Though A Passage North opens after the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which lasted almost twenty-six years and killed an unknown number of people – estimates range between 40,000 and 100,000 – the conflict is very much at the centre of the novel as the cause of trauma, displacement and fragmented identities. While Krishan is fully aware of the war’s existence, and indeed returned to Sri Lanka from India specifically to work in the former conflict zone, he knows too that he is lucky to have grown up in Colombo, largely protected from the fighting. Having not experienced it first-hand, he is ‘obsessed’ with learning as much about it as possible, unable to look away from the horrifying photos of massacres he researches online. This appetite for images of destruction may also explain his almost magnetic attraction to Rani, who lost her two sons during the conflict – one as a soldier, one to a sniper – and has never since recovered.

As Krishan travels by train to the north of his country, to a ‘cremation ground at the end of the world’, Arudpragasam weaves a narrative that jumps back and forth in time, exploring memory, relationships and the relentless progression of life. The novel is a slow drift, mirroring the natural movement of thought, and so it is that Krishan’s love affair with Anjum is intertwined with his grandmother’s decline into old age, his attempts to understand what it is to live with trauma interspersed with meditations on freedom and desire. The long, comma-ridden sentences and effortless shifting from one topic to the next have a mesmerising effect on the reader, allowing us to sink in deep to a world that on the surface may be unfamiliar. For all it examines hard-hitting themes, there is nothing confrontational about this novel; we are eased into the story and a realisation also afforded to Krishan – that all lives and experiences are more connected than we thought, that ‘whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out always to be another piece of earth’.

When he isn’t being philosophical, or tracing his way along the rabbit warren of his characters’ thoughts, Arudpragasam does a fine line in bringing Sri Lanka to life. The smallest scenes are deeply evocative – a woman from a village standing on a night-wet pavement in Colombo, overwhelmed by the traffic streaming past her – and at times his very specific sense of setting is magical, as when Krishan remembers staring into the darkness from a moving night-train window. Both these memorable scenes and many others besides do in fact play out in the night, but perhaps because of the gloom that hovers around the novel, Arudpragasam’s writing seems all the more luminous.

[extract from the full review available on my blog]

The descriptions of the environment in which this book is set are vivid, and allow the reader to travel with the character and understand the complexities of living in Sri Lanka after the civil war. At times I found the prose to be overly lyrical, with long reflections on certain states of being (belonging, desire, ageing etc) which disrupted the narrative without providing enough insight into the main character's inner life. The feeling of listlessness felt by the character himself pervades the narrative, making this a somewhat melancholic slow burn of a book.

“It was only when looking at a horizon that one’s eyes could move past all the obstacles that limited one’s vision to the present situation, that one’s eyes could range without limit to other times and other places, and perhaps this was all that freedom was”

A Passage North, the second novel by award-winning and Dylan Thomas Prize shortlisted Tamil Sri Lankan novelist Anuk Arukpragasam, deals with the legacy of the devastating thirty-year-long Sri Lankan civil war, which saw Sinhalese and Tamil as major opponents. The latter were spearheaded by the Tamil Tigers, fighting for an independent Tamil-speaking state in the NorthEast but eventually defeated in 2009 following a massive attack that many equal to a genocide and that ultimately left the country ravaged and wounded.

Grishan is a young Tamil Sri Lankan employed at an Ngo in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital situated on the southwestern coast. He has returned there from New Delhi abandoning his PhD after a relationship with Anjoum, a woman he met at lgbt events and film viewings. He has always lived far from the conflict but has been drawn back home, partially driven by guilt for having been spared:
“He’d begun to cultivate once, more his sense of having a destiny in that place he he’d never actually lived, fantasising what it would be like to walk over the same land his forebears had, to help create our of near annihilation the possibility of some new and compelling future, as though living a life simplified in the way that only war can simplify he too would be able to find something worth surrendering to”

At the beginning of the novel, a phone call announcing the death of Grishan’s grandmother’s carer Rani prompts a five-day trip to the North-East through a war-ravaged country to attend her funeral. During the trip, through his thoughts and recollections Grishan reconstructs the recent history of “his own poor, violated, stateless people”: a story – as we will learn -- of utter devastation because, apparently, the modern Sri Lankan state can only be built “in direct relation to the evisceration of the northeast”.

But how can you tell the story of something that you have not lived on your skin, of things that are no more, of the aspirations that were annihilated, of monuments that have been reduced to dust along with the memory of what they represent”? Lacking first-hand experience of the conflic, in this compelling narrative Grishan often pieces together his vicarious, mediated experiences reporting his thoughts and visceral reaction: for example, he recounts how he learnt about events immersing himself in diaspora blogs and social media (he tells us of the experience of viewing the mutilated bodies on blogs, of reading about the massive refugee demonstrations and of their odyssey around the world, which is compellingly portrayed), as well as through films, documentaries, books, and the media, all acting as a particular lens. We learn, for example, that Visa Pillayar temple, where people now petition for Visas, has been so labelled by Google Maps. Vision, the possibility to envision a future, the nature of representation and the experience of the direct versus the mediated gaze are prominent themes I found very well developed and particularly interesting: from Grishan’s own experience, to Anjoum’s interest in film and accounts of the threatening male gaze, to the Tamil prisoner who is blinded to deny his only desire to be able to imagine an horizon for his people.

