Good but not for the squeamishly expectant

A couple of weeks ago I read The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser. Until just now I didn't realise it's technically Australian because the author has lived here since she was 14. This is a reasonably excusable oversight because the novel is set almost completely in Sri Lanka with a couple of excursions to England.

The action takes place from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s amongst the privileged Sinhalese class who were wealthy and socially powerful but never accepted by the Europeans as equals even though they sent their children to be educated at Oxford and Cambridge and bought their suits on Saville Row.

The central figure, Sam, is a very unhappy barrister who spends his whole life being rejected by both his mother and the society which unaccountably defies his expectations, rewarding people he sees as useless and denying him his just desserts. He can't bear Sri Lankan independence: at one point he laments that he has to put up with pineapple jelly when he'd been raised to appreciate marmalade. This unhappiness makes him very cruel.

I thought it was remarkably good. It starts off with Sam's account of his life and the case he thought would make his career. Mercifully, this is quite short because he has an overly fussy, ironical voice. Most of the rest of the book is narratged in the third person, some from other viewpoints so you can qury the reliability of Sam's version of events.

The blurb on the front of the book says that it is reminiscent of Remains of the Day. This is a fair enough comment about Sam's capacity for self-deception but there is a lot more going on in the story. The jungle is described magnificently. One character changes from a hunter to a proto-ecologist over time. There are ghosts of dead children and magical visions. It's a very fine read.

But I really could have done without reading about a stillborn baby when I was eight and a half months pregnant. I poked Winnie until she did somersaults after reading that bit.