‘Reef’ is Romesh Gunesekera’s first novel – it won the Yorkshire Post First Work prize – and was shortlisted for both the highly prestigious Booker Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1994.

It is the tale of Triton who, at the age of eleven, goes to work for Ranjan Salgado as a houseboy. Set in the author’s native Sri Lanka the novel explores – through the eyes of young Triton and observations of Mr Salgado – a disappearing paradise. Mr Salgado is a marine biologist obsessed by water – seas and lakes – and is mournfully mapping the degeneration of the island’s coral reefs. The power of the story comes from the collision of a young boys excited discovery of the world around him, and his own potential, with the apparent stasis of society all around him. Set in the near past and the present this is a novel about today and today’s issues.

In one sense the story telling technique of Gunesekera is a simple one, and description and state is far more apparent than action or deviation. Much of the power of the writing comes from the intensely poetic style adopted; scenes, smells, sounds and tastes are so strongly evoked that the reader can easily find themselves sitting alongside young Triton as he sees, listens, feels and learns.

In the following extract, Triton finds he unexpectedly has some time to himself and is alone in the house. Note how the author contrasts the movement of the present with the calm, static nature of a remembered past.

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REEF – Extract 1

In the afternoon the sun was hotter than it had been for some time; I went back into the house. I sat in the front bay with the bamboo tats half rolled up. The floor in the house was cool except where the sun fell directly on it. The breeze blew over the low parapet walls and under the greenish tubes of the tats. The sound of the breeze passing was in itself cooling. lt was our version of the water gardens that are found in more rarefied countries, or back in our own more refined archaeological past. In the shade, I watched ants crawling across a warm step; small black beetles scurrying across a wilderness; soldiers marching up into the hills and warriors from some heavenly bush paradise descending to protect the roots of a croton hedge. I remembered the coconut trees of my childhood, the sound of the breeze through the fronds. Simple, pure, deathless air.

Most of all I missed the closeness of the tank - the reservoir. The lapping of the dark water, flapping lotus leaves, the warm air rippling over it and the cormorants rising, the silent glide of a hornbill. And then those very still moments when the world would stop and only colour move like the blue breath of dawn lightening the sky, or the darkness of night misting the globe; a colour, a ray of curved light and nothing else. The water would be unbroken like a mirror, and the moon would gleam in it. At twilight when the forces of darkness and the forces of light were evenly matched and in balance there was nothing to fear. No demons, no troubles, no carrion. An elephant swaying to a music of its own. A perfect peace that seemed eternal even though the jungle might unleash its fury at any moment. The tank was a sea made safe by human imagination, a vast expanse of water that ensured the health of our bodies and our minds and soothed our graceless lives.

After reading the first extract, discuss the following:

• How big do you think ‘the tank’ is?
• What images does the author use to evoke calmness and equilibrium?
• How do we know that ‘the tank’ is man made?

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Food and cooking form an important part of the narrative, and in the next extract Triton’s master, Mr Salgado, is speaking at a dinner party with friends. The sense of human collective memory he invokes is breathtaking, and his passion for water is left in no doubt, and he explains the origins of ‘the tanks’, or muhada. The fact that he ties all this in with a sense of a lost and glorious past is significant.

REEF Extract 2

‘You could say Africa, the whole of the rest of the world was part of us. lt was all once one place: Gondwanaland. The great land-mass in the age of innocence. But then the earth was corrupted and the sea flooded in. The land was divided. Bits broke and drifted away and we were left with this spoiled paradise of yakkhas – demons - and the history of mankind spoken on stone. That is why we in this country, despite the monsoon, love water. lt is a symbol of regeneration reflecting the time when all evil, all the dissonance of birth, was swept away in divine rain leaving the gods to spawn a new world. That was the real flood; Noah’s just an echo. The kings who built the great tanks maybe were remembering that cleansing flood, just as we do.'

‘The tanks?'

I was spellbound. I could see the whole of our world come to life when he spoke: the great tanks, the sea, the forests, the stars. The past resurrected in a pageant of long-haired princes clutching ebony rods; red-tailed mermaids; elephants adorned with tasselled canopies and silver bells raising their sheathed, gilded, curved tusks and circling the bronze painted cities of ancient warlords. His words conjured up adventurers from India north and south, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, each with their flotillas of disturbed hope and manic wanderlust. They had come full of the promise of cinnamon, pepper, clove, and found a refuge in this jungle of demons and vast quiet waters.

'So what men, Ranjan, you are trying to make out this place is the first Jerusalem? What about Buddha’s special haven and all that?'

