Is Sheet Music Obsolete?

How to visualize music accurately: A ProTools screenshot. 

One properly learns music through the ears and body, not the eyes.

Musical notation is, in essence, a method of recording music for later reproduction. It is a woefully primitive method, largely unfit for purpose. Of the four elements that make up a musical sound – pitch, volume, phase and timbre or tone colour – notation only records the first with any accuracy, and even then can only do so in relation to a reference tone (A above Middle C = 440Hz). Volume is rendered very roughly, in words – forte, pianissimo, etc – and symbols like < or > (‘turn up’ or ‘pipe down’ respectively): absurd. As for phase and timbre (the latter is the most basic perceptual aspect, apart from loudness, of any sound, musical or not), they are all but ignored. Being told what instrument to use to play a given part in a piece is all the timbral information you’ll ever get.

As poorly served is that other vital component of music, rhythm, which is rendered so ineptly in conventional notation that the rhythmic scope of Western music was badly hobbled – crippled, in fact – by long dependence upon it. In the West, for hundreds of years, rhythmic complexity became the exclusive preserve of folk song and folk dance, which were propagated by ear and bodily movement rather than via sheet music. It was only through later cross-fertilization with African music that rhythmic sensibility came to be restored to Western ears. Modern musical forms like pop, rock, jazz and the blues all owe their genesis – tragically, inescapably – to the transatlantic slave trade.

What does written music still have going for it? Musical notation does convey relative harmonic information very well – again, it’s no accident that Western music is harmonically more advanced than music from other cultures – but in practical terms it is really only good for three things these days: propagating music that is ‘too complex’ to decipher accurately by ear (though this is a faculty that varies widely from person to person), rapidly teaching musicians in ensemble how to play their individual ‘parts’, and to facilitate the composition and performance of musical pieces of the crossword-puzzle variety -- things like Bach fugues or complex Serialist pieces, where geometrical or mathematical conceits are rendered in musical form. The pleasures of such music are visual and intellectual, that is to say not intrinsically musical; and thus, for very good reason, they are minority pleasures, of interest only to a cultivated few and far removed from what the bulk of humanity knows, loves and utilises as music.

Musical notation was rendered obsolete in terms of its original purpose as soon as the phonograph was invented. Now it appears doubly so. Specialist software like ProTools® captures every aspect of music visually without any need for musical notation – and allows you to edit the music too, with far greater facility than any composer ever altered a score. It even gives you the power to hear the result of your edit in real time before you press Save. Less elaborate versions of such software are cheaply available for your smartphone. Given the ubiquity of these far superior recording methods, is there still a place in the world for sheet music?

Bright-Eyed Brown Boys Ahoy

Ceylon: History in Stone by R. Raven-Hart 

‘I am convinced,’ declares Roland James Milleville Raven-Hart, OBE, on page 163 of Ceylon: History in Stone, ‘that Galle children are the most handsome in Ceylon.’ 

        In support of this opinion he quotes Werner Hoffmeister, a physician-botanist who visited Ceylon in 1844 in the company of Prince Waldemar of Prussia. Putting into harbour at Galle with the prince, Hoffmeister had noticed some of the local fishermen. Among them, he wrote, were ‘young boys of most lovely countenance, whose rich, flowing black hair fell over their backs.’ Raven-Hart was always keenly alert for observations of this kind; only two pages further on in his book we find him endorsing the judgement of a much more famous Teutonic visitor to Lanka, the eminent natural historian, artist and all-round polymath Ernst Haeckel – who, in his own writings, seldom troubled to conceal his taste for dusky young natives.

I enthusiastically agree when [Haeckel] says that in Ceylon ‘the stronger sex is also the more handsome; and the boys especially stand out by a certain affectionate expression’ (but ‘affectionate’ is a poor translation of the untranslatable schwärmerisch)… Sinhalese countrymen are almost always handsome and often really lovely…

Schwärmerisch does not quite defy translation. It means something like ‘eagerly affectionate’ or ‘fatuously complaisant’ . No department of life offers more scope for wish-fulfilling presumption than sex.

*     *     *

Ceylon: History in Stone is a travel guide, now hopelessly out of date though it remains an excellent read as long as you aren’t put off by the plenitude of bright-eyed brown boys. Its author was adventurous, well-travelled, well-read and decidedly eccentric, a figure better suited to the late-Victorian world stage than to the twentieth century in which he lived. Even his origins were typical of those nineteenth-century British imperialists: according to an excellent biographical article by Richard Boyle in the Sunday Times, Raven-Hart’s father was the English vicar of a scantily-populated hamlet in Ireland, his mother the vicar’s more or less well-born Irish wife. His own double-barrelled surname was arrived at by combining theirs.
By the time young Roland had grown to man’s estate, the British Empire was already past its peak. He served it in the approved manner all the same, fighting with the Suffolk Regiment in the First World War, being gassed at the Battle of Cateau and later joining the Signals Corps, a branch of British military intelligence, in the Middle East. In the Corps he became an expert electrical engineer. Tellingly, his war service earned him no martial decorations from his own country but, instead, an OBE ‘for valuable services rendered in connection with military operations in Egypt,’ along with the French Croix de guerre and the Tsarist Order of St Stanislaus. With gongs like those, he may as well have headed his personal résumé with the word SPY in scare capitals.
After some post-war years spent ‘setting up a radio network’ in South America, Raven-Hart went to live in the French Mediterranean commune of Le Ciotat, whence he embarked upon a series of far-flung expeditions as a canoeist-explorer. These jaunts formed the basis of a series of travel books: Canoe Errant, Canoe Errant on the Nile, Canoe Errant on the Mississippi and so on, in which, as Boyle reports, he unblushingly ‘revealed his partiality for young boys as companions.’ In Canoe to Mandalay, for example, he descants upon the neotenic charms of a twenty-two-year-old Burmese who, to him, looked no more than sixteen: ‘the skin of his cheeks [was] as soft as that of his arms…[and he had] as little pubic hair as a just-adolescent European or American boy.’ This is slightly more graphic than anything you’ll find in the pages of History in Stone, yet even there, paederastic sentiment is rarely ever more than a page or two away.
Raven-Hart’s first visits to Ceylon were made in 1937 and 1938. He does not seem to have stayed long on either occasion; perhaps they were connected with the profession (rather than the love) that dare not speak its name. But he returned to the island in 1947, not long after the death of his much-neglected wife Hester, and this time he stayed for sixteen years. 

