[Amirthanayagam is a Sri Lankan poet and essayist and the former ambassador from his country to England. In the following favorable review, he discusses Reef as a bildungsroman in which the main character's maturation is mirrored by the political changes in Sri Lanka.]

One of the impressive adventures of the 20th century is the rapidly burgeoning interpenetration of cultures. A rich fruit of this is a type of modern literature in which the central experience is cross-cultural and characters' destinies are shaped in some fashion by the cross-cultural encounter.

Romesh Gunesekera's debut novel, Reef, which was short-listed for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, is a successful example of cross-cultural convergence. Sri Lanka, the book's setting and the land of Gunesekera's birth, has its own ethnic mix. The island nation, which is insulated from the rest of the world by the reef which girds its southern shore, has, however, undergone considerable change because of external influences during some centuries of colonization and foreign rule. Now, even its coral reef is in danger as it is being dug for use in building projects and the sea is fast eroding the frail land mass; the sea, "which would be the end of us all," is only waiting for the motion of its final wave. The sea and the reef have a symbolic weight in this novel, but the fortunes of the central characters are at the center of the stage.

There have been other novels written by Sri Lankans with the island as their setting, but this is the first to win international acclaim. Leonard Woolf's neglected masterpiece, The Village in the Jungle, is located in Sri Lanka, but Woolf was an Englishman. Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, though it uses the techniques of fiction, is a family history peopled by some exotic, larger-than-life characters. Besides, Ondaatje, though born in Sri Lanka, has long been a Canadian.

But it is important to see Gunesekera also as a Britisher, one of the expatriates who have written novels of diaspora and who are now at the forefront of London literary life. He bids fair to join the likes of V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Reef is a Bildungsroman, the story of a boy's maturation into an expert cook, an autodidact and even a philosopher. The boy is the narrator, named Triton after the son of the mythological god of the sea, Poseidon. He goes into service as a house boy in the employ of Salgado, an affluent marine biologist dedicated to the mission of saving the protective reef from its human predators, an able and well-meaning scientist but with little sense of what is going on in the country around him. Salgado's hypothesis is that the delicate polyp is affected even by a minor change in the immediate environment. "Then the whole thing will go. And if the structure is destroyed, the sea will rush in. The sand will go. The beach will disappear."

It is nature, red in tooth and claw: The human cruelty only mirrors nature and what goes on in the jungle on land and under the sea. In Triton's words:

The one time I did swim out to Mister Salgado's real reef, back home, I was frightened by its exuberance. The shallow water seethed with creatures. Flickering eyes, whirling tails, fish of a hundred colours darting and digging, sea snakes, sea-slugs, tentacles sprouting and grasping everywhere. Suspended in the most primal of sensations, I slowly began to see that everything was perpetually devouring its surroundings.

This predaciousness in nature has its human parallel in the rumblings of national discontent that soon erupt into a suppurating class and ethnic war in the 1960s. Neither Triton—who plies the culinary arts, learns to make excellent love cakes and other pastries, and knows how to marinate tiger prawns and steam parrot fish—nor his master Salgado, who is a dedicated scientist but also a naif, realizes what is going on until it is too late.

The novel is further complicated by the entry into the bachelor household of Salgado's mistress, Nili, who lifts the monkishness from their house but does little to open their eyes to the real conditions in the country, preferring to bask in Salgado's love and to savor Triton's culinary delicacies.

Gunesekera's style is sensuous and impassioned, almost incandescent. Nature also has its benign and blessed aspect:

The sand garden, the clumps of crotons, the vines around the trellises by the kitchen, all seemed to breathe life. Even the furniture seemed stained by the shade, but when I looked up again I would glimpse the sea between the trees bathed in a mulled gold light. The colour of it, the roar of it, was overwhelming. It was like living inside a conch: the endless pounding. Numinous.

But whatever is idyllic has to disappear. Nili proves unfaithful; the insurgency and the racial war make it necessary for Salgado to emigrate. Triton is led to reflect: "But are we not all refugees from something? Whether we stay or go or return, we all need refuge from the world beyond our fingertips at some time."

When Salgado hears in England that his former love Nili is homeless after her house was gutted by a mob incensed because she had given refuge to Tamil families, he decides to return to find her. Triton remains in London, "without a past, without a name," hoping to become a restaurateur. But he cannot forget the sights and sounds of his home country:

"Most of all I missed the closeness of … the reservoir, the lapping of the dark water, flapping lotus leaves, the warm air rippling over it and the cormorants rising, the silent glide of the hornbill … An elephant swaying to a music of its own."