He may have been a product of Tamil-Sinhala union, and he may have had a six-fingered coach. Both Ari and Wije have seen him play, so they know he exists, but there is little else they know. It's in this post-victorious state that Wije and his neighbour, Ariyaratne Byrd, a maths teacher and fellow cricket fanatic, set out to make a documentary on the player they consider to be the greatest of all time: a bowler called Pradeep Sivanathan Mathew, whom no one alive will publicly acknowledge, and whose name has mysteriously been erased from the records. It's the year Sri Lanka beat Australia in the Cricket World Cup final, proving "the possibility of the improbable". In Sri Lankan sporting history, the hallowed year is 1996. "But in a hundred years, Bulgarians will still talk of Letchkov and how he expelled the mighty Germans from the 1994 World Cup with a simple header." "In 30 years, the world will not care about how I lived," Wije says. He loves his wife Sheila, would take bullets for her and their son, Garfield (named after Sobers, not the cat), but he also knows that sport is somehow bigger than this. WeeGee or Wije, as he is known to his friends, is a retired sports journalist who is dying because he persists in doing shots with breakfast. He's convinced that "unlike life, sport matters". WG Karunasena, the 64-year-old narrator of Chinaman, is a grumpy old man in an endearing Walter Matthau kind of way. It's a story about many stories: friendships, rivalries, nationhood, the undesirability of old age, the quantification of genius and other "unknowables", like how much love do you need in a lifetime, and is sport really greater than life?
It is incredibly funny, and while it does occasionally meander with the laboriousness of a test match, the heart of this expansive novel isn't just about cricket.
It also features a midget, a man accused of paedophilia, match-fixers, terrorists, dodgy government officials, an ambidextrous spin-bowler and more than you will ever need to know about cricket.įor those readers who think of nocturnal insects that chirp when you think "cricket", have no fear this book could still work for you. Shehan Karunatilaka's debut novel, Chinaman, features a suicide, several alcoholics and almost no volleyball. Another is that volleyball is its national sport. O ne of Sri Lanka's best-kept secrets is that it ranks consistently in lists of countries with the highest incidences of suicide and alcoholism.
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