Romesh Gunesekera struggles to squeeze a baroque family drama into a tiny Sri Lanka

By NISID HAJARI

ome histories impose their will on writers: anything that might be called a Sri Lankan Novel, for instance, is almost bound to explore that nation's recent blood-soaked past. The narrative is obvious--it tells of lives and families sundered by civil war; of bombs, intransigence and ludicrous, pained hatreds. Yet among all the plot lines jostling for room in Romesh Gunesekera's third book, The Sandglass (Granta Books; 278 pages), that history speaks mostly by its absence.

The silence is not in itself unusual. In his slim previous volumes--the short-story collection Monkfish Moon and Reef, a delicate novel short-listed for the 1994 Booker Prize--Gunesekera also quietly traversed the war's edges. The struggle emerged through small-bore family dynamics, warped by an ever-present threat of violence. The Sandglass aims much wider. Framed by the death of spry matriarch Pearl Ducal in contemporary London, the novel retraces the histories of two intertwined families--the Ducals and the Vatunases--as their rivalry runs down the generations and across the globe. Its brief--to tell this tall tale as well as to expound on the imperfect art of tale-telling--seems to demand a big book. Gunesekera, however, retains the eye of a miniaturist.

That style does lend itself to finely turned phrases, evoking an overcast day that "never quite becom[es] itself before slipping into darkness." And Gunesekera does produce lively, contained snapshots of The Sandglass' secondary characters (an admittedly unwieldy mob). In no more than seven pages, he manages to bring to life, marry off and bury Pearl's delightfully oddball daughter, Anoja. Unfortunately, such nuggets are far too rare. Too many of Gunesekera's characters never develop much further than a tart comment or inexplicable affectation, like Pearl's addiction to old movies. Their passions only serve to point out how small they themselves are; nothing in the thin characterization of Pearl's husband, Jason, explains his mythic struggle to snatch a distillery from the clutches of his nemesis, Esra Vatunas. These are emblems more than people, and in describing their battle for the Sri Lankan Eden, the author presents a dull echo of that history he typically avoids.

What he is attempting, whether intentionally or not, is just that sort of writing of national history through a sprawling, off-kilter family that has been perfected by Salman Rushdie. But in this outing Gunesekera lacks both Rushdie's and his own previous verbal grace. His characters speak with inconsistent voices--formal one moment, almost incomprehensibly colloquial the next--and in bad puns. (Pearl's son Prins, like his father, shoots "for the impossible moonshine.") His similes ring awkwardly, and at times the prose loses itself in a baroque self-indulgence: the streaks on a dirty window become "a vertically suspended solution of the world's smallest grains, frozen as if by the momentary sleep of time." Each of these over-stylized sentences might have been soaked up by the spread of a more expansive, fleshed-out novel. But while Gunesekera reminds us that "the space around [Pearl] was teeming with words," we don't hear them often enough. Such claims suggest that the real story of The Sandglass exists in some other text. One could have used it in this ambitious but ultimately frustrating tale.