The Hamilton Case is first and foremost a novel of place. Second, it is a psychological studya number of them, actually. Third (and a weak third, I would say) it purports to beand plays with beinga mystery. Taken as a whole, it is a rumination on what one might call the British Reichdämmerungthe Twilight of the Empire. The place is Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka) in the first half of the twentieth century, when three hundred years of British colonial rule came to an end after World War II and the rise of local self-rule movements.
The psychology is that of Sam Obeysekere, born in 1902, grandson of Sir Stanley Obesekere, who was a mudaliyara Ceylonese office that “placed a man at the pinnacle of our island’s social system” and who rose in the Colonial administration so far as to be awarded knighthood. It is also the psychology of his mother, Maud, his sister, Claudia, and his wife, Leela, and, to an extent, of just about every character de Kretser creates.
The obvious mystery is the eponymous Hamilton case, but there is yet another, more disturbing mystery that turns out to have permeated the story without asserting itself until the final pages of the novel. If you are an aficionado of the murder mystery genre, do not seek out this book. Most of what transpires has nothing to do with whodunit, why, and how.
This is one of those narratives in which nothing much happens, and at great length. As a study of place, it succeeds in creating a rather disembodied ambience in which the visual is very much subservient to the feelings the setting engenders in the characters. This is not a travelogue. If you don’t know anything about
One of de Kretsers expatriate Ceylonese characters articulates the problem an author faces in trying to conjure up a veridical image of Ceylon (or any other unfamiliar setting).
[Readers] wrote to tell me…. Your work is so exotic. So marvelously authentic…. I saw that what I had taken for the markers of truth functioned as signs of exoticism. The colonizer returns as a tourist, you see. And he is mad for difference. That is the luxury commodity we now supply…. The prose may be as insipid as rice cooked without salt. No matter: call up a monsoon or the rustle of a sari, and watch him salivate. (p.305)
De Kretser serves up both monsoons and saris, but by staying true to her characters manages to avoid providing local color for the sake of local color alone.
The British Empire in
In his excitement of solving (shudder quotes made necessary by an ambiguity that becomes apparent only at the end of the novel) the Hamilton casewith the foreseeable consequence of finding a white British man guilty of murder and in turn sentenced to be hangedSam momentarily loses sight of the underlying reality. The exhilarating satisfaction of being the instrument of justice clouds his mind. The prestigious judgeship he expects as his due evaporates. He has forgotten that nobody who counts wants a judge on the bench who is willing to do equal justice to British citizens and Ceylonese subjects alike. Sams momentary lapse is not so surprising. Sam was educated on the British model in the best Ceylonese prep school. He read history at
As de Kretser makes clear, the British felt a terrible, hubristic ambivalence towards their colonial subjectssubjects, meaning inhabitants of a subjugated possession, not equal citizens of the British Empire, and certainly not equal British citizens. On the one hand, colonial subjects were free to travel to England, attend schools there (including Oxford and Cambridge), train there, and live there; but on the other hand they were always the other, the distasteful, fightening dark-skinnned, inferior other. Tolerated at best.
I am reminded of a conversation I had as a Harvard freshman in 1960 with a classmate from the American Deep South. I had asked about the race problem or some similarly (I hoped) unprovocative paraphrase of the question I wanted to ask, which was roughly, How do you feel about the treatment of Blacks [actually, at that time, one would have said Negroes] both culturally and legally as second class citizens? Now, fifty years later, I still remember his exact words. In a detectably aggrieved tone he replied, We love the colored people. We take care of them. A Britain might have said the same thing. At their most idealistic, they really believed they should, in the words of Kiplings poem, Take up the white mans burden.
But there was something else going on in England. As one of de Kretsers characters remarks, it used to be in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, that a non-white face there would surely belong to a rich personmaybe a prince or a princesssuch were the only such people who could afford to travel that far; but by the 1950s, less distinguished, ordinary people were able to visit, and prejudice could find just that much more traction.
If the novel were transported entirely to England and Sam Obeysekere transmogrified into the son of an eccentric English noble family, his character would be a familiar one. A boy raised in traditional, emotional isolation from his parents who becomes a cold and distant man unable to relate to his wife or his son, contemptuous of the lower classes, ultimately perplexed by the empty hole inside of him that he tries unsuccessfully to fill with a childishly obsessive devotion to his physical home and the haphazard acquisition of physical possessions that confirm his self-image as a person of substance. As such, he would not, for the most part, be particularly interesting. British stiff-upper-lip, emotional constipation has been scrutinized at exhausting length by many writers. They all come to the same conclusion. If you are unlucky enough to be unable to recognize that you are clueless about the emotional life of others, you wont be beloved of your wife and children, and your friends may not care much about you either.