*     *     *

Ceylon: History in Stone is a product of that sojourn. Rather like W.T. Keble’s Ceylon Beaten Track a decade earlier, it is an attempt to tell the story of the island through visits to ‘places of interest’ associated with it. Raven-Hart handles this device better than Keble does, eschewing the latter’s flights of time-travelling fantasy in favour of scholarly detail. He gives us the conventional narrative of Sinhalese history, commencing with a trip to Mahiyangana, which the Buddha is said to have visited (travelling, according to tradition, by air) in the ninth month of his enlightenment. Mihintale and Anuradhapura inevitably follow, and we hear again the story of Arahant Mahinda and King Tissa, the martial feats of Dutugemunu and all the other well-known, well-worn tales. There are, indeed, few surprises anywhere on the author’s itinerary: Dambulla, Aluvihare, Kalawewa and Sigiriya follow Anuradhapura in predictable succession. Each place receives an amiable, well-informed description, brightened with local colour, and an uncritical retelling of its role in history.
The chapter-arrangement is chronological: following our guide from place to place, we ricochet wildly back and forth across the island but keep moving steadily forward through history. Thus, after faring south to Tissamaharama, we turn back to visit ruined Polonnurawa, locus of a syncretic, cosmopolitan Lankan renaissance between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries; thence we proceed south again and westward through the darkening ages, tracing the decline of Sinhalese power via Yapahuwa, Kurunegala and Gampola into the shadow of the Kandyan hills. By this time the author has got ahead of his story, but a trip to Adam’s Peak (which he sensibly refuses to climb) returns him to the late-mediaeval period when Muslim traders and settlers dominated the littoral and commerce of the island. We hear more about them in the next chapter, which focuses on Ratnapura and features a canoe journey down the Kalu Ganga.
Over two-thirds of History in Stone, however, deals with the colonial era. No longer reliant on hesitant translations of ancient Pali and Sinhala texts for his information, Raven-Hart is on firmer ground here, and it shows. Kudos to him, he has read all the old authors – even Queiroz, who was hard to find in his day – and even translated a few into English himself. His guided tour, though, is now perforce confined largely to the southwest of the island, with brief side-trips to the colonial fortified ports of Jaffna, Batticaloa and Trincomalee. I found those excursions a disappointment, for though there is plenty to read in them about the bloody, confusing wars and power-politics which centred on those places, we learn little about their pre-colonial history or their traditional culture. Largely because of this omission, History in Stone affords Lanka’s Tamils an almost insignificant place in the island’s story. When the author does mention them (or the Chola invaders he wrongly assumes were their ancestors) he pays them scant honour; the contrast with his frequent and effusive praise of the Sinhalese is stark. As for Lanka’s other modern-day minorities, they are barely mentioned at all.
By the time we come to the British period, the tour has shrunk to a commute, up and down between Colombo and the hill country. The storytelling, though, has grown more colourful and incident-filled than ever. Juicy historical morsels abound; one I particularly savoured was the revelation that Charles-Daniel de Meuron, a Swiss mercenary commander in the pay of the Dutch who switched sides in the middle of the British assault on Colombo, marched his regiment out of the Fort and in among the redcoat ranks to the strains of ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’. To the Dutch, watching him go, he was anything but.
More remarkable is the author’s coldly unsparing account of how the Uva Rebellion – the only serious native threat to British rule that ever arose in Lanka – was put down. The revolt was more widespread than its name implies, and it was suppressed with great brutality. Historians (save for the near-contemporary John Davy) have tended to gloss over the details, but Raven-Hart is less reticent:

The rising of 1817-18…was serious: the sick in Kandy hospital were issued with arms and ammunition each evening; the city would have been evacuated had large reinforcements not arrived from India. Finally the British resorted to terrorism as the only means of ‘pacification’: Calladine tells how ‘we had parties out scouring the country…burning all they came across and shooting those they could not take prisoners.’ In one five-day raid three hundred houses were destroyed, and all the fruit-trees, palms, furniture, even pots and pans, ‘in fact everything that could tend to comfort or utility.’ Some of the military did well out of that ‘pacification’; Campbell, himself a British official, tells how people, their rice-terraces destroyed, were selling their cattle at any price to buy rice – a ‘Captain’ whom he mercifully leaves unnamed told him how he had ‘thus acquired’ more than five hundred cows and bullocks, besides buffaloes.

 
With the crushing of the Uva Rebellion the history of modern Lanka – then known as the Crown Colony of Ceylon – begins. In this the author has relatively little interest: he gives us a much-condensed account, concerned mainly with the plantation enterprise and the Sinhalese Buddhist Revival. Correctly, he presents the latter as a reaction against official ‘neglect’ of Buddhism and attacks on the faith by Christian missionaries.
So much for modern history; as for sightseeing, we are given little more than a glimpse of post-colonial Colombo as a European visitor on a day-tour might see it before being bundled off, yet again, to Kandy. Here we are treated to a close-up view of the Perahera, accompanied by a disquisition on the place of Buddhism in Lankan life. This is slightly incongruous: as Raven-Hart surely knew, the Perahera was originally an animist (nominally, Hindu) festival on to which the Buddhist elements that dominate it today were later grafted. Besides, Lankan history in his time ended at Independence Square in Colombo, not in Kandy. Yet though he lived in Ceylon for fifteen years after independence, Raven-Hart has almost no comment to make about this period. 
Rather, the book ends with a deliberate reversion to the past. The author takes us back to a place he has shown us once already: Balane Pass, the ‘one-way door’, as he calls it, to the Kandyan kingdom and a potent symbol of the Sinhalese ability to resist or assimilate foreign invaders. No doubt he has a point to make, but since he does not make it explicitly, we are left to work out his meaning by our own lights.

*     *     *

We might have understood this mysterious subtext of his better if those lissom brown boys didn’t keep interposing their confounded bodies. We meet the first of them on page fifteen, at the foot of Mihintale Rock.

A schoolboy attached himself to me, one of those sudden children who have an attractive way of turning up in Ceylon with local information, often quite accurate.

This seems innocuous enough; Keble, a revered schoolmaster, often stopped to chat with local children in the course of his own travels round the island. But only four pages later, we find Raven-Hart visiting the nearby Kaludiya Pokuna (‘Blackwater Pool’) with his new friend and a troop of other juveniles.

