Ian McEwan – Blood and Porridge

March 20, 2023March 20, 2023

The butcher boy

One feature of growing older is that every new day seems to be an anniversary of some sort or other – an anniversary of something you did, or something you experienced, or something big or small that you witnessed happening in the world. For instance, just last Friday, March 17^th – St Patrick’s Day 2023 – I realised it was 30 years exactly since some friends and I went to see the great Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers at Glasgow Barrowland. Both Stiff Little Fingers and the Barrowland, I’m pleased to report, are still on the go; and their histories have been happily entwined during the three decades since. As the latter’s Wikipedia entry reports: “Northern Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers have played sold-out concerts at the venue every St Patrick’s Day since 1992, and recorded their Best Served Loud album there in 2016 to celebrate 25 years at Barrowland.”

Even if it reminds me of how ancient I am now, that’s at least an anniversary of something I remember fondly. However, there’s nothing fond I remember about the event that today, March 20^th, is the anniversary of. It’s now been twenty years since Western military forces, mainly American and British ones directed by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, blasted their way into Iraq.

The invasion was launched in order to depose Saddam Hussein who, it was claimed, possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. It transpired, though, that these WMDs didn’t exist and it became obvious that Bush and Blair had spun a web of lies beforehand to make people believe that they did. In the two decades since the invasion, those WMDs haven’t been the only things to not exist. The Iraq Body Count Project has calculated that, up until 2019, between 183,535 and 206,107 Iraqi people have stopped existing too. Their deaths have been a result of Bush and Blair’s actions – of the invasion, the bungled Western occupation and its chaotic aftermath.

George Bush once donned a flak jacket, posed on the deck of an American aircraft-carrier and boasted that the ‘mission’ in Iraq was ‘accomplished’. That seems a very long time ago now. Mind you, through the dubious involvement in the supposed occupation and ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq by outfits such as Haliburton, the debacle succeeded in lining the likes of Dick Cheney’s pockets very nicely. I suppose that was the real point of it.

Of course, the Iraq War helped to put some coinage into Tony Blair’s pockets too. Thanks to his support for the second-most right-wing and incompetent president in American history, the former PM was for a long time revered in Republican sectors of the USA and he made more than a few bob on the public speaking circuit there. (He also profited from a dodgy job negotiating the movement of oil between Iraq and South Korea.) I suppose his popularity in America reduced his pain at being less admired in other parts of the world. For instance, I was working in India during the worst phase of the ‘official’ Iraq War – Abu Ghraib and all that – and whenever I read the Indian English-language newspapers, his name seldom appeared in a sentence without being accompanied by the words ‘poodle’ or ‘lapdog’.

I’d never trusted Blair. His big smile and ingratiating, want-to-be-your-pal manner struck me as phoney, especially compared to the plain-speaking, no-nonsense demeanour of his predecessor as Labour Party leader, John Smith, who died unexpectedly in 1994. However, up until 2003, and having recently endured 18 years of Conservative government, I’d consoled myself with the thought that “At least he isn’t as bad as that other lot.” He headed a political party that claimed to have some conscience, principles and scruples, the supposed antithesis of Maggie Thatcher and her cynical gang. But events in March 2003 changed my opinion.

To be fair, in Britain, it wasn’t just Blair who willed the invasion into happening. He had the support of many in his party, though with a few noble objectors like the late Robin Cook, and the Tories backed him to the hilt. In fact, among the Westminster-based parties, it was only Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats who showed some spine and opposed the bloody thing. It goes without saying that the majority of Britain’s predominantly right-wing newspapers were cheerleaders for it too.

From wikipedia.org / © William M. Connelly

And, though people still talk about the anti-war protests on February 15^th, 2003, which saw the biggest ever political demonstration in London’s history take to the capital’s streets (and was the subject of Ian McEwan’s rather annoying 2005 novel Saturday), I’m afraid to say it had the support of a good chunk of the British population as well. Before and during the initial invasion, I was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but for personal reasons I also spent a lot of time down in East Anglia. Nearly everyone I know in Newcastle – Labour supporters to a man and woman – was horrified by what Blair was doing. But down south, it was a different story. I heard people saying it in pubs, and saw it on stickers in car windows. This war was right, Saddam Hussein was going to blow us up with his WMDs, we needed to hit him before he hit us, we had to support ‘our boys’, and if you were anti-war you were unpatriotic, a coward, a traitor. It was the mentality that, nearly 80 years earlier, had seen young men humiliated by getting white feathers if they didn’t sign up to fight amid the mud and bloodshed of the trenches.

