Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

Overview

I. NUBURN

Marc arrives from London at the Palm Beach hotel, on an island that is never named but is presumably based on the author's native Sri Lanka. He is disappointed to see that poverty has made accommodations scarce and the starved attendants are surly and disdainful. He doesn't like to think of himself as a tourist, but rather a man on a spiritual mission: his grandfather Eldon, a flying instructor, was born on the island but left it when war broke out and challenged his pacifism. The grandfather expatriated to London, where he met a Caribbean ex-patriate and made a family with her, occupying himself with his love of gardening. Eventually Eldon took his son Lee back to the island to show off its natural splendors, and the home that had been destroyed. While Eldon remained happy to be gone from the culture of relentless violence and oppression that emerged there when rival colonialists withdrew and left the island to endlessly feuding warlords, his son Lee, Marc's father, was enchanted by his father's descriptions of their homeland, and to the shame of his father eventually returned there to fight as a helicopter pilot, intending to bring his son (Marc) and wife there once it was safe. He was killed in action. After discovering a videotape in which his late father showed off the island's beauty, Marc found himself drawn to it, and so it is that he ends up on an island he knows very little about.

Marc tries to explore the island but is discouraged by numerous military cordons and rules preventing tourists from entering the war-torn villages. "The sense of subjugation was something I had not expected on an island infused with myth and mystery. This was a place, it seemed to me then, devoid of any joy past, present or future." Finally he wanders toward the outer ramparts of the village, and then into jungle bush, where he spots a woman who is releasing two doves. Immediately he is enchanted by her, but when he tries to converse with her, she is disdainful of the fact that he is a tourist. Eventually she disappears, leaving him to think about her all the next day, when he returns to the same spot and finds her there. He discovers that she is a "secret farmer," cultivating birds and vegetation in a secret location in order to restore the natural riches that war has stripped away. (Uva's mother "wanted these to return to a richer jungle rather than the leached scrubland that retreating global markets and distitute governments left in their wake.") In spite of having little in common-he is naïve and optimistic, while she became practical and cynical after her parents were killed by soldiers-Marc and Uva fall in love, and when Marc tells her of the paradise his grandfather often talked about, she describes a place in the south "full of butterflies and flowers," Samandia. But no one ever goes there anymore-Marc will have to "find your own Eden."

Marc's innocence ends when a hotel worker he has made friends with, Nirali, is executed. Uva observes: "The sand here never stains, you know, no matter how much blood is spilled... War here, like everywhere else, was once about land and identity. But after death cloud in the south everything changed. You see we were reshaped by gangsters into new collectives held together only by conscription. Not language, not religion, not any of those outmoded notions of nation. After so many years of fighting, violence became ingrained into our way of life. So now we have only thugs for politicians and tyranny in every tribe. Killers everywhere." Indeed, eventually one of these tribes discovers and burns down Uva's secret farm and goes after her. Mercenaries storm the hotel and Uva and Marc are separated when Marc is shot with a tranquilizer dart.


II. MARAVIL

Marc wakes up in a prison compound, tagged in the ear in case he escapes. The prisoners get a chance to go to Maravil, a shelled-out town where he remembers Uva mentioned having a friend named Jaz who works in an underground market. In the city Marc meets a coppersmith named Kris who has a carved knife just like the one Uva had, but when he tries to converse with the man he is unresponsive. Marc locates a trader named Zeng whom he remembers Uva mentioning, and Zeng tells him to meet him under a statue after nightfall. Zeng gives Marc a card that will allow him to get into the underground market where Uva's friend Jaz works. As it turns out, Jaz is an extroverted homosexual who works at a brothel/bar and serves as lover boy to the wardens who guard the market. Jaz helps Marc break into the warden's quarters, where he looks up Uva on the database and discovers that she is probably still alive. Just then Marc and Jaz are caught by some guards, and the two barely escape a gunbattle . Remembering the knife that looked like Uva's, Marc instinctively heads for Kris, the coppersmith, who kills another soldier and flees with Marc and Jaz in a stolen cruiser as the city burns. They race toward the hills, avoiding the corrrrrrdons outside of the towns, and hide out in a cave.