My urchin guided me there: at least, I chartered him to do so, but he somehow turned into half a dozen. We all swam there, the older boys tucking up their sarongs through the crutch, the brats discarding them altogether with one wriggle. The working costume of the Sinhalese male of all ages is… a string round the waist holding the ends of a wisp of cotton, aft often so narrow as to disappear between the buttocks, forward not a centimetre wider than it needs to be. I imitated it with a handkerchief tied to a waistband of creeper… It made me an excellent string-substitute.

A photograph illustrates the text, but only a portion of the pokuna is to be seen in it; the real subject is a prepubescent Sinhalese boy, naked except for a loincloth – worn exactly as described – and leaning seductively against a rock. 
On to Anuradhapura, where another ‘schoolboy’ ‘attached himself to me’; Raven-Hart spends the afternoon wandering round the remains of the ancient city with this child. Likewise, at Polonnaruwa, he chooses ‘a friendly lad of 14 with shining teeth and hair and eyes,’ gifted with a few words of English, to accompany him for an afternoon among the ruins. The sites of these vast ancient capitals were thinly peopled in those days; there was barely any of the tourist and pilgrim traffic you see at them now, so we must picture the author, a slovenly, prophetically bearded middle-aged white man, wandering with his shining-eyed companion through a bosky, deserted parkland dotted with beckoning copses and vine-draped ruins. It must have felt like Paradise – to Raven-Hart, at least. 
Wherever he goes, he finds with ease the company he seeks. After a while, you become wise to his technique. It is simple enough: he merely walks down to the nearest tank or bathing-beach and takes a dip. Boys, after all, love to bathe and fish, so there are usually a few about. Mass tourism being still in the future at this time, a nearly naked white person is a curiosity to them; in no time at all, Raven-Hart is surrounded by a small crowd of ‘urchins’, and from among them he makes his selection. At the end of the day, the chosen lad will be rewarded for his service with a ten-cent coin pressed into his ear or, if his employer is feeling unusually generous, fifty cents to spend on sweets. Sometimes the term of employment is slightly longer, with the boy sharing the author’s rest-house bedroom for the night. All this is frankly told, though without any hint of prurience, and since both the barriers interposed by race and class and the intimate relationship between master and servant allowed for greater propinquity in his day than in ours, the appearance of decorum is not hard to maintain. Yet some readers at least must surely have perceived – a few, no doubt, with a secret thrill – what Raven-Hart really was up to.

*     *     *

Ceylon: History in Stone is a popular book. My own copy (seemingly a facsimile of the original Lake House publication) is at least a fourth edition. Classic guidebooks on Lanka can have long shelf-lives: the justly famous Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller, for instance, has remained in print for decades. But the Handbook has an organisation behind it, and people with a financial and sentimental interest in keeping it going. Raven-Hart’s book, as far as I know, has neither.
Maybe it’s just my dirty mind, but it strikes me that its popularity has a darker source. I refer, of course, to the boys. History in Stone appears to have been written in part to popularize, just discreetly enough for a naive reader to miss but all too plainly to the initiate, a Lankan tourist attraction that has long been popular among foreigners with recondite tastes. Not to mince words, Raven-Hart was advertising the charms of Lankan lads for the benefit of international paedophiles. No wonder his book has so rarely been out of print.
He stands in a long tradition. In Sex & Serendipity: Cultural Encounters & Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka, the Australian scholar Robert Aldrich mentions, among others, the names of Sir Hector MacDonald, an erstwhile British military commander of Ceylon; the American composer and author Paul Bowles (who – shades of Haeckel – once rented a palatial house on ‘Serendib Island’ in Weligama Bay); the Australian painter Donald Friend; Arthur C. Clarke (whom Raven-Hart, according to Richard Boyle, persuaded to take up residence in Lanka) and other visitors and sojourners whose love for the Paradise Isle was far from Platonic. Aldrich’s book is about gay men, not paedophiles, but some of the characters he mentions were undoubtedly both. And there were others; despite never having done any particular research into the subject, I have come across a good many in the course of my own historical reading. Admittedly, one has to read between the lines to spot them but, as with History in Stone, this is rarely very difficult.
The sexual accessibility of Lankan boys to foreign visitors is no secret today; it has been common knowledge ever since the early years of the tourism boom, when the corruption of children and youths in fishing-villages adjacent to the hotels then springing up like cubist mushrooms along our west coast first began to inspire concern among the sort of folk who make it their business to worry about such things. The Spartacus International Gay Guide, a sort of Lonely Planet for queer sex-tourists, added an annual squirt of adrenalin to the panic by praising Lankans as a people warmly hospitable towards its reader-demographic. A study in the epidemiological journal WorldAIDS, published in 1993, stated frankly that Lanka was ‘known as a gay paradise’ and estimated that, at the time of publication, some 15,000 ‘beach boys’ were engaged in homosexual prostitution. When AIDS hit in the mid-Eighties, a number of earnest efforts were made to sign the boys up for HIV testing and counselling, but all these campaigns failed because, as local authorities glumly reported, the intended targets were ‘financially independent’ and could not be bribed to participate in them.

The bloated white men in Speedos who flocked to Lanka ‘for the boys’ were following, perhaps unknowingly, a trail blazed by wealthy foreign decadents of an earlier age. In those bygone days, when travelling for pleasure was a pastime only the rich could afford, Ceylon was a destination attractive to sophisticated globetrotters not only for its scenic beauty and picturesque ancient culture but also for the Westernization of its society and the cosmopolitanism of its upper classes, native as well as foreign. In most European colonies, the social tone was set by military officers, carpetbaggers and morally degenerate bureaucrats, who kept strictly to their own society and didn’t mix with the natives. Ceylon was very different: only first-class imperialists were good enough for Britain’s ‘Premier Crown Colony’, where it was also easy to meet and break bread with urbane, hospitable locals who had learnt their English at elite missionary schools – schools which also formed their manners, tastes and views along comfortably Western lines. Many of these were boarding establishments, where illicit sex and child abuse were as rife as at the English public schools upon which they were closely modelled. 

        This multicultural elite boasted a bohemian subculture of its own, in which well-to-do homosexuals (as well as, no doubt, others whose sexual propensities were not so benign) found a partial refuge from the censure of conventional society. Members of this subculture were only too happy to introduce like-minded foreigners to the local demi-monde. Meanwhile, on a less rarefied level, countless soldiers, civil servants, surveyors, teachers, clergymen, merchants and other expatriates whose foreign service had been sweetened by the taste of forbidden fruit also sent or carried word of Paradise home to their friends and lovers.

