As a reflection on the immigrant experience in Canada, or queer relationships in the 1980s, it is not uplifting. As a metaphor for the decades of conflict in Sri Lanka, this story is tragic in many aspects, although ultimately resolved. Although the riots and communal violence happen mostly offstage, we aren't allowed to forget that there are real atrocities going on and large numbers of people suffering. It's probably the lively realism of the main story that saves him, set partly in Canada and partly in the "Cinammon Gardens" middle-class neighbourhoods in Colombo. There's a danger in this sort of thing that you end up in the profound shallows of Herman Hesse country, and Selvadurai steers dangerously close once or twice, but I think he manages to stay afloat. He uses traditional Buddhist stories interpolated into the narrative to explore the way the ways that bad actions and the need to find forgiveness and redemption work out in the lives of his characters, particularly the gay narrator and his property-shark grandmother. Where Selvadurai's first novel was basically a coming-of-age story, this is a much more complex and mature treatment of the "gay love story against a background of communal violence" idea. This is the long-awaited successor to the wonderful (1993). It shows how racial, political and sexual differences can tear apart both a country and the human heart-not just once, but many times, until the ghosts are fed and freed. The Hungry Ghosts is a beautifully written, dazzling story of family, wealth and the long reach of the past. But throughout the night and into the early morning hours of his departure, Shivan grapples with his own insatiable hunger and is haunted by unrelenting ghosts of his own creation. As the novel opens in the present day, Shivan, now living in Canada, is preparing to travel back to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to rescue his elderly and ailing grandmother, to remove her from the home-now fallen into disrepair-that is her pride, and bring her to Toronto to live our her final days. The novel centres around Shivan Rassiah, the beloved grandson, who is of mixed Tamil and Sinhalese lineage, and who also-to his grandmother’s dismay-grows from beautiful boy to striking gay man. In Shyam Selvadurai’s sweeping new novel, his first in more than a decade, he creates an unforgettable ghost, a powerful Sri Lankan matriarch whose wily ways, insatiable longing for land, houses, money and control, and tragic blindness to the human needs of those around her parallels the volatile political situation of her war-torn country. It is the duty of the living relatives to free those doomed to this fate by doing kind deeds and creating good karma. In Buddhist myth, the dead may be reborn as "hungry ghosts"-spirits with stomach so large they can never be full-if they have desired too much during their lives.
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