III. MOON PLAINS

In the cave, Marc remembers his grandfather's story of how he left the island when WWII broke out, dismissing the conflicts on the island as "a military brawl between European powers that had been systematically looting the rest of the world." Instead of becoming a fighter pilot, he joined the air medical services, ferrying supplies and wounded patients into hospitals around London. He remembers the endless debates between his father and grandfather about pacifism vs. war as a means of achieving peace and freedom. The men discover an armed boy who leads them to a ravaged village of women whose men have been lost to the cause and whose children are lost to marauders. They try to learn more, but the women eventually flee in the belief that Marc, Jaz, and Kris are devils. They drive on and eventually come upon an abandoned tea factory, where they hole up, only to leave again when they fear they have been spotted by a patrolling helicopter. Eventually they come upon a tea estate that Kris assures them is abandoned, however that night Marc discovers two fresh corpses in the garden and realizes that Kris obtained access to the house by killing the caretakers. Marc reprimands Kris for this, believing it is wrong to kill, upon which Kris becomes infuriated enough to nearly kill him. Exploring in the jungle around the house, Marc discovers a hangar containing a flying machine made in the shape of a giant peacock, similar (or possibly the same one?) to the mythical sky chariot that was invented by two islanders in 2525 BC.


IV. FLIGHT

Kris spends the next days fixing up the sky chariot. Jaz says he is content to stay where he is. All of the sudden one day the house is stormed by soldiers. They kill Kris and Jaz, but Kris kills most of them before he dies and Jaz runs to the sky chariot to escape the scene.


V. THE GARDEN

Marc lands the plane in the Eden-like place Uva told him about, Samandia, where he imagines the ghost of his father lives. He imagines the man saying: "I came here, 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 realized this was what I had been looking for all my life." He came not for war, as a destroyer, but because "I came to save what I found here, before it was all squandered away. I came to do what I believed was right." Marc finds a house that he realizes is the former home of his father when he discovers a rifle with the engraving "Lee-Enfield." He sets out to explore the lush Samandia and turn the abandoned region into a garden of the type Uva was trying to build: "I wanted them all to come, drawn by a lodestone of passion and the heady, overpowering scent of a garden in the middle of a jungle; to bring Uva with them."


VI. CHRYSALIS

Sure enough, one day after the butterflies have come, Marc is swimming when Uva emerges from the water. She tells of having escaped by posing as a soldier, and leading a group of orphans who were eventually killed by an overhead helicopter. Uva is haunted by this just as Marc is haunted by the deaths of Jaz and Kris (the latter of whom, it turns out, was Uva's brother, and was responsible for the death of their parents when he betrayed them to the mercenaries), but they manage to start rebuilding as they live off the land. Eventually they discover that they have been found out, and when Marc stumbles on a sleeping soldier, he must finally make the moral decision he has been struggling with throughout the book: is it ever justifiable to kill in order to defend something that means everything to you? He finds himself forced to take his father's position and in the final scene he kills the soldiers who have come to take his land. "We do it because we must. For love as we know it."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802141453
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	07/06/2004
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Read an Excerpt

HEAVEN'S EDGE

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By ROMESH GUNESEKERA

GROVE PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Romesh Gunesekera
All right reserved.
ISBN: 080211735X

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Chapter One

I arrived on this island, by boat, the night of the fullest moon I had ever seen in my life. The sky was clear and the sea phosphorescent; the coastline, from a distance, looked entrancing. Two flying fish, accidentally netted, were released by the boatman as we docked at the pier of the Palm Beach Hotel. I thought that was auspicious.

The steps down from the jetty were a little rickety and the iron handrail had corroded in several places, but the ground was firm. I stood on the beach and breathed in. I felt elated: this was the moment I had been waiting for. Even the breeze was warm.