But what word was being spread? Questing homosexuals certainly found Lankan lads attractive, but did they also find them eager to be embraced – schwärmerisch, as Haeckel put it? Some, at least, have affirmed it, and speculated as to the cause. ‘Why,’ asked one recent, tactless American traveller, ‘did [gay men] seek me out in Ceylon [more than in India]? Was Ceylon more tolerant of homosexuals because it was Buddhist?’ 
This is not a question that can safely be asked in Lanka today. In any case, the thesis is absurd on the face of it. Buddhism levies no especial prohibition against homosexuality, but it frowns on sexual indulgence in general and specifically forbids monks to engage in any form of penetrative sex. Lay Buddhists, as I know them, are no more tolerant of sexual ‘deviancy’ than the followers of any other faith. Nor does contemporary Lankan society in its secular aspects show any great sympathy toward homosexuals; quite the opposite, if anything. 

*     *     *

Even so, the stubborn student of human nature will be moved to ask how far Lankan lads collaborated in their own despoliation. I have known and moved among the beach boys of Mount Lavinia and Moragalla, two of the oldest and most popular resorts in Lanka, and I have seen for myself that the traffic in desire – in the late twentieth century, at least – was not quite as lopsided as it might appear from a distance. Most of the boys attached themselves to white women who had came out from Europe singly or in pairs with the precise intention of having sex with the locals; some also trafficked themselves to foreign men when the opportunity arose, while others catered exclusively to this market. None of these lads saw themselves as victims; on the contrary, they considered themselves the predators. They often extracted valuable gifts – love-tokens – on top of payment for their services, and more than one was able to set up in some legitimate business with the help of donations from his foreign clients. Some had even been taken to Europe – indeed, the holy grail of all their aspirations was permanent residency in the West. On Moragalla and Bentota beaches, the boys’ slang for ‘tourist’ was ‘visa’.
Of course, as any anti-imperialist worth her vegan salt will remind you, the boys’ feelings of agency, even control, over the international affairs they conducted were illusory; beyond the immediate ambit of the encounter itself, it is obvious who had the greater power and freedom, the beach boy or his ‘visa’. And it must be admitted that evidence of the filthy trade in children – in which there is no possible ambiguity regarding power relations – was always to be found along these beaches if you cared to look. Yet for all that, it is not at all difficult to see the older beach boys, like their clients, as belonging to a collaborative tradition, a mutually beneficial (and mutually degrading) commerce that is centuries old.

*     *     *

Ironically, the successful establishment of mass tourism in this country was due in large measure to the work of certain members of Colombo’s bohemian smart set who were well known to be gay. One of the earliest of these was Lionel Wendt, whose contribution to Song of Ceylon, the first internationally-distributed tourist-promotion film about the country, was definitive. Another was Herbert Keuneman, the author of an unpublished manuscript which evolved, under other hands, into the Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller. Older readers still mentally agile enough to cast their minds back to the Sixties will find it easy to add a dozen or so locally well-known names to this list, including that of a successful director-general of the Ceylon Tourist Board. Some famous foreigners were involved, too: Clarke ran an upmarket scuba-diving business and did much through his writing to help popularize the country as a destination; Donald Friend, ‘Australia’s favourite paedophile’, who had been involved with the early development of tourism in Bali, also played his part in the evolution of Lankan ‘resort style’.

It would be absurd, of course, to conclude that our tourism industry was specifically raised up with pederasty in mind. That sort of conspiracy-theory is too simple-minded to be true, leaving out a host of other factors that weighed far more heavily in the development of the industry than the influence of a mere coterie. Yet it would be equally unwise to deny a connexion; Lanka has attracted visitors who are unconscionably fond of pretty brown boys for far too long to permit anyone to disavow the possibility of such an influence. But how and why it came to be so had better remain a mystery; it is not at all wise, in a country like Sri Lanka, to pry into such matters. Safer simply to blame the suddas and leave it at that.
But that surely cannot be all there is to the story. As I type this, I hear in my head the words of a Sinhala song, one that will be familiar to many readers – certainly to those educated at the posh boys’ schools I mentioned earlier. They sing it in their cups sometimes, to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’. It is called Mahaveli Ganga Aïné and it recounts, step by step, the sexual molestation of an innocent, compliant child. It isn’t just foreigners who are keen on our beautiful brown boys.

Bibliography 

1. Raven-Hart, R, Ceylon: History in Stone. Colombo, 2018, Stamford Lake 
2. Hoffmeister, W., Travels in Ceylon & Continental India. Eng. trans. Edinburgh, 1848, W.P. Kennedy.
3.  Haeckel, E., Indische Reisebriefe (Ch. 10). Berlin, 1909, Gebrüder Paetel. 
4. Boyle, R., ‘The Mysterious Major Raven-Hart’, Sunday Times (Sri Lanka), 19 Feb 2017.
5. Aldrich, R., Sex & Serendipity: Cultural Encounters & Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka. London, 2014, Routledge.
6. West J., ‘Selling Cheap Sex & Seashells’, WorldAIDS, Mar 1993.
7. Itiel, J., Escapades of a Gay Traveller. Ann Arbor, 2003, University of Mich. Press.
8. Antony Funnel, ‘Our Favourite Paedophile’, ABC Radio News (Australia). Online at www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-28/donald-friend-our-favourite-paedophile/8053222 

The Amis Effect: A Fan Piece

Martin Amis died last Friday. He’s been my favourite novelist ever since, aged eighteen, I first read The Rachel Papers. Eighteen was a good age to be reading a literary novel about impending adulthood, first love and the problem of having to make life-defining decisions without the relevant experience, written by an author who was only six years older, when he wrote it, than I was when I read it. Never before had I known someone to write – to speak – in a voice that, to my innocently self-regarding sensibility, sounded so much like my own. Later, of course, I would come to realise just how pretentious the comparison was; yet, to this day, when I read Martin Amis, I don’t hear his voice in my head so much as I hear mine coming out of his.