Everything that happened in Iraq was a reprehensible failure – morally, politically, even in terms of making ground against Osamu Bin Laden in the supposed War on Terror. (It took a Navy SEALs raid in Pakistan during the Obama era to put an end to him.) In Britain, it loosened the Labour Party’s hold on power and paved the way for the David Cameron government and its disastrous austerity policies. It also shook the public’s faith in politicians and what they saw as ‘the establishment’ and, arguably, helped lead to the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, which was Britain’s other huge, idiotic mistake of the 21^st century. But all this never dented Blair’s belief that invading Iraq with Bush was the correct thing to do. He was right and those millions of people who came onto the streets to protest against the invasion were wrong.

A lot of this, I suspect, was down to Blair being a devout Christian. Since God was on his side, he reasoned, his decision to back Bush must have divine sanction. Bush, of course, professed to being a Christian too, although I couldn’t imagine the gimlet-eyed Texan being as zealous about it as Blair.

Actually, Blair’s Christianity puts me in mind of something said by the late William S. Burroughs in his spoken lyrics for the Bill Laswell song Words of Advice for Young People: “If you’re doing business with a religious sonofabitch, get it in writing. His word isn’t worth shit, not with the good Lord telling him how to f**k you on the deal.”

From unsplash.com / © Levi Meir Clancy

January 20, 2022January 21, 2022

Ian McEwan’s Saturday: Tony Blair and tone-deaf

© Vintage

“The butcher boy gets a bauble,” was my reaction to the news that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was to be made ‘a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter’, whatever that means, in the Queen’s New Year Honours List. I call Blair ‘the butcher boy’ because of his role in the invasion of Iraq, which happened during his watch in 2003. The invasion was launched to depose Saddam Hussein who, it was claimed, possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. However, these WMDs turned out to not actually exist and it became obvious that Blair and his invasion partner George W. Bush had spun a web of lies beforehand to make people believe that they did.

And it wasn’t just the WMDs that didn’t exist. Since the invasion took place, up until the beginning of 2021, due to ‘coalition and insurgent military action’ and subsequent ‘sectarian violence and criminal violence’, between 185,000 and 209,000 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have stopped existing too – their deaths the direct and indirect results of Blair and Bush’s actions.

Actually, I’d been thinking about Tony Blair and Iraq before word came through of Blair’s ennoblement, because late last year I read Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday. This describes 24 hours in the life of a middle-aged, London-based neurosurgeon called Henry Perowne, starting on the morning of Saturday, February 15^th, 2003. In real life, that date saw the biggest political demonstration in British history. A million people took to the streets of London in an anti-war protest organised by the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Muslim Association of Britain. Blair, of course, had a messianic belief in his own rightness and ignored the many arguments against war voiced by the protestors, and just over a month later Britain joined the USA and its allies in starting hostilities against Iraq. The demonstration forms a backdrop to the events in McEwan’s novel and the forthcoming invasion is prominent in the thoughts and conversations of its characters.

I was a big fan of McEwan during my youth. This was while he was in a weird, morbid, modern-gothic phase and wrote the novel The Cement Garden (1978) and the short stories collected in First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978). Thereafter, McEwan became more wholesome and respectable and found success and acclaim as a writer of mainstream literature. Saturday is only the third novel I’ve read by McEwan since he stopped being ghoulish. The others were The Child in Time (1987), which I enjoyed with some reservations, and Atonement (2001), which I thought was excellent, although a later allegation of plagiarism tarnished it a bit for me. However, while I’ve generally reacted positively to McEwan’s work, I found Saturday problematic. It seemed naïve in the statements it was making. Also, its depiction of its central characters I found downright annoying.

From wikipedia.org / © Thesupermat

The day described in Saturday begins before dawn. Perowne gets out of bed and notices an object that he first assumes is ‘a meteor burning out in the London sky’. He realises, though, that it’s a plane with an engine on fire, which makes him wonder if he’s witnessing an act of terrorism – terrorism being on everyone’s minds since events in New York a year-and-a-half earlier. But it turns out that he’s seen an accidental fire on board a cargo plane, which manages to make an emergency landing at Heathrow. Reassured, he gets on what’s been planned for the day ahead.

