‘A Passage North’ Composes a Long and Winding Poem
Shortlisted Booker Prize 2021, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North stands out among the competitors owing to its unique origin, Sri Lanka. I’ve read few South Asian books, and it’s fortunate that the current one is included. Frankly speaking, it isn’t easy to read. The sentences are long, the paragraphs longer and full of information. Nevertheless, the reading experience turned out to be extremely enjoyable because of the profound insight the story carries out. The lingering words compose more than a story, but an invitation to the trivial and yet painful paradoxes of consciousness and soul.
The novel features a simple plot: Krishan, the Sri Lankan Tamil protagonist, learns about the death of his grandmother’s former caretaker Rani. As her funeral summons him north, his mind drifts back to review years of two relationships: the friendship between Rani and his grandmother Appamma, as well as a fruitless romance between himself and Anjum, his Indian ex-girlfriend. Touching on the aftermath of the decades-lasting Sri Lankan civil war, the story does not aim to accuse its cruelty or voice out for the refugees. Instead, it focuses more on the passing of the years and, during the long period of time, how individuals are connected to each other.
Arudpragasam’s unique writing style dramatises the seemingly plain story. It requires rigorous technique as well as wisdom to master complicated lines, and Arudpragasam managed to develop paragraphs one after another in brilliant precision, clarity, and coherence. He brings insight to the ordinary moments of life, leading readers to dive into the ambiguous nature of those scenes: self and others, power and will. The poetic narration illuminates the significance of every trifle, which slightly resembles Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, but in a more retrospective and abstract manner. With the delicate (or even experimental) splice of phrases and clauses, Arudpragasam successfully slowed down the flow of words, and then time. Time freezes between lines and paragraphs, while thoughts move on. Thoughts are the subject of all the obscure conflicts.
In light of this, the protagonist’s journey is in fact an odyssey of cognition. As though the northern land devastated by war, there’s a desolation in every character’s mind, to which we are introduced throughout the narrative. The emotional flow often relates individuals to the deviation of the world in their eyes, under which the characters experience loss and aging. The silent vibration of the characters’ mood puts a magnifying glass between their stories and the readers; the detailed retrospects of their past reveal that, although time is said to heal, there’s but coexistence between souls and all the scars they eternally bear.
The meditation paves a winding philosophical debate on the peaceful bitterness of life. When Krishan departs from Colombo, the war has settled for years, and the climax of the livings’ tale has already been written. Only during the pause between eras can the aftermath of all the external changes be seen. For Appamma and Rani, pain doesn’t result from the ravaged history itself, but from remembering the lives taken by the conflicts, as well as the years stolen during wartime. As a result, companionship becomes a redemption as they meet each other. Finding another injured soul eventually saves them from their unconsoled melancholy and to, furthermore, rebuild spiritual connection that sustain their existence. The end of the connection was marked by the burning ritual, which is depicted as a magic hour of realisation. Through Krishan’s view, the imagery of flame brilliantly separates the two worlds, leaving blankness and regret in the ongoing parallel story.
How does a relationship reach its end? We expect an answer to every question, a reason for every incident; but in most of the time things simply happen, and our task in the occurrence is to accept. Both Rani’s death and the Krishan’s former romance surround the fundamental paradox: No one could really master their own lives as everyone wants to, and we’re all but simultaneously experiencing and observing our own stories. Life is an accumulation of daily nuances so trivial that we hardly ever perceive, A Passage North reveals. The more we learn about those details, the deeper we see through the joy and grief as time consumes us day by day.
It’s hard to imagine the brilliance between the lines without referring to the text itself. Do allow me to quote one of my favourite sentence from the book. Yes, it’s a sentence, not a paragraph:
We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire’s completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one’s life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.
If you find the lines inspiring, don’t hesitate to read the book. A Passage North puts down a remarkable period of my reading list for this year. In the time of transition, I’m glad that I met Arudpragasam. His long and winding poem certainly led me from, in his own words, the south of mind to its distant northern reaches.