Before you wheel away, retching, a placatory word. This isn’t some self-aggrandizing exercise in smarm dressed up as an obituary. It isn’t, even, an obituary. I’m too old and lazy – besides rather conspicuously lacking in the talent – to compete with the august hommes de lettres now rushing into print with appreciations of their late colleague (I think we can take it for granted that there won’t be many femmes). Besides, Matthew D’Ancona has already written, in the New European, pretty much the same things I should have done, even making the affective comparison with the death of David Bowie that came over me the instant I heard the news. The Amis Effect Redux, I suppose; but at least it saves me the trouble.

I came here, instead, to write a short list for a couple of friends who, implicitly or explicitly, asked me to recommend something of his for them to read. One is a lately-retired English teacher whose speciality used to be squeezing the distended spawn of well-heeled semiliterates through the needle’s eye of the GCE examinations. Appropriately enough, her literary tastes run to Thomas Hardy and Alice Walker. The other friend is also a teacher, one who struggles to impart the principles of economics to English schoolchildren (I gather that the traditional method, which involved us teaching them to one another on the playground or behind the lavatories, is no longer favoured). His bread is hard-earned and although he is spending it at the bookseller’s rather than on me, I am anxious that he should obtain full value. Having heard me mention that Amis’s own literary heroes were Bellow, Nabokov and Updike, he modestly averred that he had found the road-trip in Lolita ‘tedious’.

I was a bit shaken by this confession: one doesn’t, after all, read these people for the stories they tell – imagine reading Herzog or Pale Fire or the Rabbit novels for their plots – but for how they tell them and, beyond even that, the incomparable, unspeakable pleasure of just reading their words. When Nabokov, in one exquisite sentence, makes the sight of shit coming out of a horse beautiful, questions about where the horse is going and who is riding in the sleigh it draws after it become, temporarily at least, less germane than the words themselves, which one savours – you can retch now if you want – in isolation from the narrative in which they are functionally embedded. Nabokov’s prose is full of moments of this kind, epiphanies in which the world, under his minute scrutiny (the eye of the lepidopterist), seems on the brink of revealing the mysteries at its heart. ‘Spiritual’ is a word one hardly dares utter in connection with Nabokov, whose contempt for mumbo-jumbo of any kind was scathing; all the same, I think it is the right one to use to describe the meaning he extracts, the implied essences he distils from the translucence of a melting icicle or the bereft questing of a displaced caterpillar condemned to spend its last hours endlessly circling the rim of a picnic-table. 

It’s easy to see how, if your expectations are largely primed by fiction in the plain style, by the habit of reading for the story (or, worse still, by your identity-politics), you could find Nabokov tedious, or worse. And Lolita is, of course, too notorious to be read at a first pass for anything but the story. Its infamous opening sentence, moreover, is just camouflage for the author’s intentions – his obsessions: but these are adumbrated almost immediately thereafter in that arguably even better-known sentence, perhaps the most quoted of the whole novel: ‘Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.’ Again the lepidopteristic scrutiny, the painstaking dissection with the micro-forceps and teasing-needle – though we soon learn that it is not Lolita, the butterfly, who is really being dissected, but the perverted, self-deluded pouter who has devoured her.

But I was talking about Martin Amis. He isn’t like that. His novels move at a faster clip than his heroes’ – often, in fact, at a run. Not that he isn’t capable of the parenthetical discourse, the arch stylistic excursion, the vagrant rumination wilfully extended: London Fields and, particularly, The Information, are full of that sort of thing. But he doesn’t make too much of a habit of it, and besides, there’s always the humour: anarchic, sardonic, surreal in the English manner with a thick streak of the sixth form running down it – the vrai vice Anglais to snap you back to attention when your energy or intellect begin to flag. It isn’t to everybody’s taste, this humour: if you are a prig or a propagandist of any kind, a devotee of today’s obnoxious New Puritanism, say, or some kind of authoritarian revenge-fantasist, you won’t like it at all. You will be angered or offended, and I shall laugh all the harder for knowing how much it upsets you.

I’m rambling again? Okay, down to business. To the lady whose heart’s furniture has been, by her own report, traumatically rearranged more than once by Alice Walker, I offer the novels that, in a world that had the courage of its convictions, might have won their author a Nobel Prize: House of Meetings, The Zone of Interest and, of course, Time’s Arrow. The first two are, in my opinion, nowhere near his best, but all three offer the great, terrible subjects, the nightmare settings (a Soviet slave-labour camp above the Arctic Circle in one, Auschwitz in the other two), the doomed principals with their doomed principles, the lopsided auctorial rictus registering your propensity and mine for self-deception and the bottomlessness of our common capacity for evil. 

The third, however, sits high on my personal chart of The Best of Amis: a preening virtuoso piece, a showy exercise in technical contrivance that, before you quite realise what is happening, has morphed into a harrowed first-person exposition of genocide-in-progress. When she’s done with that, she’s sure to need a pick-me-up; I recommend Mart at his most generic in Night Train, with its gender-sensitivity and – gasp – likeable female narrator-protagonist. I think my friend will enjoy that one, though of course it won’t be enough, in view of what she’ll have read or heard elsewhere, to offset its author’s reputation for good old-fashioned sexism.

That accusation has, of course, been thrown at Amis so many times that it now qualifies as one of those clichés he was eternally at war against. He never really rebutted it; some things are too silly to argue about even when the consequences to yourself are as unpleasant as the consequences of this were to him. His mild response was that, as an author, he treated his male characters far worse than his female ones. I think it will more than serve (being true), but you, especially if you’re a woman with the opinion that a lot of women seem to have about men nowadays, may not. Amis’s women are, not unreasonably, women as seen through a man’s eyes. They bear no resemblance to the wax dolls and marionettes that furnished the works of male authors for most of the last century (save, of course, for Nicola Six in London Fields – the fictional fictive, the stilettoed anima, the custom-made mantrap), but they’re still women as we – we men – see them. You don’t like that, ladies, do you? You’ve apprised us as much, times without number, though your behaviour towards us often tells a different story… Then again, modern writing by women tends, more often than not, to present men as nasty, coercive, thick or just useless: male characters in ‘quality' fiction by women tend to be objects of hilarity, terror or contempt. I note this without resentment: it is simply another manifestation of the eternal conflict of interest that obtains between the sexes, a struggle in which a peaceable truce is the best we can ever hope for, and even then, the terms must be constantly renegotiated as the world changes about us.