His first engagement is at a sports centre where he has a game of squash with his anaesthetist, an American called Jay Strauss. Then he visits his mother, stricken with dementia in a care home, and does some shopping for a family gathering at his house that evening. In addition to Perowne and his wife Rosalind, the get-together is attended by their daughter Daisy, son Theo and Rosalind’s father, the quaintly named John Grammaticus. Later that night, he gets an urgent request from Strauss to perform some emergency surgery: “We got an extradural, male, mid-twenties, fell down the stairs… a depressed fracture right over the sinus… I want someone senior in here and you’re the nearest. Plus you’re the best.”

However, two more incidents make the day darker. On his way to play squash, a distracted policeman allows Perowne to drive along Tottenham Court Road, officially closed off for the anti-war demonstration – with the result that he prangs another car coming out of a side-street, whose driver didn’t expect him to be there. When he gets out to speak to the other car’s three occupants, Perowne realises the men are criminals, ready to beat him up if he doesn’t immediately pay for the damage their car has suffered. But he also notices that the leader of the trio, a man called Baxter, is showing symptoms of a serious neurological disorder. Using his knowledge of the illness, Perowne is able to distract and disorientate Baxter long enough to get back into his car and escape.

But that isn’t the end of it. That evening, just after Perowne has welcomed his family into his house, a vengeful Baxter and one of his henchmen burst in and hold them at knifepoint. There ensues violence, threatened violence and sexual humiliation, before Perowne and his son Theo manage to repel the invaders. Baxter is thrown down some stairs, knocked unconscious and taken away in an ambulance. When the phone call comes from Strauss, Perowne realises the injured man he’s being asked to operate on is Baxter, who traumatised his family a short time ago. As he prepares to leave, Rosalind demands, “You’re not thinking about doing something, about some sort of revenge are you?”

“Of course not,” Perowne replies, and proves to be as good as his word.

As McEwan was in 2003, Perowne is in favour of the Iraq invasion. He’s not as gung-ho as Strauss, who grumbles about the protestors, “They dislike your Prime Minister, but boy do they f*cking loathe my President,” or indeed as Baxter, who snarls at them in an aside, “Horrible rabble. Sponging off the country they hate.” But to his daughter Daisy, who takes part in the day’s demonstration, he says: “No rational person is for war. But in five years’ time we might not regret it. I’d love to see the end of Saddam. You’re right. It could be a disaster. But it could be the end of a disaster and the beginning of something better.” Perowne has been influenced by the testimony of an Iraqi patient of his, an academic called Miri Taleb. Saddam’s secret police once arrested Taleb and subjected him to ten months of physical and mental torment: “Even on the day of his release he didn’t discover what the charges were against him.”

Elsewhere, McEwan’s descriptions of the anti-war protestors seem a bit patronising: “The general cheerfulness Perowne finds baffling. There are whole families, ones in various sizes of bright red coats, clearly under instructions to hold hands; and students, and a coachful of greying ladies in quilted anoraks and stout shoes. The Women’s Institute, perhaps… The scene has an air of innocence and English dottiness.” Mind you, years later in an interview with Channel 4 News, McEwan admitted that he’d changed his opinion about the war and felt that the marchers in 2003 were ‘vindicated’.

From aa.com.tr

While I read Saturday, I tried to work out the significance of the villainous Baxter. Was he a metaphor for Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime? Or was Baxter’s intrusion into the Perownes’ home a metaphor for terrorism, erupting without warning in everyday life, destroying all notions of normality and security for its victims? And what’s to be made of Perowne’s eventual decision to do the decent thing, operate on Baxter and save his life? I got the impression Perowne represented McEwan’s ideal of an enlightened, democratic, liberal West, intervening in Iraq but doing so with everyone’s best interests at heart, including the Iraqis. Unfortunately, the ‘ignorance, arrogance, neglect, stubbornness, panic, haste and denial’ displayed by Iraq’s Western occupiers following the invasion, which rapidly turned the country into a failed state, showed this to be a pipe dream. The USA, Britain and their allies were a hell of a lot less benevolent, magnanimous and expert at what they were doing in Iraq than Henry Perowne was in the operating theatre.