But Sam is Sinhalese. He has absorbed English culture all too wella remarkable testament to the identification over time of the oppressed with the opressors. That doesnt make his type more interesting, though. I would rather not have spent as much time with him as the novel required me to do. Its all very well to understand why he is brutish, but understanding is different from sympathy. A sympathetic character, Sam is not.
Sams father, who cheerfully and systematically gives away all of the familys wealth is a disturbing figure. Largesse is one thing; bringing your family to the brink of insolvency is quite a different matter.
Sams mother, Maud, is another unpleasant presence in the novel. Irresponsible and uncaring in her own way, she has no affection for Sam; and Sam, although he desperately craves her affection, treats her with contemptbut always maintaining the proper appearances. He provides her with the minimum necessary, and visits her with scrupulous regularity. De Kretser takes us inside Mauds mind as Maud has a nervous breakdowna psychotic episode that brings to mind stories of LSD hallucinations. Eventually, Maud regains (or perhaps gains for the first time) control of herself, but by then my sympathy was exhausted. I didnt care.
Structurally, the novel is divided into four parts. Part I is narrated in the first person by Sam Obeysekere and tells of his family, his education, and his life, and the events leading up to his introduction to the Hamilton case. The author purports that These manuscript pages were found among Sam Obeysekeres papers after his death.
Part II picks up where Part I left off. The author narrates in the third person the story of the Hamilton case from Sams point of view. Sams brilliant detection leads to the conviction of the murderer, Sams fame is established and thus He knew it was time he married. (p. 123)
Part III is about what happened after the Hamilton case. It is narrated by the author in the traditional Victorian novel voice of an omniscient third person privy to the thoughts and feelings of her characters. It carries Sam from his marriage to the birth of his son, Harry; the death of his wife, Leela; his estrangement from Harry; and finally his own death. De Kretser shows us Sams mother, Maud, and his wife, Leela from the inside. We learn that Maud had another son, Leo, who lived only a few months and died in his crib. Sam was eight and his sister, Claudia was three. Claudia marries a Sinhalese political rabble-rouser and gives birth to his son, whom she kills and then she commits suicide. Sam comes to have doubts about whether justice was done in the Hamilton case. Think Rashomon.
Finally, we learn the complete story of Leos deatha tale worthy of Tennessee Williams at his best. When All Was Revealed, I had to rethink my assessment of the novel so far. I still thought it was tedious, but at least there was an unexpected, melodramatic twist that moved the story from dead-center commonplace to worthwhile.
Part IV serves as an epilog, taking the form of letter written after Sams death to Harry in England from Sams Tamil friend, Shivanathan. I use the term friend advisedly. Sam would have preferred former colleague. Shivanathan, though, might not have caviled at friend.
De Kretsers prose is a bit plodding, generally without excitement, but she does from time to time provide thought-provoking insights and satisfying images.
My favorite has got to be the interchange between Sam and his prospective gardeners:
[H]e called together the six men who had restored order to his garden and put this question to them: What is gardening?
The rich were like the sun, disease, the pull of currents, which is to say, arbitrary and potent. Each man feared, instantly, that this riddle would be the means to deprive him of his days wages. They stared dull-eyed .
At last, one of the men took half a step forward .
It is preventing things from growing. (p.140)
And that, on a tropical island where everything conspires to promote the proliferation of plants of a thousand kinds, is the correct answer.
Sams wife, Leela, becomes depressed. In years past, she had found solace in the pages of Sir Walter Raleighs novels, but, de Kretser chillingly observes, Narrative, an optimistic form, assumes that it is worth turning the page. (p.151)
Sam, staggered by Claudias suicide, watches the monsoon. Nails of rain were driven into the sea, de Kretser tells us.
Sam does not come across as a bigoted person insofar as race is concerned. Class, yes; race, no. Still, with children, there is no escape from the culture at large. Sams son, Harry, scolds his ayah for always going in the sun without a hat. You will become black like a dirty Tamil person, he tells her. (p.236)
Describing the events of February 1948, de Kretser tells us, The English were leaving, with the haste instinctive to thieves. (p.245)
Sams son, Harry, goes to
Sam wrote to his old tutor. Fisher, now the Senior Fellow, suggested that the boy read history. It does a young man no lasting harm. Thus it was settled. (p. 250)
Sams father criticizes Maud, after a prize-giving at Sams prep school.
I say, old thing, you should try harder with Sam. Should I? said Maud, as startled by the fact of the reproach as by the point it delivered. Yes. After a minute, Do you think he minds? she had asked. I should say so. Among a set that valued astringency in human relations, her style passed as good form. (p. 158)
And finally, Maud, writing from the exile Sam has imposed on her to the Lokugama estate in the hinterlands, has been painting a brighter, more optimistic than realistic picture of her situation and her environment to her correspondents. De Kretser notes, It was not her intention to deceive. There is an old instinct at work in bordellos and the relations of East and West, to convert the unbearable into the picturesque. (p. 158)
I didnt think so on the first reading, but on the second reading, this seems like a book worthy of note.