Perhaps I should be more defensive still with my friend the economics teacher, who will surely be on the lookout for other symptoms of privilege and patriarchy besides sexism. Having lately had cause to read an awareness pamphlet published for them by HM Government, I know that such vigilance is specifically enjoined on teachers within the British school system. All the same, I shan’t bother, because – come on – art and literature at the highest level define the bloody patriarchy and, the history of the world being what it is, cannot help but do so. Besides, he’s going to find them anyway, so let’s forget about the woke stuff for a bit and just steam in.

Thus: Money is the acknowledged masterpiece, the one that caused a sensation when published, made its author rich and famous and is now regarded as the literary distillation of life in the metropolitan West during the Eighties. If my friend is planning to read only one novel by Martin Amis, this should be the one. But if he’s willing to consider making a habit of him, as I have, I would advise saving the cream till later and starting, instead, with Lionel Asbo, which is as outrageous as Money but set in a world more recognizable to a Gen X-er than the yuppie inferno in which its predecessor was forged. Or he could try Success, which I think may be Amis’s most typical novel without necessarily being among his best.

After that, I’m afraid, my questing pedagogues are on their own. Perhaps they’ll work their way up, via some of the less successful works (Yellow Dog, The Pregnant Widow) to Other People, chronologically the first open revelation of Amis’s, ah, tender and sensitive side, but unsatisfying to me because the ending remains a puzzle no matter how many times I re-read it. Most people, though, would go straight for the biggies: Time’s Arrow, The Information, or my own favourite (preferred, though only by a hair, to Money), London Fields. Some of the nonfiction is also excellent, particularly Koba the Dread, Amis’s passionate indictment of Stalin, which led to his public feud with Christopher Hitchens (reportedly it never affected their private friendship), and The War against Cliché, a brilliant collection of critical essays and reflections. Finally and perhaps best of all, we come to his personal memoir, Experience. This deals, inter alia, with such persons and matters as the author’s father, a novelist nearly as celebrated in his time as his son is now; the stingy strangeness of Philip Larkin, who (young Martin speculates) might just have been his real father; middle-aged Martin’s discovery of a son he never knew he had; his relationships with other authors, in particular the elderly, dying Saul Bellow; and, most terrible of all, a portrait-biography of his well-loved cousin Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in December 1973 and whose dismembered remains were discovered in 1994 alongside those of the other victims of the mass-murderers Fred and Rose West. The Information is dedicated to her memory.

I haven’t yet talked about the novel I started with, The Rachel Papers. I love it, as the song says, for sentimental reasons, but it is very much of its time, culturally as well as in outlook. It’s the most blatantly autobiographical of all his novels, and one of its unexpected pleasures, nowadays, is that it contains numerous scenes played out between its twenty-year-old narrator-protagonist, an obvious stand-in for Amis himself, and his best friend, a hulking ‘city bumpkin’ who, with hindsight, is a dead ringer for Christopher Hitchens. 

What of the turkeys? Are there turkeys? Sure there are. Amis once wrote a book about Space Invaders, a now-defunct arcade game. It’s for obsessives and I haven’t read it. Dead Babies, the difficult second novel, is to be avoided at all costs. I don’t care for The Information, either (its protagonist is an unsuccessful author; you can see how that might put me off), but it does contain some of his most brilliant comic writing, the kind that has you laughing so hard you can’t see to read. Of the short-story collections, Heavy Water is uneven, as short-story collections as a rule tend to be, and Einstein’s Monsters is (are?) breathtakingly good. 

Is that all? It’s all I care to write. Like Bowie, Amis was someone I thought of as a kind of elder sibling, hero, avatar, even scapegoat: one of those icons to whom the term ‘role model’ scarcely applies because they embody not (or not just) our aspirations but some aspect of our true selves, or perhaps just an aspect of the kind of person we think we really are. There’s no need to get sentimental about this. Still, if one has chosen well, we find that, even after they have left us, these figures not only continue to live for us, but go on paying back, with interest, the representation of ourselves that we have invested in them. I chose well with Martin Amis.

The Double Afterlife of Maali Almeida

 Chats with the Dead and
The Seven Moons of Maali 
Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

When Chinaman came out in 2010, I described it in a review as the first really credible contender for the title of Great Sri Lankan Novel. Sadly, there haven’t been any worthy entrants in the category since then – apart, perhaps, for Shehan Karunatilaka’s own second novel, originally published by Penguin India in early 2020 under the title Chats with the Dead and later re-published in the UK as The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I was at the Colombo launch of the first version and ended up buying three copies, one of which I excitedly added to the tall stack of to-be-read books on my bedside table, meaning to take it up as soon as I had finished whatever it was I was reading just then. 

Several things happened to prevent this. The first, of course, was Covid. The lockdown certainly gave me plenty of time to read, but amid the prevailing gloom and paranoia I found it impossible to face a story about civil war, terrorism, murder and dismemberment narrated in the second person by a dead man. Nor did it help that the novel is set during a particularly ugly period in Lanka’s recent past, a period I lived through myself and still shudder to recall.
The second thing that prevented me was the book I was then writing, an ‘unauthorised biography’ of St Thomas’s College that delves deep into modern Lankan history. This daily engagement with the sorry catalogue of avoidable disasters that comprise the latter was, frankly, enough; I hadn’t the stomach to read about generic Lankan folly and malice in my off-duty hours as well. 
While I havered, others with greater intestinal fortitude completed the challenge. From them, I learnt that the narrator and protagonist of Chats with the Dead is modelled loosely on my long departed, still-lamented friend Richard de Zoysa, who was murdered, evidently by a state-sponsored death squad, in 1990. This, I’m sorry to say, took away what little appetite for the book I still had left.

