[In the following review, Mannes-Abbott comments that although Reef is "impressive," it displays somewhat less of the "Chekhovian clarity and brevity" found in his short story collection Monkfish Moon (1992).]

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha wrote that it is "from those who have suffered the sentence of history—subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement—that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking". Towards the end of his first novel, Romesh Gunesekera echoes Bhabha's wide thesis, while his preoccupation, made messy and dilute by the processes of fiction, is with the lessons for living and "enlarging the world with each flick of a tongue".

Reef displays many of the qualities of Gunesekera's assured collection of stories, Monkfish Moon (1992). In them he negotiated the terrain between Sri Lanka and Britain with a ventriloquist agility in sober, quietly crafted prose whose solution contained an eruptive intelligence.

In "Ullswater", for example, among the sheep and hollyhocks of a pastoral England, a young Sri Lankan encountered intimate truths about his dead, Anglophile father. The device is repeated in Reef, which begins with a section called "The Breach", in which Triton encounters a Sri Lankan refugee and recalls the "voyage of discovery" that landed him in London.

Reef returns 30 years, to a day in 1962 when Triton, aged 11, becomes a houseboy for Mister Salgado, a self-educated marine biologist and proto-environmentalist. Suddenly, "trapped inside what I could see", Triton realises that he had "no idea how much I did not know about the city." While Triton's limits remain undefined, Salgado will concede "no boundaries to knowledge" in his quest both to transform nature and to conserve the past in his imagined world. Salgado's appetites gain him a government commission to protect the coral reef that separates the south of Sri Lanka from the deep-water abyss.

Over the next eight years, Triton learns "the art of good housekeeping" while the world and the political culture of Sri Lanka changes. Salgado is changed too, swept up by a hungry passion for Miss Nili, who introduces him to a cosmopolitan, "bubbly world of gaiety" that conflicts with the murmurs of revolution that reach Triton.

Salgado's affair is charted in Triton's inclusive cooking. Beginning with a moist "love-cake", it settles oddly over a tangerine-stuffed Christmas turkey, and is destroyed after it peaks decadently with a bright blue-striped parrot fish known as a "coral cruncher".

Gunesekera's language, poetic and metaphorical in conception though deliberately less so in execution, fitted the short story perfectly. His stories are marked by Chekhovian clarity and brevity, occupied with the human scale and details of explosive significance. Reef is an impressive leap into novel writing, but the assured tone has dispersed and left a series of bright episodes unsure of their relative weight.

Similarly, metaphors jostle for dominance and expand erratically. While this is partly the novel's purpose, among such understated prose, the conflict is more accidental than instrumental. However, the lasting, and aptly liminal, image is of a breached but self-renewing reef: a holed survivor.