'Ah yes, but remember this was also known as the Garden of Eden. It panders to anyone's chauvinism, you know: Sinhala, Tamil, aboriginal. Choose a religion, pick your fantasy. History is flexible.' Mister Salgado laughed and peered into the dining-room. 'Here,' he called out for me. 'More pineapple juice for the lady. And get the food now, OK?'

In discussion, can you summarise the effect that the island has had on invaders and religious philosophy?

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In the next extract, we find Triton accompanying Nili, Mr Salgado’s lover, to a fish market in a coastal village. In this short extract we are exposed to two ecological concerns, and the justification of at least one of them. This is an excellent example of the concision of Gunesekera’s writing.

We walked along the gallery and I pointed out the fish neatly arranged in rows on wooden tables. Their eyes like buttons and their mouths wide open in '0's of surprise at being lifted from the sea, gagging and drowning on a moon of warm air, their stomachs turning before being ripped open and gutted. 'Fish, crab, lobster?' I asked her. Which to buy?'

Crabs and crayfish were heaped in baskets, waiting to be plunged into boiling water. I used to think these boneheads cursed their killers as the air hissed through their crusty joints, but they feel nothing and would break your finger given half a chance. Nili was fascinated by them. 'These,' she said, pointing at the crayfish. I bought three trussed up with coconut fronds. I don’t think she had ever been to a fish market before, ar least not one as raw as this. I suppose she never had reason to.

There was a rush of excitement across the hall. 'What's happening?' Nili asked.

'Someone has caught a dolphin,' the crab-seller said.

'They got a dolphin?'

'Yes, they will kill it quickly. Very good money. Someone's lucky day.'

'Let's go,' Nili said and pulled my arm. 'I want to go back now.'

'lt happens,' I told her. 'They have to make a living.'

'Killing . . . ' she shook her head to herself. 'Why dolphins? What next?'

Outside a man was filling an unmarked van with baskets of dead fish. Small pieces of bleached white coral marked the municipal parking lot.

A question that this passage evokes concerns the relationship between poverty and environmental conservation. Explore the moral issues raised.

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If ‘Reef’ is a deep, descriptive, dream-like novel concerned with the human condition and the natural environment, then ‘Heaven’s Edge’ is a faster paced action-filled love story which is, well, concerned with the human condition and the natural environment. ‘Heaven’s Edge’ was published in 2002, and is set in a not too distant and apocalyptic future on a tropical island that clearly has Sri Lanka as its model. Written, like ‘Reef’, in the first person, we are taken to the island ‘once said to be near the edge of heaven, but now ravaged and despoiled by war’ which we view through the eyes of Marc. Marc’s grandfather, Eldon, was born on this island, and Marc’s father – a fighter pilot – was shot down over it. Marc is visiting the island for the first time, desperate to ‘find himself’ in a place that is extolled by Eldon, a character who is never far from the front of Marc’s mind. Escaping from the stultifying atmosphere of the hotel where he is staying he comes across Uva, an eco-warrior, on the edge of the jungle. He is fascinated by her and contrives to meet her again.

All along the forest path dark ferns genuflected as she brushed past. Noli-me-tangere, she said they were called. By the old mudbank she pointed out a litter of pigs she said she had released to the wild and, in the distance, her favourite trees. ‘Over there, in the older jungle where nobody goes, is my farm.’ She pressed her finger to my lips leaving me a crystalline trace to savour from the giddy whorls on her skin. 'Illegal. Nobody knows.' She nearly smiled again.

I was intrigued. She didn't say any more about it; I could see she wasn't ready to take me there yet.

She let go of me and used both her hands to clear a way through the bushes. I smothered her small sandal marks with my larger treads, watching the curve of her neck as she bent her head to go under some branches. I had to stoop lower to follow her. Her bare foot straightened, ahead of me, as she stood on tiptoe to climb over a fallen tree trunk. The bone of her brown ankle peeped from under the denim as she lifted her leg over. 'Come on, this way,' she urged.

Then, in a clump of straw saplings, she uncovered a secret woven nest for me. 'This is one of the halfway houses.' She blew a small blue fluffy feather up into the air; there was nothing else in it. She explained that it was where she nursed the birds who were slow to regain their foraging instincts. Pulling the branches back over the nest, she concealed it as before. Further on, underneath the ironwood tree, she found the corpse of one which had come to grief. She picked up the little sunbird and folded in its wings. Her face dipped, solemn but not tearful. 'Oh-oh,' she clucked like someone who had grown too fast into the world. 'lt is not easy for them, you know, to learn to be free.'

I felt a tingle run down my spine. I had come to learn too. Perhaps the eroded coast I had reached was, after all, the right place to start on this island. Watching her bury the bird under a small mound of leaves I wondered, was this the person who could show me what I really needed to know?

