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(yes, indeed, cricket fans) Karunasena proves to be a wonderful creation, and his discursive ramblings just about hold the novel together.

Karunatilaka has written a literate and highly- readable romp of a story. And, without doubt, there is plenty enough here to keep even the sport- averse happy. We are told early on that ‘If you’ve never seen a cricket match…then this is the book for you’. Mathew’s legacy of only four Test Matches, prejudice, rebellion, and disappearance fits so snugly into this folklore that even cricket aficionados will be dashing off to crikipedia to see what is real and what is not. The book delves deeply into the history of Sri Lankan cricket, referencing famous games and famous players. For Karunatilaka’s novel presents a magnificent blurring of fact and fiction. thinks is ‘the greatest player to walk the earth’.Īnd this is where things get interesting. Chinaman chronicles the final, and most important, part of the writer’s ambition: telling the story of, and hopefully tracking down, the spin bowler Pradeep S. As only an intelligent fool would do, he decides that ‘what the world needs most is a halfway decent documentary on Sri Lankan cricket’. He wants to do something worthwhile with his last years on earth, and, sadly, that is unlikely to involve his wife or son. Karunasena is our dying, grumpy, often- drunken, unreliable narrator. Like it or not, sport and national identity are indelibly linked. And, certainly, cricket is what many outsiders, perhaps ignorantly, first bring to mind when they think of the nation. While, bizarrely, volleyball is the official national game, it is with bat and ball that the island’s people are fixated. For when the Sri Lankan set out to explore the psyche of his homeland, he settled on cricket as the vehicle with which to do it. Shehan Karunatilaka adds himself to this list with his startlingly- assured debut novel, Chinaman. Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joseph O’Neill and Chad Harbach are just a few of the star (and not so star) names to have used the playing field as an entry point for explorations into wider themes and of big ambition.

The use of sport to tell the story of a country is a well-trodden literary path. Using cricket as a device to write about Sri Lankan society, Jim Morphy reviews Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka.