[In the following positive review of Reef, Evans discusses the relationship between the two main characters—Triton, the narrator, and his employer, Mr. Salgado—and examines the comedic aspects of the novel.]

Mister Salgado's house has two white columns, and he asks about the failed coup as if it is unseasonable rain. The new houseboy "had never heard language so gently spoken … Ever after, when Mister Salgado spoke, I would be captivated". Salgado is a dreaming bachelor of impossible refinement. With a bachelor's deep sublimated passion for science, he collects endless data on the disappearing coral reef and, licking his lips with excitement, theorises to his friend Dias, the government accountant, about instruments of the future sensitive enough to record the still-circulating sound waves of his great-grandparents' conversation on their wedding night.

It's odd how familiar the distant, eccentric world of Romesh Gunesekera's first novel [Reef] is. (Eccentric politically as well as psychologically: the setting is Sri Lanka, which in the sixties was already wobbling badly on its post-colonial axis.) But the reader steps into the world of the houseboy, Triton, through the universally familiar perception of the child that doesn't know anything about what goes on past the garden gate, and latches on to new discoveries with the puzzlement, terror and wonder that every adult forgets. Halfway through the story, Mister Salgado gets a girlfriend. Miss Nili moves in, and Triton handles women's clothes for the first time:

With one hand I was able to lift a whole pile of thin shiny material … Underneath I discovered little black pieces and white garments: satin cups with pointed ends where the seams met, coupled up with straps and hooks and bits of elastic. I picked up another squidgy bundle but felt perhaps that this was all getting a little out of hand. The material was like nothing I had ever come across before; not like Mister Salgado's underwear with pockets and pouches and little gaps for his pipe to shoot.

Like R K Narayan's novels about Malgudi, Reef is a comedy that reminds us of a framework of social conventions that we recognise but no longer share. This is another reason for its familiarity: human weakness brought out into the glare by misplaced aspirations, the frustrations of class, social taboos. Gunesekera's comedy is more tragic than Narayan's. There's a more brutal intrusion of politics, but there's the same mischievous ironic grace which stops short of judging.

When the 11-year-old Triton goes to work for "my Mister Salgado" he also thinks he "might find something more, something that would really change the world and make our lives worthwhile". The eventual revelation, brought about by his roughly simultaneous experience of Salgado's jealousy, the disappearance of Nili and the onset of the long-feared political violence—that the garden gate won't keep the world out—is his first and saddest adult experience.

Reef is a delightful novel. With no resolution (an escape from Sri Lanka to Earls Court hardly counts as a fictional resolution), Reef is a long story more than a novel, a long episode of childhood that ends with the characters fading out into real life on the last page, a comedy with a vein of sadness.

Native English writers seem to have little access to this world any more. Our world is liberated from these conventions; our aspirations of money and success have been converted to be part of the humourless material stock of human rights, not to be mocked. We had a comedy of recognition and we continue to have satire—comedy with attitude—but our popular satirists' aspirations are no different from ours. Most of them are successful businessmen. It could be argued that there aren't any English comedians now because real comedy, as in this novel, is never altogether happy. It needs the revealing presence of sadness.

In such a simple book one doesn't expect subtlety, and Triton appears to tell us nothing subtle. Yet his reflections on Salgado's yearning for impossibly sensitive scientific instruments to record 100-year-old conversations—things more accurately recorded by imagination and memory, the writer's instruments—are part of a cache of concealed maturity.

Mister Salgado himself, mysterious, kind, dreaming, depressive, is a complex creature on a par with Narayan's Margayya in The Financial Expert and Yusef in Greene's The Heart of the Matter. And to frame this depth, there is the view of Triton from the kitchen, expressed in a light voice of simplicity, loyalty and faint boyish cunning.

The kitchen is his main observation point, the place where he indulges his pride. "Triton made it," says Mister Salgado when Nili on her first visit asks him where he got the love cake. The food of seduction for Salgado, it is literally the food of memory for Triton. "Triton made it. It was the one phrase he would say with my name again and again like a refrain through those months, giving me such happiness … 'He makes a lovely cake,' she said." With these words Nili not only endears herself to him, but earns her place in his memory for the rest of his life. The observation, like the cake, is as light as a feather.