of him in the future.
The novel, with a refreshing theme and written bordering on several literary genres, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Commonwealth Prize.
In 2010 Karunatilaka’s Chinaman emerged as the best Sri Lankan English fiction and won the Gratian Award. The award is an annual literary prize for the best work of literary writing in English founded in 1992 by Ondaatje with the money he received as a joint-winner of the Booker Prize for The English Patient.
The punchy, arrogant tale of an alcoholic journalist (W.A. Karunasena) dying of liver disease and who until his death is trying to uncover the whereabouts of a mystery cricketer whose claim to fame is a style of spin-bowling known as Chinaman capable of deceiving any batsman.
Only a couple of bowlers are said to have mastered this style, which is turned on the cricket pitch bouncing in unpredictable angles.
Though it looks like a cricket novel on account of its association with world famous cricketers – fictional, real or disguised – and their records, and intricacies of the English man’s game mostly played in the former colonies, Chinaman is about life, its idiosyncrasies, courage against insurmountable odds, corruption, cronyism and dogged enthusiasm in a country torn by a meaningless 30-year ethnic war, at the same time basking in the glory of the World Cricket Cup win in 1996.
Chinaman has earned admirers on top order. Ondaatje describes the novel as ‘a crazy, ambidextrous delight’. ‘I loved Chinaman’ says the icon of the written word Salman Rushdie. “As close to a masterpiece as anything to have come out of South Asia in recent years,” is India Today’s verdict. Former Sri Lankan cricket star Kumar Sangakkara is a fan who says, “Shehan has managed to charmingly and at times alarmingly capture the essence of Sri Lankan cricket, both in its beauty and its ugliness.”
Karunatilaka quite daringly exposes the dirty underbelly of world and local cricket and the betting scams which had landed several famous cricketers in hot water with real and assumed names along with personal scandals making me wonder why there had been no attempt to sue the writer for libel.
I believe that spinner Pradeep Mathew’s profile is a combination of several cricketers familiar to us and some make-believe characters in the novel made me even Google their names to find their authenticity!
This particular feature reminds me of Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost in which we come face to face with real-life characters with assumed names, but in the back of our minds, we know who the writer is talking about. There are familiar politicians, archeologists, medical professionals under assumed names. Karaunatilaka approach is bolder than that of Ondaatje because he names names.
One intriguing character is Elmo Thowfeeq. I have a vague feeling that this name really combines the names of two sportswriters who worked with me. However, my guess may be wrong.
The tale told in deft, hypnotic language with turn of events almost every page and humour surpassing the talent of another great Sri Lankan writer, Karl Muller, though Karunatilake humbly refers to the late writer as one of his inspirations.
The concluding who-done-it part of the novel is completed by Garfield, protagonist’s son – a failed rocker- named after the great West Indian allrounder Garfield Sobers. Garfield who, in his young days, questions his father’s obsession with a man with a physical disability that gives him greater advantage above the other bowlers, tracks down the mystery cricketer in New Zealand where place names sound like Sinhala vulgar words – Pukakohe – while the Maori words for hill (puka) and European New Zealander (Pakeha) can draw few chuckles from a Sinhala speaker.
A host of retired hippies and junkies leads Garfield to the ‘Chinaman’ for whom his father drank till his death, becoming a villain for stepping on the toes of many cricket administrators, players and government VIPs in his failed odyssey to find his favourite cricketer in the world.
The page-turner should not be taken as a novel about cricket. It is a microcosm of Sri Lankan life and its culture unifying all the good, bad and ugly things in the name of a game, which remains a puzzle or a joke to the people living outside the former English colonies. – Somasiri Munasinghe
