Paul M. M. Cooper

Here's a great little piece of historical fiction about a time period I didn't know anything about - the invasion and attempted conquest of Sri Lanka by Kalinga Magha in 1215 AD - that manages to be densely researched, well-written, and satisfying on a storytelling level all at once. Cooper fits an impressive amount of research into the details of the Sinhalese-Tamil struggle, the kingdom, the palace, the food, the clothing, etc, in here, and while he drops in maybe a few too many untranslated terms for the prose to be completely smooth reading for a non-Sri Lankan, if you just relax and go with the atmosphere eventually you're so fully immersed you hardly notice it, especially because he's so descriptive and detailed. It's a novel about translation, bother personal and literary, which means it must also necessarily convey something about the difficulty of communication, and the melancholy love story that accompanies the war for control of the kingdom makes the personal political, adding a welcome human element to the mix of literary commentary and political struggle.

The protagonist is Asanka, a nebbishy court poet to King Parakrama and Queen Dayani of Sri Lanka in the Sinhalese royal capital of Polonnaruwa. After the crown prince Kalinga Magha arrives from the mainland and executes the royal family, Asanka is given the task of translating the epic poem Shishupala Vadha from the more academic Sanskrit into vernacular Tamil in order to promote the culture of the invaders as well as to raise the new king's status for posterity as a bringer of literature, since he has a chip on his shoulder about being the bastard youngest son of his royal family. Unfortunately, the Shishupala Vadha is incredibly difficult to translate well, being both dense in complex poetic imagery and heavily reliant on ingenious structural tricks (anagrams, palindromes, double meanings, visual puns, etc), and Asanka's burden of an impossible deadline is additionally complicated by the new king's desire to take Asanka's mistress Sarasi as the new queen. But if Asanka can keep his wits he can keep his head, as he plans an escape with Sarasi and embeds secret messages of defiance into his translation for the commoners to rally around. This subversion of Magha's desire for fame with unflattering comparisons to infamous tyrants is a sort of inverse of Virgil's flattering of Augustus in the Aeneid by linking the imperial dynasty to glorious Homeric myth.

At first I had some complaints about the novel's characters and themes. Even though it's written as a first-person diary/letter to Sarasi, Asanka generally comes off like a rich but uncharismatic dilettante, so it's hard to figure out why the two other main characters put up with him so much. Sarasi is much tougher and self-reliant than he is, to his chagrin, and her affection for him doesn't really seem warranted by his actions, which mostly range from uncaring and distant to cowardly and embarrassing. It seems like she would have dumped him a long time ago, even despite his influence with the new king, and the enduring sincerity of her feelings is out of proportion to anything he does on the page. Magha's continual trust in Asanka until almost the very end of the novel is even odder: a brutal conqueror without a lot of compunctions against killing those who displease him overlooks a long series of incredibly suspicious acts by this holdover poet from the old regime, and Asanka does not seem to have such a high Value Over Replacement Poet that Magha wouldn't have had him executed and replaced several times over. I realize that keeping Asanka alive was necessary to accomplish a few threads of dramatic irony - pay attention to the repeated lament that "poetry makes nothing happen", reader! - yet the sudden appearance of drought-breaking rain at the climax of the novel where the subversive power of literature is exhibited is just too perfect. Even Asanka's fear of elephants gets a callback right before he's reassured that, actually, poets are the real heroes, and the ending revelation of who had been writing Asanka helpful secret messages related to his work is groan-inducing.

But on further reflection these criticisms miss why Cooper set those things up that way. The novel is a deliberate echo of the great poetic epic that Asanka is translating, and just as the deliberately florid similes that various characters deploy attempt to connect the frequently-insufficient power of language to the real qualities of the thing they're trying to describe, the often-stylized actions of the characters connect the messiness of reality to the larger-than-life archetypes that populate the Shishupala Vadha. Asanka doesn't seem good enough for Sarasi to the reader; well, he doesn't seem good enough to himself either! Especially not when all he does is scribble words on the page, what a waste of time... until his works turns out to be actually meaningful to people. It's easy to lose count of how often the characters, Asanka included, denigrate literature ("poetry makes nothing happen"), but we're fooling ourselves if we think it doesn't matter, and even if words aren't real, they have real effects through our beliefs. Cooper did a marvelous job bringing this world of smoke, ink, and rain to life. A fantastic debut novel.… (mere)

Although I'd recommend this book to any visitor to Sri Lanka as a vivid look at a time and place most non-Lankans know nothing about, I found it a dispiriting read. Asanka, the poet-protagonist, is constitutionally timid and perpetually anxious, and he has much to be anxious about: his new master, the foreign conquerer Kalinga Magha, is a suspicious, capricious sadist always ready to torture to death anyone who doesn't seem to love him enough. The experience of living inside the head of a mouselike man who expects at any time a fate quite literally worse than death was exhausting and depressing.