I followed a footpath littered with dead urchins and broken crabclaws and climbed up to the hotel overlooking the bay. The gate at the top wouldn't fully open and I had to squeeze past a giant screw-pine; one of its thorny leaves scraped the sea that had coated my arm. In front of me a blue plumbago shrub exposed a few pale flakes broken off the moon. A yellow light on the garden terrace blinked and went out. I crossed the strip of lawn not knowing quite what to expect.

The Palm Beach Hotel, I had been warned, was thirty kilometres from Maravil and the only other hotel open to visitors; it had no brochure and no guaranteed amenities.

When I reached the long, low building I could seethat the paint on the outside wall had cracked and peeled; a trail of blisters ran down one side of the portico and the wooden beams of the veranda were warped. The hotel sign had not been repaired.

I brushed the sand from my shoes and pushed open the door, careful not to touch the loose glass in the frame. I rolled my case into the foyer feeling a little nervous. The floor was made out of coarse, uneven granite and the small plastic wheels fixed to the bag rattled over the bumps; there was no other sound. In a corner, behind a desk, I noticed a receptionist asleep. His narrow face had crumbled at the edges; his tunic was unbuttoned. I waited at least a minute before gently rapping on the counter.

'I have a reservation,' I said in slow English.

The cowls over his eyes slid open. He stared at me.

'From the Sea-Link Corporation,' I added, trying to be a little upbeat. I had a fortnight confirmed with an option to renew, indefinitely if I wanted to. I had been told there was very little business these days anywhere on the island.

Opening a large ledger, the receptionist flicked a page over. 'No,' he grunted. The lids slipped down again, leaving only a pair of narrow slits through which he watched me. 'We have no reservation.'

I started to panic and fumbled around for my papers.

'You want a room?' he asked then, as if issuing a challenge.

'Yes.' I found my passport and the booking docket. I offered them to him.

He riffled through the documents. After some time he relented. 'Maybe one, but no discount.'

He pushed the passport back to me, together with a registration card and a faded tariff sheet. While I filled in the card, he inched out from behind the desk. He was a small, scrawny man and seemed to have some trouble with his foot. He limped down a dim corridor. I quickly signed the card and followed him.

The room he led me to was the last in the line. He switched on the light; it barely made a difference but I felt relieved. The bed was large - king-sized - and solid; inviting despite the mangy blue coverlet. He pointed at the shrouded windows. 'Sea view.'

A gecko emerged from behind the frosted lampshade fixed to the wall.

'Good,' I nodded. The boat I had travelled on would have left by now. It wasn't due back again until the end of the month. 'I'll take the room,' I said, 'at least until the next boat.'

He made an odd guttural sound and then stared at my bag with his head awkwardly lowered. It took me a while to realise he was waiting for a tip. I handed him a ten-dollar note. The foreign exchange made him, briefly, almost garrulous.

'Pool, minibar.' He jerked his thumb and pivoted, cracking his joints. 'Breakfast not included. Extra charge.'

'OK,' I said. That was not what I had come for. I had not wanted to cruise in on a cut-price package deal, full-board or half. I was on a mission to explore an older terrain and discover for myself what was best to remember, and what might be better to forget, here and in my life. I would have told him so, but he looked much too sullen and worn-out to care.

After he left, I drew back the curtains and opened the windows to let the sea breeze in. There was no air-conditioner. It suited me; I wanted to know what a night in a hot country was really like. To hear the crickets and the cicadas, to smell the citrus and the citronella, the warm earth dreaming, and feel the spirit of the place brush against my skin.

My grandfather Eldon had warned me, as I was growing up between the fig trees and rat-runs of a rowdy, congested London, 'You must decide for yourself how you should live in this world. Like a flower seeking light, we each go where we find our best sustenance. Yet in reaching out - free as we are - we have to be careful not to lose more than can ever be gained.' He would lecture me in his sheltered garden, pruning his roses, watering his delphiniums, trying to pass to me the lessons of what he called his extended innings, while I trained my ears to the roar of aircraft coming in to land, one after another, at nearby Heathrow. He was gravest when he spoke about my father's undertakings. 'We have a choice, you know, and sometimes that is hard. Sometimes we have to choose between people and places, the sky and the earth. War and peace.' He lifted his large, wavering hands as though he wanted to admonish my dad - his absent son Lee, the ace air warrior - through me, and I watched as though Eldon was my absent father: each of us occupying the other's empty space.

