The Hamilton Case

by Michelle De Kretser

  He swallowed the last of the aerated water and set his tumbler down with a click. “Now bugger off,” he said, pleasantly.

  I swear it was a lie. A foul lie concocted by that drunken fool Velu. No need to labor its contradictions. Its idiocies. The gaps that stand out as stark as nooses. Do you think I could have watched Taylor tried for a crime I knew he hadn’t committed? That my hatred of imperialism skewed reason to the point where I was indifferent to the murder of Englishmen?

  Yet I sense your hesitation. By placing Jaya’s accusation at the end of my account, I’ve lent it credence. We believe the explanation we hear last. It’s one of the ways in which narrative influences our perception of truth. We crave finality, an end to interpretation, not seeing that this too, the tying up of all loose ends in the last chapter, is only a storyteller’s ruse. The device runs contrary to experience, wouldn’t you say? Time never simplifies—it unravels and complicates. Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken.

  But you will have to make up your own mind about my part in the Hamilton case. It’s true that if Velu had been arrested for the murder, the official line on up-country Tamils would have hardened. So you could take me for an unreliable narrator, objecting to flaws in Jaya’s story in order to obscure my guilt. Perhaps you have heard a rumor linking my name with something fishy and unspecified? It was not long after my conversation with Jaya that I first encountered it. The taint of corruption. In time it cost me my appointment to the Supreme Court. Its breath has pursued me across half the globe. I detect its odor in air-freshened common rooms where silence falls as soon as I appear. So believe, if you like, that I wrote “Death of a Planter” with the intention of clouding the truth. That I threw suspicion on Nagel and Mrs. Taylor in order to divert it, once and for all, from myself.

  There remains the possibility that Jaya whipped up the whole rigmarole from air, Nadesan’s visit and all, to slather over my protest at his government’s treatment of my people. No way of telling if that’s true, of course. But I can give you my word that his accusation was false. Bearing witness to lies: it’s the closest we can come to truth in an age of suspicion.

  You ask who murdered Hamilton? Understand that when you drag out the past you find yourself standing over a corpse. You circle it and it lies there unbreathing. The slant of the light eludes you. A dog barks in the night and you fail to hear it. The stench of pipeclay or ghee chokes every molecule of air but stops short of your nostrils. Because the things that changed everything always resist interrogation. So you list the evidence before your eyes, and miss the stain trickling down the stairs. History, like any other verdict, is not a matter of fact but a point of view. To be honest, I am tired of history. It has been going on for a long time.

  You asked about your father and I have told you a great deal about myself. Forgive an old man’s egotism. I hope the detour has not been entirely irrelevant.

  We had just called for the other half that evening at the Downhill when he said, without preamble, “Remember the canna house?”

  At first, nothing. Then a hinge swung back. I saw two boys wheeling down a sand-rutted lane, salt-streaked blue and a glorious burst of gold.

  He said, “There’s a certain kind of English room. Lamplight, those heavy-headed dahlias, dented Georgian sugar tongs, two wing armchairs, Regency frames on striped wallpaper, a square teapot on a bamboo table. Talk as reassuring as the swish of curtains meeting against November gloom.” He leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair. “If you picture everything together,” he said, “cannas, dahlias, kerosene tins, that bally teapot, it looks a shambles, of course. But why suppose that the opposite of incongruity is coherence? There’s also sterility. This mania for one thing or the other.”

  Then Nagel walked into the club and our lives changed course. These days I have an inkling of what your father was trying to say. I think he glimpsed, obscurely, that we were being written by the grand narratives of our age. Nationalism, empire, socialism, capitalism. It was necessary to choose between them. You picked a story and stuck with it, saw out the plot to its predictable outcome. He was no exception. As the product of an idea, he was superb. Only it walled him off from so much he might have loved.

  For myself, I tried to write about that love. You have seen the result. Pretty little tales, tricked out with guavas and temple bells. It seemed a way forward. I persuaded myself that a girl with oiled hair threading her way barefoot through a paddy field was more authentic than a man downing a cocktail, one glossy shoe resting on a polished rail. After all, the girl stood for a way of life uncorrupted by the West. That fixation on purity! It branded me a creature of my age. In its service I perfected a rhetorical sleight of hand as slick as any magician’s patter. Coconut oil. Paddy field. Hey presto.