If the political statement McEwan seems to make in Saturday is wishful thinking, certainly in hindsight, I was more troubled by the lack of self-awareness displayed by the main characters. Fair enough, as a London neurosurgeon, Perowne is going to be a wealthy man. His car, McEwan notes, is a “silver Mercedes S500 with cream upholstery – and he’s no longer embarrassed by it. He doesn’t even love it – it’s simply a sensuous part of what he regards as his overgenerous share of the world’s goods.”

But his son Theo is an up-and-coming blues guitarist. His mother arranged for him to get lessons from Jack Bruce, no less. “Through Bruce, Theo met some of the legendary figures. He was allowed to sit in on a Clapton masterclass. Long John Baldry came over from Canada for a reunion… By some accident Theo jammed for several minutes with Ronnie Wood and met his older brother Art…” So, while most kids his age are worrying about entry-level jobs, rents and college fees, Theo, through his family wealth and connections, gets stupendous opportunities to develop his skills playing music – ironically, a type of music that was invented by impoverished black people living in America’s rural south.

Similarly, Perowne’s daughter Daisy is a graduate of Oxford University and a poetess who’s just had a collection of poems published. It no doubt helps that her grandfather, John Grammaticus, is a famous English poet who lives in a chateau in France. Though both lauded and loaded, the old man is bitter about how the world has treated him: “John minded when Spender and not he was knighted, when Raine not Grammaticus got the editorship at Faber, when he lost the Oxford Professorship of Poetry to Fenton, when Hughes and later Motion were preferred as Poets Laureate, and above all when it was Heaney who got the Nobel.”

I may have missed it in Saturday, but I don’t remember the Perownes reflecting on their good fortune, on having so much in a world where many people have so little. It’s especially galling that Theo and Daisy, whom we’re supposed to like as characters, don’t acknowledge their luck in having fulfilling, creative lives, doing the things they enjoy doing, that most people their age can’t have because they lack the wealth, security, support, time and connections. Perhaps once, back when many of Theo’s British-blues heroes were youngsters from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, Britain offered some social mobility and the arts weren’t necessarily the preserve of the elite. But that’s hardly the case in 21^st century Britain, when money, poshness and who-you-know seems to be prerequisites for careers in music (Florence Welch, Mumford and Sons, James Blunt), acting (Cumberbatch, Hiddleston, Pattinson, various Foxes) and literature (while the 2003 and 2013 Granta lists of ‘Best Young British Novelists’ showed some ethnic diversity, about 60% of those novelists had still attended Oxford or Cambridge Universities).

I’d assumed McEwan would use Baxter, who’d obviously never had the opportunities gifted to Theo and Daisy, as an instrument to comment on this when he crashes into the Perownes’ comfortable world. However, the ‘home invasion’ section of Saturday is relatively brief and the bitter commentary I expected didn’t appear. Baxter gets strangely emotional after he forces Daisy to recite a poem to him, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, but that’s all.

This muted acceptance of the advantages enjoyed by the Perowne family irritated me most about Saturday. In this respect, it seems as tone-deaf as Tony Blair was about the war that the novel ruminates on.

From change.org

December 18, 2020December 21, 2020

From sci-fi to Sri-fi

During the half-dozen years I’ve lived in Sri Lanka, I’ve read a fair number of novels and short story collections by local writers, including works by Martin Wickramasinghe, Romesh Gunesekera, Shyam Selvadurai, Carl Muller, Ashok Ferrey, Ameena Hussein and Michael Ondaatje. The latter is probably the best known internationally, though ironically for a novel that doesn’t have much to do with Sri Lanka. Their output is what snobby literary critics would describe as ‘mainstream’ literature. I’ve seen none of them associated with ‘genre’ fiction, although Muller’s work contains a lot of humour and labelling it ‘comedy’ certainly wouldn’t be amiss.

On the other hand, I didn’t expect to encounter anything in the past six years that could be classified as ‘Sri Lankan science fiction.’ But, to my surprise, I have. Romesh Gunesekera’s 2002 novel Heaven’s Edge is set in a surreal future Sri Lanka where the Civil War hasn’t ended but gone on and on, with the country becoming increasingly authoritarian and its environment increasingly despoiled. An uneasy mixture of dystopian fiction, allegory and magical realism, with flashes of J.G. Ballard and William Gibson, I have to say I find Heaven’s Edge the least impressive of Gunesekera’s books that I’ve read.

