peter young’s listopia

Bandula Chandraratna, Mirage, 1998
Chandraratna is a Sri Lankan writer living in England, and Mirage narrowly missed being on the 1998 Booker Prize shortlist, though still managed to be 'book of the year' for two of that year's Prize judges. Somehow I can't understand why, because the telling of this story – well, in fact it's more of an elaborated episode – does not do the tale any favours.

The setting is a city in an unnamed Arab desert kingdom in the present day, where Sayeed is an illiterate hospital porter living in a shanty town hut on the city's outskirts, and with not much of a life. On a visit home to his village at the edge of the desert he agrees, somewhat against his will, to an arranged marriage with Latifa, a young widow who has a child from a late husband. Well, he comes round to thinking, I'm getting on a bit, and I could do with someone to look after me as I get old. He never sees his wife's face, or know much about her and her young daughter, until after the expensive wedding which he can't afford. There is no love between them, and his wife serves as little more than a culturally-imposed function in his life. The three then go back to live in his small and dirty hut, which Latifa justifiably hates, and where something terrible eventually happens. And this, strangely, is where the story ends, just as a real story is beginning.

What this book does do is take you deep into the life of one of the millions of Arab migrant workers you see all over the Middle East, spilling out of white open-top Toyota pick-ups early in the morning to work long days for a pittance whereever ex-pat foreigners get the better jobs and the better money. Mirage gives a detailed picture of a life very different from ours, and I don't doubt that the circumstances of Sayeed and Latifa's marriage within their culture are common. It's the telling of Sayeed's story I have a problem with; not a great deal actually happens in the book, it possesses a ponderous pace for the best part of two hundred pages, and with endless minutiae that do not in any way move the story forward. Mirage has no plot, just a very sad event to finish off a tragic short period in Sayeed's and Latifa's lives.

Mirage is also deliberately vague on several points, one being the location: this could certainly be set in any number of locales on the Arabian peninsula, but I wanted to know which city, which country. Sayeed is also very much a character without character; it is the world around him which gives him his shape rather than being a man who makes any kind of mark. But, conversely, his agreement to marry seems selfish from the outset, and we don't get to read anything of his wife's point of view until after they are wed, as if her voice never mattered until then. I'm not sure if Chandraratna actually intended to make this particular point, but the structure of the book seems to hint at saying something about the voices of marginalised people, either those prevented from taking a full and equal role within their own culture, or those deposed from living fuller and richer lives within their own wider society.

Altogether I found Mirage to be a not very satisfying read, one that puts the wrong emphasis on too much extraneous detail instead of what is actually going on inside the head of Sayeed, and which would have been far more enjoyable at half the length. It felt shallow and could have gone deeper and further, but if there are hidden depths that would justify a close call with the Booker shortlist then I'm finding them very hard to fathom.