Chinaman

Left-arm spinners cannot unclog your drains, teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.

Explain the differences between Sinhalese and Tamils? I cannot. The truth is, whatever differences there may be, they are not large enough to burn down libraries, blow up banks, or send children onto minefields. They are not significant enough to waste hundreds of months firing millions of bullets into thousands of bodies.

W.G. (Wije) Karunasena is a retired Sri Lankan sportswriter and cricket fanatic, whose lifetime of excessive alcohol consumption has finally caught show more up with him. Given only months to live by his doctor if he does not give up drinking, he decides to write a biography of Pradeep Mathew, who he considers to be the greatest Sri Lankan cricketer of all time. However, Mathew is a controversial figure, as few have ever seen him bowl, and because his name and career records have been expunged from official records due to a scandal that prematurely ended his career.

W.G., along with his longtime friend and drinking buddy Ari, embarks on a quest to learn more about Mathew, whose whereabouts are unknown. The pair encounter a variety of entertaining and sometimes shady characters, which include a Tamil gangster involved in the separatist movement and in fixing cricket matches; a fellow sportswriter and bitter rival turned coach; an alluring woman who seems to know more about Pradeep Mathew than she is willing to disclose; and another cricket star, known as the Great Lankan Opening Batsman (GLOB), who was a former teammate of Mathew's.

Throughout the novel, the author teaches the reader about the sport of cricket, its checkered past in Sri Lanka, and the country's history of violence between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities after independence. We also learn about W.G.'s faithful but long suffering wife Sheila, and their son Garfield, who chooses to abandon a promising career as a cricketer to become a marginally talented rock musician, to the chagrin of his father.

W.G.'s health worsens, yet he is determined to finish the book and meet the elusive Pradeep Mathew. However, his quest is hampered by false leads and the cricketer's ability to hide his tracks from those who he has wronged in the past.

Chinaman was a challenging read in the beginning, as I had to learn about the sport of cricket, its terms and rules, including 'chinaman', the term which denotes the left-arm unorthodox spin method of bowling. Once I understood the basics of the sport and decided that I didn't need to understand every term I was able to enjoy the novel, which was filled with humor and witty comments from W.G., Ari and the other main characters. Chinaman is a novel worthy of this year's Booker Prize longlist, and one that would be appreciated by anyone with a love of cricket or an interest in the history of Sri Lanka and its people. show less

I must slightly caveat this 5* - if you're interested in cricket, the subcontinent (especially Sri Lanka) and have a tolerance for fictional unreliable memoirs, then you may love this book. If you are deficient in any of these criteria, this may not be the book for you.

However- for those still with me - I think this is a wonderful book. All about unfulfilled ambition, and legacy. And the beauty of sport. The beauty and the glory and the capriciousness and the tragedy - in short, the romance. All set against the backdrop of the history of Sri Lanka, with its civil war and corruption and bigotry, and punctuated by cricket matches. It is sad and sweet, and suffused with the wisdom and acceptance of old age (impressively, this despite being show more the first novel by Karunatilaka).

The book is named for the stock delivery bowled by an unorthodox left-arm spinner - the main delivery bowled by the main character. The plot follows a dissolute sports writer W.G. (Wije) Karunasena and cricket fan trying to find out what happened to Mathews, the greatest bowler Wije had ever seen.

Is Mathews fictional or real? It is difficult to know what's real and made up - certainly I recognised many of the cricketing stories. Having done a little bit of research I would say the vast majority is fiction, but Karunatilaka has done a great job of weaving the two together. This greatly enhances the "unreliable narrator" aspect of the book - if you don't know what bits have been borrowed from the real world, it's impossible to know which bits are supposed to be made-up in the suspended-disbelief fictional world.

