[Hower is an American short story writer, novelist, critic, and educator. In the following review he compares Reef to Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (1989) and Michael Ondaatje's Running the Family (1982), praising Gunesekera's ability to cast "a spell of nostalgia."]

"It was small, and yet its voice could fill the whole garden," says the narrator of Reef, describing an oriole that alights near his house. "In blissful ignorance it is completely beautiful; unruffled until its last moment." Lost innocence in the final years before a war is the theme of this eloquent first novel by Romesh Gunesekera, whose Monkfish Moon, a collection of stories about his homeland of Sri Lanka, attracted critical attention here in 1993. Reef was a finalist for Britain's Booker Prize last year.

Now an adult in exile in London, the novel's narrator remembers his Edenic childhood in Sri Lanka in the post-independence era of the 1960's, when at the age of 11 he became an apprentice houseboy for a marine biologist, Mr. Salgado. The boy—appropriately named Triton for the son of Poseidon, the sea god—loved the kindly oceanographer's home. "Even the sun seemed to rise out of the garage and sleep behind the del tree at night," he remembers. His master's praise thrilled him as if it had come from "a channel cut from heaven to earth right through the petrified morass of all our lives, releasing a blessing like water springing from a riverhead, from a god's head."

The aristocratic young scientist, as Mr. Gunesekera presents him, is himself an innocent, preoccupied with his studies of the sea and oblivious of the forces of darkness gathering around him. He has no understanding of the potential brutality of people like Joseph, his head house servant. But Triton does. Joseph terrorizes the boy, who can combat the older man's menace only with prayerful fantasies inspired by Buddhist folklore. He imagines the gods in the sky "crowded on a bamboo raft on a blue lake surrounded by rolling hills, holding silver spears and peering through peepholes in the clouds, searching for Joseph, determined to destroy him."

The prayer seems to work. Joseph, returning home drunk, is fired, and Triton is put in charge of the house. The pride he takes in his position brings to mind that of the butler-narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day, but without any of the distancing irony of that work.

All the home lacks, Triton feels, is a woman's presence. Enter graceful Nili, a desk clerk from the local hotel, who captivates not only Mr. Salgado but the now teen-age Triton as well. The buttery "love cake" that the boy cooks for her and his employer has a magical effect: Mr. Salgado gives up his bachelor ways and invites Nili to move in. Their happy conversations on the veranda enchant Triton. "In the dark," he says, "the voices had a life of their own; they moved around me as if I were deep underwater and they were fish swimming, leaving a trail that could be felt but not seen, small currents, waves."

The novel is rich in sensuous descriptions not only of the gardenlike loveliness of the countryside, but also of the pleasures of cooking, which Triton discovers as a creative outlet. His culinary artistry, like Mr. Gunesekera's literary skill, produces "a kind of energy that revitalizes every cell…. Suddenly everything becomes possible and the whole world, that before seemed slowly to be coming apart at the seams, pulls together."

Other recurring themes, threaded subtly throughout the narrative, gradually become visible. The reef surrounding the island nation has always protected it from the outside world, but now the coral is being torn up by developers and turned into cement for tourist hotels. Capitalism is ravaging the country as aggressively as the revolutionary ideas spreading among the exploited people who insist that "we have to destroy in order to create."

The benign, protective aspects of Triton's religion are also shattered, as sectarian violence erupts, pitting Buddhist against Hindu. Triton recalls a folk tale about a gentle young prince who is told by his corrupt teacher to make a necklace out of a thousand human fingers and as a result becomes a blood-crazed mass murderer. He learns how naïve he was to assume that the tale was merely an exaggerated fantasy.

Triton's efforts to retain the harmonious atmosphere in the household, like Mr. Salgado's crusade to protect the reef and Nili's attempts to save him from despair, cannot preserve the innocence of his world. Nili leaves; Mr. Salgado takes to drink. The oriole in the garden will sing no more—except in memory.

Romesh Gunesekera's powerful novel preserves that memory beautifully. Like Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje's reminiscences of his Sri Lankan childhood, Reef is peopled with colorful, memorable characters. Mr. Gunesekera, a masterly storyteller, writes about them with great affection, casting a spell of nostalgia with his lyrical prose.

At the story's end, Mr. Salgado, who has fled to England, returns to his homeland intent on finding his lost love—going after "a glimmer of hope in a faraway house of sorrow." For its exiled author, who now lives in London, this novel itself must represent such a glimmer. For his fortunate readers, the book is incandescent.