The Guardian’s Shame

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‘The country’s worst violence in decades’, apparently.

The Guardian published an article on my country yesterday morning. It’s called ‘“The Family Took Over”: How a Feuding Ruling Dynasty Drove Sri Lanka to Ruin’. Its perpetrator is someone called Hannah Ellis-Petersen who was, apparently, ‘in Colombo’ when she filed it.

It’s a clueless shambles, just like the events it attempts to describe. The author’s principal sources appear to be discarded Rajapaksa creatures like Dilith Jayaweera and Udaya Gammanpila. I suppose it’s at least creditable that she gets them to talk. Of course, they tell their own versions of the story, in which everything is Basil’s or Mahinda’s fault and they come up smelling of roses. Inevitably, so does Gotabaya Rajapaksa. An ‘austere, devout and straight-talking military man’ if you please, rather than an incompetent, corrupt, death-dealing figure who needed to plunge the nation into debt in order to enable a lakhs-strong military, supersonic bombers and kilotons of ordnance to defeat a guerrilla army of five thousand – murdering thousands of civilians in the process – and sell it as a great victory. 

It was quite amazing to read a Guardian article on Sri Lanka that didn’t mention Mullivaikal even once. That might even have been a relief, frankly, but no, wait a minute: it’s much worse than that! Ms Ellis-Petersen writes, concerning the events of 9 and 10 May, that ‘the country’s worst violence in more than three decades took place.’ Holy smoke! She actually forgot Mullivaikal! She forgot the bloody war! Or else she thinks tear gas at Galle Face and a few kleptocrats’ and drug dealers’ empty houses getting torched are worse than 26 years of armed conflict and the deaths of thousands of unarmed civilians on an open beach...

Compared to that solecism, Ms Petersen’s other howlers are trivial. Nivard Cabral, slimeball of the ages, is practically made to sound like a hero. There is not a word about Ranil Wickremasinghe and his efforts to sabotage peaceful regime change and save the Rajapaksas from gaol. All she gets out of him is a single meaningless quote. I suppose that’s all the sorry bugger is good for these days: Ranil ‘Busted Flush’ Wickremasinghe. 

I could go on, but I think you get the picture, so I will end with just one more observation: this story is two months late. It describes the situation in Sri Lanka as it was on, say, May 12. Crap as it is, it might at least have had current-affairs value if it had come out then. Appearing on July 7, it’s a load of worthless arsewipe. The Guardian should be ashamed of itself, and as for the lady who wrote it, she’s in the wrong profession. She should get a job in the public-relations industry with a portfolio of banana-republic governments for clients.

Vaporous

Visitors

Anita Brookner

With that title, and a cover like the one my paperback edition has, it ought to be a ghost story. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be one; the lead character might as well be a ghost, anyway, for all the energy and gumption she shows. 

This is a good novel? Anita Brookner is the modern Jane Austen?

So: widowed lady, seventy or thereabouts, has a houseguest thrust upon her by her rich in-laws. He’s to be the best man at their granddaughter’s wedding. The bride’s father is the family black sheep, largely out of the picture. Her intended is some kind of evangelical Christian pastor, though everyone else in the story appears to be Jewish. The pair of them are the typical uncouth young idiots who are often introduced to spice up a story about boring, rich old people by way of humorous contrast, like the music student and his wife in The Lyre of Orpheus or the rude young hippie couple at a dinner party in Earthly Powers. These two are not nearly as deftly drawn as either of those couples, but they’re being set up for the same kind of comical humiliation as far as I can see. The best man is just a cipher, his only purpose being to cause Boring Old Dear to look back upon, and rue, all the dissatisfactions of her largely colourless life.

Meanwhile there are family quarrels and fits of the vapours, but they’re all shown us through the filtering eyes of our widowed protagonist, whose feelings and reactions are barely animate. There are, of course, a few ‘action scenes’ (parlour set-pieces, really) but most of the novel consists of her inner ruminations.

I don’t know if I’m going to finish this. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and wondering why I’m wasting my time on it when there are so many books I would enjoy reading better. 

Poor Jane Austen. There’s more wit and energy in one of her paragraphs than in this whole novel. A much more appropriate comparison would be Virginia Woolf – whom, needless to say, I thoroughly detest.