  An ash-smeared sadhu. The fragrance of cumin. I pulled them from my hat in earnest good faith when I first ventured into fiction. And my stories proved very popular with readers in the West. They wrote to tell me so. Your work is so exotic. So marvelously authentic. When the flatu-lent rumbles of self-satisfaction subsided, I saw that what I had taken for the markers of truth functioned as the signs of exoticism. The colonizer returns as a tourist, you see. And he is mad for difference. That is the luxury commodity we now supply, as we once kept him in cinnamon and sapphires. The prose may be as insipid as rice cooked without salt. No matter: call up a monsoon or the rustle of a sari, and watch him salivate.

  Literature as souvenir: I confess I traded in it. Tales as sweetly banal as the incense peddled in every mall here in Vancouver; each trite sentence a small act of cynicism. I had stumbled on my métier, I told myself, as my books went into fourth and fifth printings, and students wrote requesting interviews for their theses on New Literatures in English.

  But Jaya was wrong about me. I am only intermittently a cynic. If you knew what visions I used to tend, when I was young and drank coffee in brass tumblers until all hours designing the paradise to come. Well, history is a great unmaker of dreams. But the ruins of my romanticism persist: the belief, stubborn as a weed, that art aspires to truth, not success; an itch to begin again, differently. So that night after night I sit here shuffling oddments, laying out the past in imaginary spreads. Two children, side by side, peering at a corpse. A woman dressed for a ball walking down an arcade of leaves. Brocade curtains patterned with rot. Sambol spooned onto a Limoges plate. Each hygienic Canadian dawn finds me a little further advanced in invention and imitation, drawn on by a tale as shot through with impurities as history itself.

  I envy you, in your house by the sea. Lately I’ve kept an old map to hand. A cockeyed Portuguese projection, continents rolled up and jammed into corners, Europa at the center dragging the world out of true. Yet I find it straight away, every time: Ceylon, Ceilao, syllables I repeat secretly, willing myself there, where the world ends in plunging blue and the flip of a monster’s tail.

  I loved the dash of it, as a boy: a small island riding an ocean and nothing to break the fall.

  Shivanathan

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Hamilton Case draws on the following books: Douglas G. Browne and E. V. Tullet, Bernard Spilsbury: His Life and Cases; Rodney Ferdinands, Proud & Prejudiced: The Story of the Burghers of Sri Lanka; Yasmine Gooneratne, Relative Merits; James Manor, The Expedient Utopian: Bandaranaike and Ceylon; Douglas Raffel, In Ruhunu Jungles; John D. Rogers, Crime, Justice and Society in Colonial Sri Lanka; Gamini Salgado, The True Paradise; R. L. Spittel, Far-Off Things and Wild Ceylon; Leonard Woolf, Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904–1911. Readers will have already noticed my debt to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and Somerset Maugham’s “Footprints in the Jungle.”

  My research was facilitated by the Victor Melder Sri Lanka Library in Melbourne. I am grateful to Victor for giving me the run of this remarkable archive.

  My thanks go also to my editors, Pat Strachan, Jane Palfreyman and Alison Samuel, for their encouragement and perceptive criticism; to
Chandani Lokugé, who patiently answered questions about Sinhalese culture; and to Chris Andrews, Sara White and Mark Williams, who kindly read drafts of the novel and improved it with their good advice. Special thanks are due to Dr. Walter Perera of the University of Peradeniya, a stranger who gave generously of his time and erudition. Also to Sarah Lutyens, whose flawless sense of direction kept me from losing my way.

  In 1942 the Caxton Press published a book called The Pope Murder Case, a true crime account of the murder of an English tea planter in Ceylon and the trial of his killers. The author, O. L. de Kretser, was my father. His book has no direct bearing on the events imagined here. But it is one of the ghosts that haunt these pages.

  THE HAMILTON CASE

  A novel by

  Michelle de Kretser

  A Reading Group Guide

  A CONVERSATION WITH MICHELLE DE KRETSER

  The Hamilton Case is set in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where you grew up. Do the experiences that you and your family had while in Ceylon figure in the novel?

  Only obliquely. What seeps into the novel from my childhood is what you might call its atmosphere: that sense of a gorgeous, seductive, yet rather menacing landscape, for instance, that I retain from the gardens I played in—green and pleasant places, yet so rampant, so lush, that they threatened to overrun any weak thing they encountered. My memories of once-grand old houses, full of shadows and hauntings, also made their way into the book.