She covered our tracks and dusted her hands, looking around thoughtfully. Then she turned to me and said it was time to take me back. 'The path can be tricky, you know, when it gets dark. Sometimes the night patrols are trigger-happy.'

I wasn't sure whether I should hold her hand again. I swung mine close as we sauntered out into the open, but she seemed too busy thinking about military manoeuvres to notice.

When we reached the edge of the village, she said, 'I must go now.'

'When can I see you again?' I asked.

'Tomorrow. Same place, the same time again. I have lots more birds to bring.' She looked up at the darkened sky above me, filling it with wings. A nervous quiver ran down her throat. In my mind I turned it to that laugh from the previous day, still hovering inside her, waiting to break free.

I felt hollow after she had gone, emptier than before. The breeze was warm, but there was something cold under my skin as if I carried winter in my bones. I felt I had crossed a line that split the world and me; I was both lost and found at the same time. 'Sindbad was the bugger', my grandfather used to say tapping his head with his finger, 'who showed us how we forget what we should remember - the dangers of the voyage - and remember what we should forget: the place we must leave behind.' Eldon always had some dictum or other to fix every moment in its place. I had none of my own and, at that moment, I couldn't even tell the sea from the shore.

I made my way, reluctantly, to the entrance of the hotel. The building seemed to have sunk further into the ground. The lights were low. The gates which were usually open had been locked. lt didn't worry me. I was too absorbed with what was happening inside me. I clanked the chain several times and, finally, a young security guard appeared. I didn't recognise him but he smiled shyly when he saw me. He too seemed to know who I was. He slung his short-barrelled gun over his shoulder and fumbled with the padlock.

After reading the extract, discuss the following:

• Why might a farm, hidden in the jungle, be ‘illegal’?
• The third paragraph talks about ‘a half way house’ and the corpse of a bird. From this evidence, what do you think Uva is trying to do?
• What is happening to Marc? (Refer especially to the penultimate paragraph)
• Why do you think there is an armed guard at the hotel?

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A passionate love affair develops between Marc and Uva, which ends abruptly when she disappears following some military activity in the area. Marc is detained by the military but, desperate to find Uva, escapes and tries to find help in the city of Maravil. He makes contact with one of Uva’s friends, Jaz and as they are trying to find information about Uva, they are surprised by two soldiers.

HEAVEN’S EDGE. Extract 2

As he clicked another button , I realised that it was up to me to somehow disarm them. I rocked back, tensing my muscles. I held my breath, and then shoved the cabinet at the two guards. It crashed into them and sent them sprawling on the floor. I scrambled out, grabbed one of their fallen guns and pointed it at the heaving flab. The gun was much heavier than Nirali’s; I had to step back a couple of paces to keep my balance. ‘Shoot, shoot,’ Jaz hissed. I hesitated. My finger was on the trigger, but the cat’s eye in the centre of the nearest soldier’s forehead stopped me. I heard Eldon scolding my father for becoming an air warrior, for wanting to bury a bullet in someone’s brain.

Rope, rope, I needed rope and their surrender. Then there was an explosion as the other guard snatched back a gun and fired. Half a dozen bullets riddled the ceiling. A siren went off outside.

I yanked Jaz by the arm and we took off. 'You should have got them while you could,' he whined. I banged door behind me and we ran down to the corner and hid in a doorway.

On the main promenade people had gathered together, frightened by the siren.

'What happens with this alarm?' I asked Jaz.

'I don't know. lt hasn't happened before.' The mascara around his eye had spread like a bruise.

I was trying to get my bearings when I saw a woman break away from the crowd and nip into the alleyway opposite us. She had one of Jaz's bar bottles in her hand and was stuffing it with a piece of cloth. Jaz saw her too. 'She's crazy. We must stop her.' I held him back; the soldiers would have seen him if he tried to cross over. I watched in a sort of paralysis as she set fire to the cloth and then, darting out, hurled it at the squad of soldiers in the centre. The bottle burst into flames. The soldiers scattered, firing in the direction from which the missile had been launched. 'Fire, fire, fire,' the woman chanted. Another volley of shots echoed in the mall. People screamed; several in the crowd fell, writhing as if skewered. One man, clutching his head, lurched towards the soldiers pleading; others scrambled to the upper floors and flung more bottles and stools, pipes and glass, from the galleries and stairways. Within moments the whole area was in mayhem.

Was that woman, like Uva, another subversive? 'She a friend?' I asked Jaz.

He shook his head. 'She's a nutter. She's had too much. We have got to get out.' His whole body sagged; his eyes were squeezed small in his face as if he didn't want to see what was happening.