Personal memories and family history find a place, too. While Grishan’s traumatic experience is one of distance, disembodiment and longing to connect, history finds its embodiment in the martyred body of Rani, who is precisely who we are honouring at the end of the trip: prior to her mysterious death at the bottom of a well, she experienced war on her skin, displacement, the loss of her sons and trauma. Her deep depression and psychic wounds resulting in years of electroshock therapy are a living testimony of the horrors of war. Indeed, in this well constructed novel, the symbolical journey through the history of the Tamil people starts with an image of “the painful first moments of entry in the world” with bodies firmly occupying space, and ends with the funeral scene of Rani’s body burning in a pyre, with “ feelings and visions, memories and expectations, all of which would take time to burn, to be reduced to soothing uniformity of ash”, quietly and inexorably vanishing.

The few quotes I have inserted testify as to the beauty and the depth of Arudpragasam’s writing. This is a marvellous read on the different ways trauma affects people, a deeply political novel and a moving love letter to a wounded country: immensely beautiful, original, profound, visceral, meditative, philosophical and a worthy contender for literary prizes. Since it’s dense and slow I would not recommend it to everyone, but if you can make it will be a 5 star experience.

I am grateful to Granta for an Arc of this novel via NetGalley.

(note: 4.5 stars)
A Passage North is a beautifully written, philosophical book which highlights the events of the Sri Lankan Civil War, through its various characters who have each been affected by the war in differing ways. Through this book, I was therefore able to learn so much about events that I know shockingly little about, as well as gaining a deep insight into Sri Lankan culture. This was my first encounter with the author and I was absolutely blown away by his descriptive writing style and attention to detail, and the way in which he intricately weaved flashbacks into present-day action. Since reading this book, I am now very keen to read his first, award-winning novel. For me, this is a book which combines multiple genres, such as romance, politics and non-fiction, and it also examines a number of themes, ranging from religion to mental health. It is by no means a lighthearted read, but an incredible one.

Favourite quote: 'he couldn't help thinking, as the train hurtled closer towards his destination, that he'd traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he'd been advance not from the island's south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.'

A exquisite powerhouse of a profoundly moving, disturbing novel by the award winning Anuk Arudpragasam, philosophical, a meditation, that with its beautiful, lyrical and understated prose carries the capacity to break the reader as it details the broken soul of Sri Lanka in the aftermath and legacy of the thirty year long civil war, the annihilation of the Tamils, where the swathes of land are a metaphorical cemetery and where the funeral pyres are still burning. It subtly and closely examines identity, the rich layers of consciousness and connections, of the elusive nature of time, time that can come and go, leaving a person untouched, ageing a process of dying negotiated over many years. This is a story of a war torn nation, the scars and trauma, mental health issues, family, the complexities of intimate relationships, life, death, culture, traditions, religion, culture, memory, the personal and the political.

Krishan receives a phone call informing him that his grandmother's carer, Rani, at home in the northeast region has died, breaking her neck after falling into a well. This leads to him travelling by train for the funeral. He is further unsettled after receiving a email from Anjum, a political activist, the first after their separation in India, where he dropped out of academia to return to fulfil what he felt was his destiny, returning to help his country rebuild and recover. Through the stream of consciousness, his interior life depicts his experiences of Columbo, his grandmother's ferocious efforts to cling to the world in the face of the grim realities of the body and mind's deterioration, brought back from the brink by the care of a Rani, whose devastating losses of her sons and almost everything else, left her with mental health issues and trauma. We learn the intricate details of his relationship with Anjum, her sexuality, his fears, anxieties and vulnerabilities, and his awareness of his unrealistic yearnings for a reunion.

The war left many Tamils leaving, to scatter around the world, a determination to depart, despite the heartbreaking cruelty and hostility of the world to refugees. Arudpragasam is a writer memorialising the terrors of the inhumanity of war, the people left behind to survive the unbearable consequences and losses, fearlessly acknowledging and comprehending that, for so many, learning to cope on a day to day basis in this life cannot address the festering open wounds that blight the soul and there is only so much the medical community can accomplish. This is a story that travels north through a country, its history, observing and noticing its people. This not a book that will let go of you, even as you finish reading the last page, a shellshock of a read, it is destined to linger, live long in the mind, one of the qualities that defines a great novel and author. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

It begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother's former caregiver, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances, at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier while living in Delhi, bringing with it the stirring of distant memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for the funeral, so begins a passage into the soul of an island devastated by violence.

I enjoyed the characters, story and pacing of the novel. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has been to Sri Lanka, wants to go to Sri Lanka, or is interested in different places, customs and people. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

Quite a slow burner, this one, but enjoyable non the less. Set in Sri Lanka, this books deals with life and death in equal measures. If you're looking to learn and understand a bit more about Sri Lanka, then you will enjoy this read.

Beautifully written book, a physical and a spiritual journey that enlightens about Sri Lankan history. Very intense but deeply resonating.