Better is the 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke. Although Clark was in many ways a very English Englishman, Fountains is for me a very Sri Lankan book. Clarke had lived in Sri Lanka for decades by the time it was published and the fictional island the story takes place on, Taprobane, is simply Sri Lanka with a few tweaks, for example, with Sigiriya Rock and Adam’s Peak being near neighbours when in the real Sri Lanka they’re 175 kilometres apart. Set mostly in the 22^nd century, though with some bold flashbacks to 2000 years earlier in Taprobane / Sri Lanka’s history, Fountains is about the construction of a giant ‘space elevator’ linking the earth’s surface with a space station in geosynchronous orbit. Geographical factors necessitate the elevator being built from a mountaintop in Taprobane / Sri Lanka, which coincidentally happens to be the island’s most sacred location. The book meditates on the conflict between preserving heritage and culture and pushing on with scientific and technological progress, with Clarke treating both causes sympathetically even if it’s obvious which one will ultimately prevail.

Now, I’ve discovered the 28-year-old Sri Lankan author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and recently read two of his novels, Numbercaste (2017) and The Inhuman Race (2019). While neither book is entirely to my pernickety tastes, I’d say they make a good case for Wijeratne being hailed as the potential future of Sri Lankan science fiction.

On his website Wijeratne identifies himself as a member of a ‘Data, Algorithms and Policy’ team working for a thinktank called LIRNEasia. This background obviously helped shape Numbercaste. Its narrator, Patrick Udo, is recruited by a tech company called NumberCorp in the 2030s and gets involved in a project with revolutionary consequences for humanity. Its purpose is to collate every human being’s data – salary, bank balance, credit card rating, police record, social media profile and a thousand things more – and distil it into a single score, an all-important ‘number’ that determines the social and professional options open to him or her. As Udo says near the book’s end, “Every morning I’d check Number News on my phone. Tap, tap. There, just above the news and the social gossip and the who-checked-in-wheres, was my score. My score was critical. It got me the best tables at restaurants I went to, all simple but pricy affairs. It got me into the VIP section of any club where I wanted to party. It got me first class tickets on the airplanes.”

A person’s number isn’t immutable. It can rise or fall. As Julius Common, NumberCorp’s visionary founder and leader, argues, this makes it a positive force because it rewards good behaviour and punishes bad. For example, police officers who blot their records with corruption or brutality will see their numbers drop below the threshold required for them to remain employed. Thus, they’ll be replaced by less crooked cops with better numbers. That, of course, is Common’s spin on the system and the question throughout the book is if it’ll actually become a tool of oppression, locking everyone into their own social and professional cells on different tiers of society and keeping everyone in line with the threat of demotion to lower tiers if they don’t obey orders. Will Common and NumberCorp lead the world to utopia or dystopia? In the book’s afterword, Wijeratne notes that China has tried doing something like this in real life with its social credit project.

Much of Numbercaste details Udo’s Boswell / Dr Johnson-like relationship with Common. This relationship sees Udo play the role of humble employee, then trusted lieutenant and finally fallen-from-favour outcast. Although it’s largely set in California, a culture where the names Zuckerberg, Musk, Gates and Bezos are intoned as if they’re ancient but all-powerful deities, Sri Lanka makes an appearance along the way as an early test lab for Common and his scoring system: “We need a sort of guinea pig to test this stuff. A small population that we can monitor and test and retest the bulk of our SEA algorithms on… This place is perfect… Highly connected, almost everyone’s online, and the government will let us do whatever the hell we want as long as their ministers are happy.”

As I’m a relative luddite with information technology, and an avoider of most social media, Numbercaste isn’t a book that automatically appeals to me. Also, I suspect more could have been done to humanise Common whilst chronicling his inexorable rise. Perhaps he could have been given some Citizen Kane-style foibles that taint his success with bitter unhappiness. Nonetheless, a lot of Numbercaste impressed me and Wijeratne’s prose style is spot on. It provides just enough detail to give a firm sense of time and place, but never overdoes it and doesn’t get in the way of the fast-moving narrative.