'But is Uva with her?' I grabbed him and forced him to listen to me.

'No, I tell you. She is not in here. I am sure of it.'

‘Come with me, then. This way.' I pulled him towards the stairs I had come down earlier. 'You'll have to run.'

Jaz clutched hold of me with both hands, 'Where?'

A common technique for writers to adopt when writing ‘action’ scenes is that of short sentences – they heighten the sense of speed and energy. But Gunesekera’s style is normally one of short sentences, so to add dimension to speed, energy and tension he chooses his verbs very carefully. Look through the extract above and underline verbs which indicate quick or sudden movements.

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HEAVEN’S EDGE Extract 3

Marc escapes and embarks upon a terrifying journey that tests everything he believes in. Eventually he finds himself near an abandoned coconut estate close by a lake in the middle of the jungle. Read the following paragraphs and be prepared to say, in your own words, what the narrator is thinking.

The house sat low, dappled in dreamlight. The thatched bearing down to the ground in the way stone-age dwellings do - close to the earth - sweeping down like a brushstroke with gaping holes where meterorites could easily have passed through. The wall facing me was a hushed pale yellow, while all around overgrown flowering shrubs had entangled themselves with each other in a cacophony of vaulting purples and oranges. On the left I could see a large empty swimming pool, with dwarf palms and lime trees dotted around it in the sand. Beyond the main house, like playground shelters, several smaller mud huts and sheds languished in various stages of disrepair.

I knew then that this had to be the place I had always been yearning for without ever quite knowing it; but was it my refuge or a place already occupied? Although the house looked neglected, the exuberant flowers gave the place an air of continuing habitation. I knew I should be cautious. I slipped back behind the hedge and settled down as though it were a nest that needed to be watched. My nerves were bare. I felt drained.

I wondered whether my father might be inside, not dead but another recluse hiding out in an ancestral home, waiting for things to turn better, a son to find his true self. Lee, the ancient aviator threading seashells, waiting to be relieved of his story; his blue-winged Kfir, dripping wax, tucked away in a thatched hangar. If he were to emerge, I wondered, what should I say?

'It's me. Marc. The son you left behind.' The words tightened into a child's fist. 'I've come, like you wanted me to.' Yes, I would have asked him. 'So what was it that brought you here, Papa? That has kept you here? Where was the wedding? What happened to the band?'

I saw him as an old man, now more like Eldon than anyone else; a strong gaunt face, a mantle of silver hair. His phantom voice would be gravelly. 'I came, son, because I love this place. The warm ocean breeze, the smell of the earth here, the closeness of the moon. When my father first brought me here, I realised this was what I had been looking for all my life. From the first moment I saw the curve of its vulnerable coastline, as we flew in, I knew I would one day have to make this place my own. Just breathe this air, feel the texture of the jasmine, the lantana, the lilies. This was a garden like I had never imagined before. Have you seen the parrots? The orioles? The woodpeckers? The sky is magic. More full of stars than I had ever dreamt of before. I fell in love here. I wasn't leaving you when I returned here. I came because I knew that one day you would too, and I had to do the best I could to preserve something of what I found here for you.'

'But you came because of war, a destroyer………’ Eldon's distraught accusation echoed in my head.

I imagined him, in his youth, arguing with his own father as they drove around the hills of this island. 'No, they must not flood the valleys, the old tanks will do. No, they must not destroy the forests, these animals must live too. No, no more plantations of tea. Go for bio-diversity. No, no more history. No more insane bloody foolery. No more war to end war.'

My eyes were smarting. I was competes disoriented. You can't do that, I wanted to retaliate. But it was my grandfather, surely, not my father speaking. The garden could only be his. This had to be the cottage he was so fond of, the one he had searched for in vain with his son. That was a kingfisher, not a Kfir.

No one emerged. A voyage of love. I realised I was delirious. If anyone would have been hiding inside, it would have been Uva, not my sparring paternal ghosts. Uva, I whispered to myself, with her feathers unfolding.

Yet, I felt more like a child stirring there, than a lover.

© The above extracts are quoted with permission from the author.

‘Reef’ is published by Granta Books ISBN I-86207-097-6 (paperback)

‘Heaven’s Edge’ is published by Bloomsbury ISBN 0-7475-58I3-2 (hardback)

Areas you may wish to consider when formulating questions are:

• Background of author: Sri Lankan born, now living in Britain (Why? How? Language? Culture? Identity? Etc)
• Writing style: Descriptive/poetic - style. Influenced by? Admired authors? Other influences? Etc
• World view: Environmentally concerned – opinions; priorities. Pessimistic or optimistic about future – of what?