Both my father and my grandfather had been quick to escape their formative traps. Eldon by coming to England from this apparent pearl of an island, and Lee, fifty years later, by leaving England, his birthplace. I never had the same compulsion to move - until the day my father's voice returned and urged me out.

* * *

In the morning, I woke up hot and hungry. The glare from the window flattened the room. I wondered what the rest of the place looked like in daylight. I changed into my shorts and went in search of breakfast.

A couple of parasols had been put out on the terrace and two waiters were squatting down by the pool. I ordered the local menu and was served a plate of raw roti, some red desiccated coconut and a glass of sour undrinkable juice. I asked for bottled water and was given a jug. It was probably permanent hunger, or some parasite in the gut, that made the staff seem so unfriendly, but I didn't think of it then. I just felt disappointed.

Most of that first day I spent adjusting to the heat and the humidity. It was something I had only ever experienced before in horticultural glasshouses, and it was difficult for me to believe that the temperature was not temporary.

Inside the hotel I walked around in a daze, ducking into the dingy comfort of the arcade room every half hour or so to punch a bunch of pinball buttons and swill another glass of iced lotus-brew. The atmosphere, even in the aromatherapy room, was absolutely stultifying. Nowhere did I see any sign of other guests. It didn't surprise me, given the warnings about civil strife, oppression and levels of residual radiation; quite apart, that is, from the service.

Late in the afternoon I dipped into the shady saline pool to cool down and recover the plans I had hatched on the boat, or even earlier, while I was still wired to my home-web, looking for news of this forgotten, assaulted island; or listening to my father's last recorded words.

When I got out of the water, I heard the buzz of a small aircraft and saw a military plane disappear behind the ailing cassias. Although there were no obvious transport facilities at the hotel, I was still confident I could find a way to visit some of the places Lee and Eldon had been to on their one and only journey abroad together. The journey that had changed my father's life.

He was seventeen when he first came here, brought to spay his respects to the ancestral land Eldon himself had spurned for decades. They had visited graveyards and sleepy suburbs; they had done a grand tour of the country which Eldon recounted time and again over the years. 'We went everywhere: the wildlife reserves, the ancient cities - more ruined now than ever before - up to the cool tea-hills, and then down through miles and bloody miles of those damn low-country coconut plantations.' I still remember how Eldon would pause and then mock me with his calypso version of my juvenile dub, 'Whole generations went to pot, you know, chasing the golden bloody coconut ...' But, despite ridiculing the coconut kings of those days, his fondest recollection of that trip was the hunt for an ancestral home in his so-called low-country: a farm cottage in a twenty-acre coconut estate where he spent his holidays. He would conjure up the house for me. 'It had a thatched roof, and whitewashed walls. A sand garden with lantana shrubs and bougainvillaea. Hundreds of butterflies. And a breadfruit tree. I loved that place, my little Eden, so much more than the big manor house that our lot liked to pretend was the family heritage.' Sometimes he would bring out his crinkled maps and show me the web of journeys that held him and his son together, like a memory of paradise, after their return. His brown finger would trace their route along a network of red roads as though he was trying to soothe the veins of a lachrymose eye. 'We looked all over for that little house I had loved, but it had disappeared. The shape of the land itself had changed. Political gerrymandering had played socks with every bloody thing. I couldn't find my way. But looking for it, you know, was almost good enough ...' He never returned to the island.

My father, on the other hand, seemed to have seen something that the older man could not. Something irresistible that brought him back, again and again. First to meet my mother, on her first long-haul holiday; and then again for their honeymoon; finally it brought him back in the middle of a war, for ever.