Aside from Magha, whose narcissism and incapacity for reflection are similar to the traits of certain present-day rulers, none of the supporting characters are fully developed, perhaps because our narrator is so self-absorbed in his fear. The book's strengths are in the depth of its research and the fullness of its description of its time and place. But they're overwhelmed by the gray, humorless anxiety that pervades almost every scene from first to last.… (mere)

Lush and vivid - a mesmerizing tale of a poet caught in an invasion of medieval Sri Lanka.

Polonnaruwa, one of the kingdoms of "Lanka" in 1215 AD, is invaded by the Indian Kalinga Magha, who pillages and destroys the area to take whatever he can find of value, forever changing the social and cultural landscape of the island. In this re-imagined telling, the defeated king's court poet, Asanka, survives the sacking and, in exchange for his life, is charged with translating from Sanskrit into Tamil the Hindu masterpiece "Shishupala Vadha". Magha is convinced the locals will hear the epic and realize the superiority and wisdom of their new masters. Terrified, and assailed by guilt for not refusing the invader, Asanka begins the work, only to become besotted by the language of the original. He's an excellent translator and poet, but his guilt eats at him, and then he starts finding unsigned stories, told from the point of view of the epic's characters, secretly delivered to his door. He begins to see that he can do his part to undermine Magha by incorporating certain detestable facts about him into the narrative, facts which he knows the local populace will find laughable.

Asanka's story is addressed to his lover, a palace servant girl. His longing for her and fear for her safety permeate the novel, and there is a suspense to the story that makes for just as compelling reading as does the beauty of the writing. It's unclear whether either of them will survive Magha's rule, and for most of the book I suspected Asanka might be writing this from a prison cell while awaiting execution. But, without giving anything away, let me just say this was a story I loved from beginning to end, savoring each word. I desperately wanted to find out the characters' futures but didn't want the book to end, but, when I reached it, the ending was perfect. And, my highest praise: I can see myself rereading this, something I rarely do.… (mere)

I was intrigued to hear about this book because of its unusual setting, thirteenth-century Sri Lanka. In 1215 the Kingdom of Polonnaruwa was conquered by the Indian prince Kalinga Magha. River of Ink imagines that the court poet is asked by the new king to translate an epic Sanskrit poem into Tamil, as part of his mission to 'civilise' the people he now rules and help them understand that they have been conquered by a superior people. The king is brutal and murderous, but the terrified poet finds ways to sneak in subtle satire and criticism into his version. Magha loves the translation, though, and interprets it as justifying his harsh rule.

What worked about the book?

The author is a Brit who taught English in Sri Lanka for a time, and he clearly immersed himself in Sri Lankan history and culture. There are several lovely quotations from classic Tamil poetry, and the poet's voice is well-imagined - he uses many similes, which all feel very realistic for his time and place: "Perhaps in ceasing my mockery of the King I had merely drawn attention to it, the way one sometimes only notices the chirp of the cicadas when they stop." "[The crowd] hushed gradually, the noise dying in a pattern like the fall of raindrops."

The language of the book manages to be poetic without being flowery or orientalist. I think he achieves this through simple, specific details, vivid to our senses: ...the soldiers' backs steamed in the heat. Unable to watch, I looked down at the dust and loam beneath my feet, at a single stamped okra finger and a pink rambutan skin, a blood-spatter of spat betel juice. There are such enormous termites in Polonnaruwa, so large you can see the dust on their backs. I remember following their lines to where the mounds rose between the buildings, homes for cobras, monuments to their own futility.

Unfortunately, there were also some key things which didn't work for me.

One was the pace. For a book about destruction and conquest, love and epic poetry, not much happens! Or at least, the ratio of things happening to things not-happening is too high.

Partly this is the fault of the narrator, who spends a lot of time being frightened and worried at great length. It is possible to show that your hero is indecisive and cowardly without needing to dither on every page. I hate ditheriness in real life and it turns out, in literature too (sorry, Hamlet).

And finally, the romance at the centre of the book. I was not invested in this, perhaps because of my annoyance with the narrator, or perhaps because the description of the relationship was not as vivid as the description of their physical environment. This reduced the stakes.

So for me, only a middle-ranking read, although I would have liked it much more if it had been shorter.… (mere)