[In the following essay, Hussein favorably reviews Reef.]

In one of the finest stories in Monkfish Moon, Romesh Gunesekera's evocative and tantalizingly brief first collection, the narrator tells us of his deep and inarticulate relationship with an artisan who becomes his servant, managing, with startling sparseness, to convey the troubled state of Sri Lanka through the words and the silences of his characters. Reef, Gunesekera's first novel, reverses the story's central relationship to recount, this time in the words of the servant, the story of a similar relationship, explored in some depth with the author's customary precision and economy.

The novel begins with a London fragment. Triton, the narrator, now the self-possessed owner of a restaurant, meets, at a petrol station, a fellow-refugee. In spite of what they may have in common, they are divided by their mother tongues. But Triton can see that his Tamil compatriot, too, will "start with nothing", and is "painting a dream" of a lucrative future. Both have come from the "sea of pearls. Once a diver's dream. Now a landmark for gunrunners in a battle zone of army camps and Tigers". This encounter takes him on a return trip to where his life's journey effectively began: when, in 1962, he was brought, as a boy of eleven, by his uncle to the house of Mr Salgado, the kindly, intellectual marine biologist, with whom his destiny would be inextricably linked.

The first substantial section of the novel is the tale of Triton's apprenticeship. Hauntingly bleak and atmospheric, this is also the novel's most compelling and sustained piece of writing; Triton's sense of displacement from his rural milieu, and his adolescent terror of the lascivious, predatory head servant, Joseph, are deftly contrasted with their lush, tropical surroundings, vividly described. The lonely voice of the child interweaves with the more knowing tones of the adult narrator; practical reality and subterfuge combine with magical thinking to displace the demonic figure of Joseph, leaving Triton as sole auxiliary (and virtual manager) of his master's life. The effect of the chapter is reminiscent of Gunesekera's best short fiction; the author, a natural short-story writer, has cunningly contrived to compose his novel of fragments structured like complete stories; but each story is deliberately deprived of an essential element, which is later revealed at the right moment.

The two long central segments contain much of the novel's emotional and thematic development. The tautness of Gunesekera's tone gives way to a more relaxed rhythm, with set-pieces of gentle irony and telling banalities, as Triton, now growing into a masterly, self-taught chef, watches the flowering of Salgado's attraction to the seductive and volatile Miss Nili, a modern Sri Lankan woman. Triton plays culinary Cupid to the romantic duo, finding his master's—and possibly his own—way to her heart with his delicious food. Nili moves in, but their idyll is short-lived: stirrings of dissent, in the form of a distorted and disconcerting polyphony, the dinner-party conversations of Salgado's cronies as overheard by the inexperienced Triton, explode into full-scale violence. Death and destruction abound; the image of the island's fast disappearing reef is projected and re-projected with increasing clarity, juxtaposed with conflicting reports of reality.

Salgado's assistant tells the politically naive Triton: "You know, brother, our country really needs to be cleansed, radically. There is no alternative. We have to destroy in order to create. Understand? Like the sea. Whatever it destroys, it uses to grow something better."

But Triton, well trained by his moderate master and influenced, perhaps, by his Buddhist culture, fails to comprehend the need for violence, though he senses the potential for renewal and growth implicit in destruction. Asked by Salgado—now abandoned by Nili—to remind him of the parable of Anguli-Maala, the harmless prince turned by the machinations of ill-wishers into a vicious collector of human fingers, Triton finds no comfort in the happy ending of the fable, in which the prince repents and returns to contemplation and the Buddha. Instead, a vision of those killed and maimed by the prince, of corpses thrown up by the sea, is shared by teller and listener, and superimposes on the body of the legend a shroud of contemporary historical reality. For in 1971 the Reign of Terror, the "suppurating ethnic war", begins; "bodies would roll again in the surf, they would be washed in by the tide and be beached by the dozen. The lives of brothers, sisters, men and women, lovers, fathers and mothers and children would be blighted time and again, unremembered." Recalling this era of violence in his English exile with his beloved mentor, Triton remembers his one visit to the real reef that Salgado had so diligently studied: "startling in its hidden brilliance. Suspended in the most primal of sensations, I slowly began to see that everything was perpetually devouring its surroundings." There are no simple answers to dilemmas political or philosophical.

But even in their "uprooted, overshadowed lives", Salgado and Triton are beleaguered by the call of home. Salgado is eventually summoned back by the memory of Nili, leaving behind with Triton the key to an independent future, the legacy of a painfully acquired blend of knowledge, bitter wisdom and a dream of origins and of the sea to which we all return: "The sea in our loins. A tear-drop for an island. A spinning blue globule for a planet. Salt. A wound."