Theirs are in fact the most interesting chapters. The ‘voices’ work best when the authour ‘speaks’ from the point of view of youth - Niranjan and Anoushka. This reviewer couldn’t help feeling that a straightforward third person narrative technique might have worked better. This has been used by novelists as diverse as William Faulkner and Mario Vargas Llosa. The authour uses the technique of first person narrative using different characters. The many contradictions and complexities of Sri Lanka’s social fabric are woven into this tale – ethnic Sinhalese editor working in the English medium, his Tamil wife Lakshmi – both with urban backgrounds and tastes, their worldly and sophisticated children Niranjan and Anoushka, and Latha, the Sinhalese domestic servant from a remote village. ‘Ruins’ is about the family of newspaper editor Manoratne Herath and their domestic servant.

As the story progresses, one can see similar tumultuous changes taking place in the lives of these characters. It is set during the final stages of the war, and brings out a tangle of relationships – mother and father, parent and child, interracial marriage, employer and domestic, and so forth, while events changing the country’s future drastically take place in the background. Savanadasa lives in Australia but this story takes place in Sri Lanka, with only scant reference to his adapted country. With his debut novel ‘Ruins,’ Rajith Savanadasa joins that increasingly-long list of Sri Lankan expatriate writers which includes names like Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunasekara.

Ruins by rajith savanadasa