Obviously, the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the world have made a lot of science fiction published before 2020 but set a short time after it seem dated. In the real future, people in 2025, 2030 or 2035 will presumably talk about the 2020 pandemic in the way that we still talk about 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis now. In the near-futures of pre-2020 science fiction, the characters aren’t talking about it because the writers had no idea it was going to happen. The 2017-published Numbercaste gets around this credibility problem by accident rather than design. It alludes to something called ‘the TRS-8I superbug’, which ‘hit Asia hardest’ and ‘had done in millions of people’. Among its victims were ten million Sri Lankans, who presumably perished from it sometime in the 2020s. So that’s why nobody mentions Covid-19 in Numbercaste. The TRS-8I pandemic was so traumatic that it erased the earlier virus from the collective memory.

The Inhuman Race, meanwhile, takes place in an alternative universe, in a version of Sri Lanka in 2033 where, to quote the book’s back-cover blurb, “The British Empire never fell. Communism never happened. The flag of the Commonwealth still flies over its colonies, which lie stripped bare in the name of British interests, powerless to resist.” The story begins with gangs of feral children scrabbling for survival amid the ruins of the Colombo seafront. This is a legacy of the Chinese Emperor deciding to give the British a bloody nose: “having won the might of a united China,” he “brooded over his navy from his darkened throne-room. The white devils that flew the Union Jack ruled too much of the ocean for his liking. Dimly, he remembered Fa-Xian’s accounts of Ceylon, the Buddha’s blessed island… And thus the British Empire’s first direct contact with China in two hundred years was when the Chinese warships pulled into Colombo port and began their assault.” In the ensuing carnage, Colombo’s ‘Galle Face Green became Galle Face Brown.’

While the novel’s first part offers some good post-apocalyptic fun, with the different gangs using as their headquarters the shells of the different luxury hotels that used to do business along Galle Face, such as the Shangri La, the Taj and the Cinnamon Grand, and with a gigantic mountain range of garbage separating the city’s devasted seaboard from its more habitable parts inland, I enjoyed the later chapters more. Here, the action switches to the island’s still-intact administrative centre, the mountain city of Kandy. At the same time, the book’s main theme emerges, which is about how much robots built to emulate living beings should be regarded as living beings themselves. This is hardly a ground-breaking theme in science fiction – though you might think it is if your name is Ian McEwan. But Wijeratne explores it well, through the eyes of a sympathetic character called Dr Kushlani de Alemeida. She’s an employee of a company manufacturing and using robots for dubious entertainment purposes. Though these products look ‘a lot like what God would have made the humans to look like had he been limited to metal and cheap plastic’, Alemeida uncovers evidence that they’re more sentient than anyone had imagined.

What I really like about the book’s Kandy sequences are the glimpses it gives of Sri Lankan society in this weird, alternative-universe scenario where the British Empire is still a thing. Order is maintained by ‘British’ soldiers, actually Indians and Gurkas, and by a fearsome outfit called the Inquisition that consist of ‘hooded monk-like figures’, from whom ‘a pale face with ruby lenses for eyes’ occasionally appears. The economy has been portioned off to the control of several rich houses, the Ratwatte, Madugalle, Rambukpotha and Bandaras. The judiciary is staffed by Buddhist monks, which leads to some interesting debate when Alemeida tries to convince a court that the robots should be treated like living creatures. The British themselves, apart from a mention of a Governor, are invisible – though evidently creaming off the country’s wealth at the top.

In this way, The Inhuman Race reminds me of certain works of Sri Lankan literature set when the country was under British rule, like Martin Wickramasinghe’s Ape Game (1940) and Madol Doova (1947) or Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913). (Okay, Village wasn’t penned by a Sri Lankan but by an Englishman, Virginia Woolf’s husband no less, while he worked for the Ceylon Civil Service. But it was written from a native’s point of view, not from a colonialist’s.) In those books too, the British are barely around. The administrative machinery they’ve set up is run by the locals, which gives a semblance of Sri Lankan autonomy. But again, up above, the Brits are discretely pocketing the profits.

One small but nice touch in The Inhuman Race’s is when a character refers to the words of ‘the great Pratchett’: “There is no justice… there is just us.” So not only has Terry Pratchett churned out Discworld novels in this alternative universe too, but he’s even more revered than he is in our one.

I was slightly frustrated that The Inhuman Race didn’t show more of its future-imperialist / Buddhist society or, indeed, of the secretive Chinese Empire that pulverised Colombo at the novel’s start. But The Inhuman Race is supposedly the first part of a trilogy, so hopefully Yudhanjaya Wijeratne will supply more details in the instalments to come.