On my second morning I got up earlier, before the heat became unbearable, and took a walk outside the wails of the hotel. A broad strip of macadam meandered up to a sentry-point. I noticed the flash of mirror-light as a gun, or camera lens, hidden in the pill-box caught the rays of the sun. Although there were no soldiers to be seen, I didn't go any closer.

In the other direction, about five hundred metres down the road, was the village. I was keen to explore it, imagining that perhaps there I might discover the hidden charm of a long-suffering but colourful land.

I found a few ramshackle bungalows and, within the ramparts of an old fort, a pockmarked shopping mart boasting a drug store and a couple of bazaar stalls with some trinkets and a few essential dry goods like rice, flour and soap. Hardly any people were around. Inside a bakery, I spotted a couple of women in muted saris and a solitary man in a sarong, his shoulders drooped as though the blades had been ripped off. I tried to talk to them - English was supposed to have become the common link language along the coast - but no one was willing to speak to me. The women quickly retreated, and the man simply stared at me as if he had been hypnotised. The sense of subjugation was something I had not expected on an island so infused with myth and mystery. This was a place, it seemed to me then, devoid of any joy past, present or future. It was impossible to imagine what the attraction could have been for anyone.

As the days passed, I began to feel disheartened. The sun seemed cancerous on my skin, and the water was starting to feel too hot for swimming, even in the dark. I thought, if only I could reach one of the famous sites Eldon had talked about I might gain some satisfaction but there seemed no way of getting anywhere. I didn't have any proper information on where I could travel; I didn't even have an up-to-date map, only historical charts. Nothing else had been available. The hotel staff, when they deigned to appear, were hopeless. The receptionist would always summon the bellboy whenever I asked about excursions. 'Try village, sir,' was the bellboy's refrain, and he would scratch his ear violently whenever I complained that nobody there even bothered to listen.

'What about the jeep?' I asked the boy one morning, having seen him drive it into a garage. 'Can't I hire it?'

'Not possible, sir. Special approval required.' He put the keys in his little brown box and banged down the lid.

Nobody was able to tell me who gave 'special approval'. Even the barman at the cocktail hut pruned his lips and withdrew into his shell when I tried to question him. Perhaps I should have learned one of the local languages before I came, but I don't think it would have helped. It seemed I was in a place where conformity, or silence, was the only safe strategy for survival, and ignorance a kind of haven.

I was so disgruntled I spent the rest of the day trashing the decrepit minibar in my room. This could not be the same island that Eldon had talked about, that my father had loved, that I had read so much about. I had seen no animals, no birds, hardly any life. The trees, the plants, the buildings, the land, everything was drab. That evening, when I emerged, I banged into the drinks trolley parked at the poolside and knocked over an ice bucket. I ordered more lotus-brew and a packet of mouldy buns and derided the barman. I was too sozzled to care what he thought of me.

I felt thoroughly ashamed the next day and wanted to apologise to him. I looked all over the hotel; I couldn't find him. There was nobody around to say sorry to.

I decided then it was time to pull myself together and do whatever I could on my own. Six days had passed since I had landed. There was no point in hanging around. I thought I'd go into the scrub, at least, and see what I could find there. Explore as far as I could by foot, if nothing else. It was midday. The heat was searing, but I felt it had to be now or never. Walking, at least, was not forbidden. Any restricted area, I reckoned, would be fenced off or something. The rules would become clear, if there was a danger of violation; that seemed to be the way programmes ran everywhere.

I headed for the outer ramparts of the village. A dusty dog, stretched out in the shade, roused itself briefly; there was no other sign of life. A hundred metres beyond the old walls and piles of rubble, I came to a path that led down to a small sandy cove.

Continues...