But then, of course, Chats with the Dead was picked up by an independent UK publisher, Sort of Books, much revised under editorial supervision and reissued in an eye-catching new cover under a new title. Next thing I knew it had won the 2022 Booker Prize. Alright, that’s it, son, I sighed to myself: you’ll have to read the bloody thing now. So I worked my copy of Chats out from the bottom of the bedside-table pile, where it had settled as other books were promoted over it in reading order, and made a start.
I began reading with pencil in hand, having some vague idea of reviewing the novel for this blog. About two dozen pages in, I gave up the scheme. This was not a book I could review without causing its author, who is by way of being a friend of mine, some pain. Oh, there was much to praise in it, certainly: the framing conceit was original, the descriptive passages full of colourful detail and the action non-stop; but it was all a bit ramshackle and rough-cut and even I, experienced reader though I am, found the story difficult to follow. I thought at first that the slap-bang-tumble narrative was just Shehan’s way of conveying the confusion and anxiety felt by the newly-disembodied soul of Maali Almeida, but as I read on and Maali began to find his feet in the afterlife, it became clear that my sense of struggling to stay afloat amid a tsunami of distractions was due to inherent narrative problems rather than any fault of my own. Other difficulties also began to obtrude themselves: for example, the period and setting, which I remember, as I say, all too well, were unconvincingly evoked, and the characters didn’t fit into it.
For all that, I made it to the end of the book speedily enough, and found the conclusion satisfying in spite of all that had gone before. Yet as I closed the volume for what I expected to be the last time, I did so with a quiet sigh of relief and a sense of duty done.
Then, only a few days later at Liberty Plaza, I saw the colourful devil-mask cover of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida goggling down at me from a bookshop window. I’d read a few reviews of the novel in the foreign press by this time: all were full of praise and none of the reviewers mentioned the sort of problems I’d had with the earlier edition. Perhaps they’d been rewritten out. According to what I’d heard, Shehan’s editors had demanded that he make ‘extensive’ changes to his original text before reprinting it… As I pondered this, the crafty little yakka that bedevils all writers hopped up on to my shoulder and hissed at me that it might be worth reading this version too, just to see how much had been changed. You’re an editor yourself, he reminded me; here’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see how the real pros operate. Call it a research opportunity.
I know the little wheedling bastard shills for the publishing industry, but reader, I fell for it.

*   *   *

The difference was apparent from the very first page. The chaotic anteroom to the afterlife in which Maali finds himself at the beginning of the book was much easier to visualize, as was the action taking place therein. A lot of the detail that Shehan had included earlier seemed to have disappeared, though much of it, I realised as I read on, had only been moved, reappearing in later – often, much later – paragraphs and chapters. Where earlier these details had provoked confusion, they now filled out and clarified the picture being built up in the reader’s mind. Maali’s misadventures had become a whole lot easier to read.
That opening scene also had a short, important new section tagged on to the end of it. Subtitled ‘The Box under the Bed’, it foregrounded a central plot device which, in Chats, was introduced in a rather less obvious way. This was the first instance I noticed of how much more skilfully Seven Moons guides the reader along: the current of narrative is much less agitated and a great deal of irrelevant flotsam has been cleared out of the water. Some sections within chapters have been given helpful titles, which they earlier lacked: the actual ‘chats with the dead’, for instance, are dated with the year of each speaker’s demise, which makes their relevance to the plot and subtext much easier to decipher. Auctorial sleights of hand – misdirections, foreshadowings and red herrings that tended to be obscured by drifts of verbal sargassum in the first version – are carried off much more elegantly here.
Perhaps this needs to be explained a little better. When a reader opens a novel for the first time, she feels that she is setting forth on an adventure, a journey of discovery across parts hitherto unexplored. Much of the pleasure and excitement of reading fiction come from that sensation, and if the author has done their job well, it will be sustained until the very denouement. But, as a moment’s thought makes clear, reading a novel is (to drag my slowly drowning metaphor out of the drink) no journey through virgin wilderness; rather, it’s a gently coercive guided tour through a cunningly designed garden in which every feature, every shrub and tree, every flower-bed and fountain, has been put in place by hand and shaped until it conforms as nearly as possible to the gardener’s – that is, the author’s – design. All art is contrivance, and much of the trouble with Chats is that it is less than perfectly contrived. The editing and rewriting that produced Seven Moons have greatly improved the quality of artifice, making it both less visible to the ordinary reader and more admirable to the professional. This is the most important difference between the two fictional afterlives of Maali Almeida.

Much has been expunged in order to achieve it. Early on in the reading, I was impressed by how little had been cut. By the final quarter of the book, however, I was well used to seeing big scenes and even complete chapters disappear wholesale. An entire sub-plot, which seemed to be of critical importance in the earlier version, had vanished without a trace. It sounds drastic, I know, but such excisions are meant to improve the reader’s comprehension and enjoyment of the book, and by George that’s just what they do. Hemingway is said to have advised a tyro writer that the more ‘good stuff’ he left out, the better his novel would be; a comparison of Seven Moons with Chats more than bears out the value of this advice, and not just for tyro writers.
Notably, the most obvious victims of the cull are the supernumerary throngs of demons, dead souls and other spooks that infest Chats with the Dead. I imagine it gave Shehan a special pang to kill these undead darlings; ghosts and Sinhalese folk-demons were, as I have learnt, the one factor that remained constant through the many changes of plot, cast and setting that the novel underwent during the years he spent writing it. Yet I, for one, was not at all sorry to see these unlovely bit-part players canned; even among the shades there can be such a thing as too much local colour, the more so when the colours are those of bruised flesh, dried blood and putrid offal (there’s plenty of it still left, by the way, if you go for that sort of thing).
Killing off the dead has, however, produced an unexpected side-effect: the novel has become a bit less specific in its ethnic character. Yet even so, Seven Moons is – as, given its authorship, it should be – a distinctly Sinhalese book. This is not at all a question of who the good guys and the bad guys are; among the many villains of the novel are, in fact, a trio of murderous Sinhalese ethnic supremacists, two living, one dead. Still less is it a charge of bias levelled against the author, whose revulsion against all nativist ideology, obscurantism and violence is amply reflected in both books. It is, rather, a question of inherent perspective, a product of the fact that no-one can really help seeing things from the angle determined by their own social and cultural position in the world. Even so, a little more research into the modern history of Lanka might have resulted in a slightly different novel and, dare I say it, a more penetrating one.
Certainly, it would have been a book with fewer historical bloopers in it. Most of them are trivial, but they are especially easy for readers of my generation to spot, and the launch of a new edition should have been taken as an opportunity to remove them. I wonder whether the UK publishers employed a local fact-checker – and if so, who that person was. I should like to have a quiet word with them.
I don’t want to give the impression that Seven Moons is a completely different book from Chats. The plot (well, most of it), the characters and nearly all the actual text are held in common between the two. But it would be equally incorrect to claim that they are the same book. The two versions don’t tell the same story in slightly different words; they tell slightly different stories in much the same words. Of the two, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is by far the better novel. The agony through which his editors put poor Shehan – who clearly had to do all the revising himself – has proven its worth in the shape of a Booker Prize. You can’t say fairer than that, can you?
It would be impossible to list all the changes that have been made – to use an appropriate metaphor, their name is Legion – but I will mention a few insertions that seem, amusingly, to have been added to render the book more attractive to a ‘global’ readership. One of these comes in the key ear-check scene, when ‘Yahweh and Zeus’ are substituted for ‘Allah, Vishnu and Karma’. Elsewhere, devilled pork – a classic Lankan bar snack or ‘bite’ – is transmogrified into devilled prawns and a ‘Semitic’ nose becomes, absurdly, ‘Hawaiian’. A British journalist’s taste for ‘village prostitutes’ becomes a partiality for ‘village maidens’. Mild Orientalisms sprinkle the text; there are none at all in Chats with the Dead. Less trivially, I was sorry to see a reference to Dollar Farm, the scene of an infamous massacre perpetrated by the Tamil Tigers, dropped; I suppose the publishers were afraid of a lawsuit from Dollar Farm Products, a massive American agribusiness firm with multibillion-dollar annual revenues.