  On a wider level, my family, and thousands of others like us, the English-speaking descendants of Dutch and British colonizers, left post-independence Ceylon as the island’s politics changed. So I was aware from an early age of the way small private lives are shaped by large historical events, like the breakup of the British Empire. The idea that the private and public spheres are inextricably linked is integral to The Hamilton Case.

  How would you explain the ways in which The Hamilton Case differs from a traditional detective story?

  In a classic 1930s-style detective novel, the detective gathers everyone together at the end of the book and explains how the murder was done and whodunit. 1 decided that in the final section of my book, a character would reconsider crimes that had previously seemed resolved. I liked the idea of having several equally plausible solutions to mysteries; it seemed a neat metaphor for the modern belief that there is more than one way of seeing the world, more than one valid way to understand reality.

  I guess also that traditional detective fiction places far greater emphasis on situation than character, whereas The Hamilton Case is above all the portrait of its “detective,” Sam.

  Given that you left your homeland when you were fourteen years old, did The Hamilton Case require extensive research and travel to Sri Lanka?

  I was superstitiously determined not to return to Sri Lanka to research the novel. In the first place, I felt that what I remembered of the island was more than enough to recreate its landscapes and so on for readers. And, then, Sri Lanka today is a very different place from the Ceylon in which I grew up, let alone the colonial Ceylon of my parents’ generation. I was writing about a country that no longer exists—a ghost country, which, like all ghosts, depends on memory and narrative to conjure its existence. It seemed important, therefore, not to muddle that remembered, imagined world with the reality of contemporary Sri Lanka. Of course I had to research aspects of the novel—elephant hunting, for instance, which I’m glad to say isn’t part of my experience!— but I did so solely in libraries.

  Your main character, Sam Obeysekere, says, “What I remember most about my parents is that they weren’t there.” How do his withholding parents affect Sam’s fate?

  Sam has a very inadequate idea of how to express love because he has little direct experience of these things. In the upper-class, British-influenced set to which his parents belong, it is “bad form” to show emotion. Consequently, the personal relationships Sam forms are predicated on the exercise of power rather than trust or tenderness.

  Your first novel, The Rose Grower, was set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, and The Hamilton Case takes place during social upheaval in Ceylon. Do you think characters can be revealed more fully in troubled times?

  Yes, indeed. Social change is interesting because it obliges people to make choices—and is therefore very revealing of character.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Michelle de Kretser once said in an interview that “people who are not well loved do not know how to love well in turn.” How does Sam exemplify this statement?

  2. How does Sam’s schooling at St. Edward’s (“Neddy’s”) and Oxford influence his social and political opinions?

  3. Sam’s sister, Claudia, ends her life tragically. What aspects of her past and present did she find unbearable?

  4. Sam and Jaya come from similar privileged Sinhalese backgrounds. What is at the root of their animosity? How do their hopes for Ceylon’s future differ?

  5. Sam reveres all things English. How does this reverence affect his attitude toward his mother, Maud, and his choice of Leela as his wife?

  6. How is “the fabulous flotsam of Empire” reflected in the decorative objects in Sam’s childhood and marital houses?

  7. The Ceylonese jungle is a powerful physical presence in this novel, especially as it slowly takes over the estate to which Maud is exiled at Lokugama. What kind of metaphorical presence does it have? How does it complement Maud’s decline?

  8. Would you say that Sam — as a widower whose grown son is estranged from him — is most dismayed by the loss of his family, his fall from professional grace, or the cessation of English rule in Ceylon in 1948?

  9. How does the use of different points of view in each of the four parts of The Hamilton Case enlarge our understanding of the characters and their country?

  10. At the end of The Hamilton Case, Shivanathan writes that “history, like any other verdict, is not a matter of fact but a point of view.” Do you agree? Discuss.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michelle de Kretser is a Sri Lankan who has lived in Australia since 1972. Her first novel, The Rose Grower, was published in 1999. She has taught literature at Melbourne University and worked as an editor and reviewer. The Hamilton Case received the Commonwealth Writers Best Book Prize, SE Asia and South Pacific region, and the Encore Award for best second novel of the year.