On Literature, Baba Segi, and Major Pettigrew
Sunday, October 3rd, 2010Book group leader Jacqueline sent me the tail end of an email exchange she was having with another book group member about Jonathan Franzens recent book Freedom. Jacqueline was less than enthusiastic. I had heard the buzz about Freedom but I didn’t know anything about it. Still dont. I looked at David Brooks’ 20 Sep 2010 op-ed piece and, setting aside whether anything he said about the book is accurate (which, I took from Jacquelines reaction and his adduced support of B. R. Meyers’ October 2010 Atlantic article, it is), I find myself in agreement that an important, larger issue is whether institutionalized pessimism is now a sine qua non of literary lionization. Too often, it seems, if it ain’t empty or depressing, it ain’t literature. Tolstoy’s oft-cited declaration that “Happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is rhetorically satisfying, but one must not confuse rhetorical felicity with truth.
Even if Tolstoy were right, is Schadenfreude really the best and highest purpose of art and literature? Is the purpose of literature to encourage the reader in the attitude of Luke’s (18:11) Pharisee who thanked God he was not like other men–robbers, evildoers, adulterers–or even like the unhappy family in Anna Karenina or the disaffected characters in Freedom? I think not. Art at its best allows us to glimpse, through the eyes of the artist, that which is good in human naturein ourselves and in others. Not that authors should aspire to be Pollyannas or Panglosses. On the contrary. Sometimes a gem is best appreciated in its contrast to a bleak, black background.
I think, for example, of the two noir-ish mystery series I have recently read–Sieg Larsson’s The Girl with / who … trilogy and John Burdett’s Bangkok … books. Both propose a world that is corrupt and threatening, yes; but they offer the serious consolation that there can be–no, there are–good people to be found; that decency exists; that friendship (and even love) are safe havens that we can and must fight to protect and expand. This is more than a formulaic Misery with a Happy Ending plot.
Notice that Hollywood is of two minds on this issue. Sometimes a film is re-shot or re-cut when audience reactions in preview showings suggest that a bleak and hopeless ending may encourage audiences to stay away in droves. When this happens, there is often juicy byplay about how soulless Hollywood moguls are destroying the artistic integrity of the director. But tacking an upbeat ending onto an essentially downer plot is a desperation move, not a serious response when the question the rest of the work poses is Why go on living at all?
Tragedy as a form seems to work (when it succeeds) because the audience understands the wrong-headedness of the hero and understands that although it is unavoidable for the hero, it is not unavoidable for everyone. So, there is a difference between hopelessness, anomie, and disaffection on the one hand and tragedy on the other. In essence, tragedy is didactic. The audience is brought to learn or recognize something positive.
Traditionally, an artist suffers for his art, but I wonder if that is not just an excuse for artists who want their art to make us suffer as they have or imagine they have. (Take that, you coddled reader, you!) A generation of authors acquired the sobriquet “Angry Young Men” (not that it doesn’t occur with women) and took it as a badge of honor, but I was never convinced that anger for the sake of anger is salutary for the artist or the reader. Sometimes it just makes me tired.
I have just finished two books that satisfied in the way I have proposed: Lola Shoneyin’s (2010) The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives and Helen Simonson’s (2010) Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. Neither insists on the purposelessness of existence, the impossibility of integrity, or the frustrations of inchoate morality; yet neither is blind to the vicissitudes of daily life–the one in a polygamous Nigerian family, the other in an uptight English Major (retired) living is a small town in Sussex. Both deal intelligently with social issues both large and small; both recognize that not everyone is a Good Guy, but they find enough wiggle room in individual interactions to enable some good things to be realized.
Shoneyin’s book is a bit more sociological in its approach–or perhaps it feels that way because I was totally ignorant of even the most general facts of Nigerian society. The author provides enough context for one to infer the forces and pressures of life in Ibadan and thus understand the motivations of her characters; but the exposition never feels forced or condescending. I suppose the same is true of Simonsons book, too. The mores of rural England are taken for granted and addressed in the text only as they interact with the characters. If I were unfamiliar with English village life, I think I would still be able to understand and appreciate the story Simonson tells.
Henry James asked, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? “ He was writing of the human (or anthropomorphic) actors in a tale, but in both Baba Segi and Major Pettigrew the prevailing mores are characters in their own right: the character of the society determining the incidents of the plot; and the incidents of the plot illustrating the character of the society.
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