Paul Binding, reviewing Noontide Toll, by Romesh Gunesekera, Granta, pp.256, £12.99, ISBN: 9781620970201
‘The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive,’ admits the usually cool-headed Vasantha, van-driver and narrator of all the stories in Noontide Toll. Kilinochchi was the operational centre of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) until the Sri Lankan army’s entry in January 2009. Now the town offers amenities like the Spice Garden Inn, with glass-walled cafeteria and reception desk overflowing with coconut flowers and bougainvillea. Yet its assistant manager, Miss Saraswati, belies such luxurious blandness. A rat suddenly appears in the café; immediately she hurls a bottle, breaking the creature’s skull without destroying the implement. ‘I stared at Miss Saraswati. “You learn to do that at Jaffna hotel school?” ’ Next morning Vasantha notices ‘the trigger finger of her right hand was callused and discoloured at the edge’.
Miss Saraswati calls the van-man a ‘peacemaker’, and often he feels himself ‘a kind of doctor’. Those long journeys on which he takes passengers ‘looking for something lost and irretrievable’ are surely a form of ‘healing’. He has certainly learned to keep his counsel, so many revelations does he hear of grave splits in identity. Continue reading