*   *   *

So what did I think of Seven Moons, I hear you ask? It’s a fair question, but I don’t know whether I can answer it fairly. I finished Chats, which is now effectively an early draft of Seven Moons, before taking on its successor. My first impressions of the plot, setting and characters were formed, therefore, by meeting them in relatively unpolished, arguably unfinished form. When I re-encountered them in Seven Moons, they hung together better and were more smartly turned out, but they could not produce for me the surprise, the invigorating fizz, of a first impression. The fault, if there is one, is entirely mine. I should have read v.2.0 first.
It turned out, though, that the thing I had worried most about – being uncomfortably reminded of Richard de Zoysa – was never a problem, because Maali doesn’t resemble Zoysa (as his mother used to call him) in the least. Richard was, to put it bluntly, a creature of his times; he lived and died immersed in them, yoked to them if you like. It is what gave him power and relevance as an individual for as long as he lived, and it is what makes him the icon he has become in death. Maali Almeida, by contrast, is a figure of a type that did not exist in the Lanka of the Eighties; he is the product of a later generation, the one to which his creator belongs. In action, attitude and philosophy, Maali is recognisably a Gen X-er.
I don’t believe that human nature changes from generation to generation. On the contrary, I am convinced that it is changeless and will remain so unless we evolve into another species. But the physical and political world changes continually about us, influencing contemporary hopes, fears and beliefs – the Zeitgeist, if you will – and shaping us as it does so. Human nature stays the same, but humanity is Protean. Lankans in the 1980s were under enormous stress: we were acutely aware, day in, day out, of the fragility of our lives. People, vehicles and buildings blew up before our eyes; we walked or drove past charred corpses lying on tyres, bodies crumpled in pools of blood, one-legged landmine victims faltering along on crutches. There were guns everywhere, wielded by the military, the police, the Tigers, the JVP, thuggish political ‘security’ operatives and heaven knows who else. We defied JVP hartals to go to work, knowing full well that the mandated penalty for this was a bullet. Our streets were obstacle-courses of checkpoints, zig-zag chicanes, speed bumps and potholes; military bases and government buildings became improvised fortresses, skulking behind battlements of oil-drums, sandbags and razor wire. There was no freedom of speech; Emergency regulations and personal threats of violence kept most of us silent until the bheeshanaya finally ended in the early Nineties. Every so often, someone we knew would disappear or be forced to leave the country in a hurry.

Under such conditions, my generation – real-life contemporaries of the fictional Maali Almeida – dared not indulge in the luxury of detachment. We were, perforce, fully engaged with the realities of war, politics and business, desperately leveraging whatever scraps of influence, acumen and culture we had to keep us alive and sane. It was no era for old men (or women); with a few key exceptions, even politicians, generals and terrorist leaders were mostly in their thirties and forties (Prabhakaran, in 1990, was thirty-six). From driven, risk-addicted Colombo yuppies to the desperate youths with blighted futures who slaughtered one another by the thousand in the wars and dirty wars that racked our country, we all had skin in the game. There could be none of the fastidious dissociation from the world of serious affairs that prevails among Maali and his circle of elite friends in Seven Moons – and which does, in fact, seem to prevail among many of the author’s generation in real life. No doubt it’s the fault of their predecessors, the Boomers, for selfishly clinging to the tiller for so long…
When the main characters of Seven Moons come face to face with the workings of the world, it is as children do; everything is run by their elders, to whom they must apply in order to get anything done. Even Maali, who maintains connexions to the world of grown-up affairs in order to pursue his profession (best described as that of atrocity photographer), doesn’t quite understand how it all works. Richard de Zoysa, I hasten to assure you, understood how everything worked, and who, moreover, was working it – and why. Maali is a tourist in this world, an untethered, breezily cynical opportunist; Richard, on the contrary, was full of idealism, hope and yearning, and when he committed himself to anything (or anyone), he dedicated himself body and soul – at least until something (or someone) else came along to capture his devotion. However closely their curriculum vitae may resemble each other’s, the characters of the invented man and the real one could not be less alike.
But let this be clear: the fact that Maali and his friends are anachronisms, resembling figures from an era later than the one they’re supposed to be part of, is not in any sense a literary failing. Authors write for their own generation first and foremost, and they express, inevitably, the mind of their generation. This is true even if they write historical novels, though readers rarely notice the implausibilities that result from it. Such anachronisms are, I think, unavoidable in any case:Wolf Hall may well be the most closely-researched historical novel ever, yet for all the pains Hilary Mantel took over its characters and setting, there is something ineluctably twenty-first century about her Thomas Cromwell. I don’t think it is possible to avoid this, especially in our era, when events as recent as twenty years past are thoroughly mangled by the folklore-mills of the media industry and the internet. But if, as Shehan Karunatilaka has done, you take the risk of writing a historical novel set in a period that still lies within the memory of some of your readers, you’d better expect to hear from codgers who will insist that no, the story didn’t go quite the way you tell it...

Kudos, then, to my friend (and erstwhile bandmate) for attempting such a risky enterprise. In my somewhat biased opinion, he has carried it off admirably. The world, which has awarded him one of its most coveted literary prizes, seems to think so too. As for the cavils of those who actually lived through those times, there are too few of us left alive and compos mentis to matter. The Zeitgeist is different nowadays. People live different lives. They read differently, too. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, like the late Richard de Zoysa, is eminently a product of its time – just as it should be.