In my googling, though, I found a couple of faked up websites about Pradeed Mathews - versions of cricinfo.com and crikipedia (with a strategic '1' in place of an 'i') - clearly created as supporting material for the book (one of these pages is featured in the book, but I only reached that after I found the page myself). So you have a fictional book that uses stories from the real world, with fictional bits leaking back out into the real world - it's kinda fascinating (and I'm certainly not saying it's unique, but it was very pleasing and effective to stumble across these fictional spillages).

http://pradeepmathew.com/
http://cric1nfo.com/player/srilanka/achive/1992/june/
http://crickiped1a.com/record/engine/asia/srilanka/player/pradeep_1992/

Minor faults: it is somewhat romaticising of alcoholism (this is well reversed by the end, but may be jarring during the reading). And I found it a bit tricky to keep track of all the side characters. This is partly due to unfamiliar Sri Lankan names, but also because of the discursive nature of the narrative. I don't think these hamper the book particularly. show less

A very strange book in the best way. Most sports books that I've read try to get you to identify with a hero, detail the ebb and flow of specific games, and are basically uncritical cheerleaders for their sport. This one does none of that; in fact hardly any cricket is actually played.

The story reminds me of the quote, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Take that idea, but imagine hearing rumours of one of these people with equal talent, tracing those stories, and trying to disentangle the truth from the deceptions and drunken misremembrances, and you'll get an idea of how show more romantic W. G.'s quest is. show less

I was given this book as a gift because the giver had heard it described as the best novel written about cricket. It isn't, though entries in this category are few (Selincourt's The Cricket Match is probably the front-runner). Although it would be difficult to understand Chinaman without a good knowledge of cricket, the game is a device rather than the substance of the book. A shared obsession between the principal characters, 'cricket' could just as well have been 'snooker' or 'stamp collecting'. The major theme of the book is the mutability of the past – personal as well as sporting and political. The historical context is Sri Lankan's travails in the late twentieth century. For those unfamiliar with this latter subject (including show more me), be warned that the author is oblique in his references. He generally refers to key political figures by nicknames (e.g. 'Ms Second Generation', which I infer is Chandrika Kumaratunga). The other important ingredient in Chinaman is alcoholism and its effects. While the writing style is sometimes interesting (as is the cricket, if you're a fan), Chinaman left me cold. Given its length, there is nothing illuminating, enriching or even memorable about it. I waited to see if the final section (avoiding spoilers) would redeem the rest of the book, but it doesn't. From a technical perspective, the diagrams that are included are reproduced so poorly that they are illegible. I recommend you find a Wisden from the 80s or 90s and read that instead. show less

'Left-arm spinners cannot unclog your drains, teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.' This then is the resounding philosophy of W.G. Karunasena, a retired sportswriter who has been told to stop drinking alcohol if he wishes to live.
'He will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, a spin bowler who has mysteriously disappeared and who WG considers 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'. On his quest to find this unsung genius, WG uncovers a coach with six fingers, a show more secret bunker below a famous stadium, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself. Ambitious, playful and strikingly original, "Chinaman" is a novel about cricket and Sri Lanka - and the story of modern day Sri Lanka through its most cherished sport.'
There were some laugh out loud moments in this book, particularly the discussions between W.G. and his close friend and neighbour Ari. This is a book very strong in character, however I did feel there could have been some judicial editing to reduce the length. Awarding this book first prize was a surprising and brave decision from the Commonwealth writers judges.
I was delighted to listen to the author at the recent Auckland Readers and Writers festival. The interview was at times hilarious and I will be interested to read his next book which will not include cricket. show less

Until I read this book, I knew nothing about cricket except that it exists. I still couldn't tell you much about it in spite of having now passed my eyes over words describing many matches, strategies, accoutrements, and people pertaining thereto. It was all of this detail that led me to struggle through a lot of this book. I can imagine that someone who has never cared for baseball might struggle with the glorious opening 80 pages or so of DeLillo's Underworld or a great deal of Harbach's The Art of Fielding. So I felt about much of Chinaman.

Yes, there is sort of a mystery story afoot here too, and there's humor and occasional dips into what feels like authentic pathos (I dog-eared a couple of these), but for most of the book, I found show more these not worth all the miscellany about cricket. For much of my reading of the book, I continued because a friend recommended it and I wanted to be able to affirm that I had in fact read the book.

But then I got to the last 60 - 80 pages of the book, which I glided through effortlessly and, at times, raptly. The turn here at the end makes the book probably worthwhile, though not masterful through and through. I give it four stars because in the end it is nicely carried off, a sort of modern day Sri Lankan Tristram Shandy. show less

Brilliant. Bloody brilliant. This is one of the best cricket books I've read, up there with Cardus and the likes. More than cricket, brings out the soul of Sri Lankan life.