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Excerpted from HEAVEN'S EDGE by ROMESH GUNESEKERA Copyright © 2002 by Romesh Gunesekera
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Editorial Reviews

Wistful, melancholy and mysterious, Heaven's Edge is a complex novel that entwines the individual's quest for wholeness with a country's longing for lost -- and better -- times. — Akash Kapur

The New York Times

Set on an environmentally devastated tropical island that resembles his native Sri Lanka, Gunesekera's new novel follows a Londoner named Marc, who comes to the island to find his father but instead gets caught up in a passionate affair with an ecological activist. When he arrives at the country's only hotel, the run-down Palm Beach Inn, Marc encounters a scarred landscape nothing like the idyllic pictures painted by his grandfather Eldon, a native who moved to London in his youth. Marc's attempts to find his father, who disappeared here when Marc was a child, come to naught, but his lover, Uva, opens new doors as she teaches Marc about her efforts to continue farming against the wishes of the island's repressive regime. Government troops begin tracking Uva, and soon soldiers attack and destroy Uva's farm. Marc is imprisoned in a government compound but manages to escape. Once he tracks down Uva's erotically preoccupied bisexual friend, Jaz, and a metalworker named Kris who has pivotal ties to Uva's past, the three embark on a quest to find Uva. The search has moments of both breathtaking suspense-e.g., the trio rebuilds a damaged plane to escape pursuing soldiers-and quiet introspection, as Marc reflects on his ambivalence toward this land. The novel's structure is a bit cliched, but there's a spark in Gunesekera's writing that gives his characters life; the affair between Marc and Una is especially rich and subtle. Gunesekera has explored these cultures and themes in his earlier books, notably Reef, which was shortlisted for the Booker, but the compelling romance makes this one of his best efforts. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In an almost epic quest to discover and understand both his homeland and himself, Marc returns from England to the unnamed tropical island from whence his family came. He feels displaced and dissatisfied until he meets Uva, an environmental activist who offers him color and enlightenment-but at a terrible price. For through his relationship with her, he is lured into the subversive underworld of those who dare to challenge the authority of the island's warlords. Much of this book describes the terrible dichotomy of a place, based on the author's native Sri Lanka, that in its natural beauty is truly at the edge of heaven yet in its political and social strife teeters on the edge of hell. Gunesekera, whose first novel, Reef, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, writes in a lyrical and evocative style, but the violence that ensnares his characters seems to despoil the beauty of the prose. While the intent may be to shock the reader from complacency, it creates a pacing challenge: this is an adventure story containing kernels of truth that, if developed differently and with the writer's obvious talent with words, could have resulted in a deeper novel. As such, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Recommended only where demand warrants purchase.-Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A strange, lyrical third novel about a young man searching for his father and his lover in a war-torn tropical island, by the London-based Sri Lankan novelist (The Sandglass, 1998, etc.). Born and raised in London, Marc is the grandson of an immigrant from "the island" (unnamed but obviously Sri Lanka), and he grew up hearing such tales of its lush natural beauty from his grandfather that he came to imagine it as a kind of Eden. His fascination turned into obsession, however, when Marc's father (also raised in London) traveled to the island while Marc was still a boy-and never returned. Now Marc has arrived there himself to try to learn what he can about the whereabouts of his father and the history of his family. Rival gangs of warlords control the island and most of the cities are in ruins-as is much of the countryside, stripped of its crops and vegetation by the various warring armies. On his first day there, though, Marc discovers a beautiful girl releasing doves in the forest. Her name is Uva, and she's an "ecowarrior" who tries to repair the damage to the island by planting crops and raising animals against the decrees of the warlords (who want the populace dependent on them for food). Marc and Uva quickly become lovers, but then Uva is kidnapped by army thugs. In his search for her, Marc becomes part of an underground resistance movement and roams the island with his new comrades Jaz and Kris. Before he learns what became of Uva, however, he makes some startling discoveries about the real story behind his father's disappearance, and he learns what true horror lies beneath the deceptively beautiful face of this bright but cruel place. With great feeling and intensity, this is an oddstory nevertheless: a strange mix of New Age politics, magical-realism, and multicultural fabulism.

Kirkus Reviews