Product Description

A flamboyant beauty who once partied with the Prince of Wales and who now, in her seventh decade, has "gone native" in a Ceylonese jungle. A proud and ambitious lawyer who unwittingly seals his own fate when he dares to solve the sensational Hamilton murder case that has rocked the upper echelons of local society. A young woman who retreats from her family and the world after her infant son is found suffocated in his crib. These are among the linked lives compellingly revealed in a novel everywhere praised for its dazzling grace and savage wit -- a spellbinding tale of family and duty, of legacy and identity, a novel that brilliantly probes the ultimate mystery of what makes us who we are.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215167 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
De Kretser's accomplished second novel (after 2000's The Rose Grower), set in the author's native Sri Lanka in the years before its independence in 1948, is as much a haunting character study as it is an elusive murder mystery and a deep exploration of colonialism. At the heart of the story is Sam Obeysekere, a brilliant Ceylonese prosecutor and perfect English gentleman—who isn't, of course, English. Born into a privileged but unstable family—his "Pater" intentionally squanders their wealth; his "Mater" sleeps around, smashes expensive crystal and feels a "massive indifference" to her son; and his beloved sister seems bent on self-destruction—Sam, as an adult, focuses on his young son and his career. By all accounts, he's prospering, able to take his place beside the island's ruling class of Brits, Dutch burghers and Portuguese. But when he offers to help solve the murder of an English tea grower shot dead in the jungle, Sam makes a "central mistake" that destabilizes his life—and, in a way, the English-dominated life of his whole "mongrel" nation. De Kretser's self-deluding protagonist will no doubt remind readers of the butler in The Remains of the Day: it's a sharp portrayal of assimilation that she manages to make complex and even poignant ("Are we to become a nation capable of talking only to itself, a lunatic on the world stage?"). But Sam is his own unique and problematic self, and like everything else in this lush, uneasy world, from the secondary characters to the ghost-haunted jungle, he is capable of shocking. De Kretser's fine, brooding, mischievous style is sure to captivate fans of serious literary fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Michelle de Kretser's ambitious, gracefully composed second novel might best be described as an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Its title and opening section -- a first-person reminiscence by its central character, a public prosecutor in the former British Indian colony of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka -- prompt readers to expect a straight expository work of detection, in the great and elegant British tradition of Willkie Collins, Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.

Our narrator, one Sam (né Stanley Alban Marriott) Obeysekere is indeed a diehard fan of the mystery genre, with an emphasis on "the sublime Mrs. Christie" and her serene-yet-bloody sorties into well-born British intrigue. Sam grew up in the Ceylonese capital of Colombo as the son of a high-living native-born estate holder of "iconic largesse," who managed to work the British takeover of the island nation into a mammoth personal land grab. The sight of his father whipping the son of a favored overseer instilled in young Sam a reverence for the cold and impersonal authority of British justice. Even though the boy was being punished unfairly, Sam intuited the workings of a grander design: "It was essential to the harmonious functioning of our little community that the boy paid publicly for his crime [of stealing coconuts] in spite of his privileged standing on the estate." Here was the germination of Sam's adult career as a prosecutor, which though "a stern and thankless calling" nevertheless "has a grandeur that the sentimentality of defense can never hope to rival."

This paternalistic self-confidence, together with his passion for "the cold brilliance" of British murderers in fact and fiction, produces Sam's big break in the Ceylonese legal world, after Angus Hamilton, a British overseer of a colonial tea plantation, is brutally murdered while riding his horse home late one evening. Suspicion immediately falls on a pair of Tamil workers caught trying to pawn the victim's watch, but Sam applies the tried-and-true principles of the Christie yarn to the case. He directs the King's Advocate who is handling the investigation to a femme fatale, the wife of the victim's best friend, another British colonial hand named Gordon Taylor -- a bit of advice that propels Taylor's swift prosecution, conviction and suicide in prison.

Don't worry: This is not giving away any key element of the plot of de Kretser's novel, for The Hamilton Case is really about something far more absorbing than the tidy and classic plot twists of a British murder mystery. Its real subject is the mystery of Sam's own thwarted life and career -- "a relentless whisper of frustrated endeavor" that haunts him well past the local 15 minutes of fame he earns in consulting on the prosecution of Gordon Taylor and into the waning of British rule in the mid-20th century, when the new Ceylon has even less use for a loyal colonial native son. We learn, after the narrative shifts out of Sam's voice -- the novel's initial false start is courtesy of an unfinished manuscript of Sam's memoirs -- that his ambitions to move up the civil service ranks in colonial Ceylon come gradually to naught. As his family's fortune continues to dwindle, and he ponders a loveless marriage into a moneyed family, he thinks of his life as "a thing of cardboard and paint, and a gale raged offstage, mocking him with losses."

He has no idea. Ever drawn to things gothic and British, he sets up housekeeping with his wife in a rambling, garishly yellow seaside estate once owned by Allenby, a 19th-century English coffee baron who hanged himself after a leaf blight. The Dutch family who then came into the mansion met with a similarly lurid fate, and the place is now rumored to be haunted. His wife, Leela -- who meets her connubial marital duties by all too literally lying back and thinking of England, i.e., reciting the names of the heroines of her beloved Walter Scott historical romances -- suffers a traumatic miscarriage and becomes ever more tormented by the notion that the spirit of her dead daughter inhabits the Allenby house. His sister, Claudia, marries a former schoolmate of Sam's who has now reinvented himself, in most unlikely fashion as a fire-breathing anti-Tamil and anti-colonialist demagogue, and meets a still crueler fate.

As his reversals of fortune multiply, Sam becomes ever more resolute in his cold detachment from the all too implacable -- and, far from coincidentally, largely female -- suffering that surrounds him. He calmly waits out the inevitable exhaustion of his father's estate at the hands of his spendthrift mother, Maud, who has always uneasily co-existed with her distinguished son in a state of rigid mutual resentment, so that he can dispatch her to live alone in the family's final remaining cottage, in an isolated jungle settlement called Lokugama. There, as Sam all too confidently reckons, the once beautiful and urbane bon vivant goes slowly mad -- but not before she intuits a terrible secret gnawing away at the very core of the Obeysekere clan's fast-decaying fortunes.

To say more about that would truly be giving away far too much of Michelle de Kretser's clear-eyed, artfully constructed fable about the most comforting, and hence cruelest, myths of a single man's long and dreadfully empty life. In its patient, layered portrait of a man's colossal folly in acquiring an entirely mistaken view of his role in life, The Hamilton Case -- originally published last year in de Kretser's adopted homeland of Australia -- has earned many comparisons with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Yet while de Kretser does share some of Ishiguro's icy precision in eliciting her characters' crabbed delusions, she has produced something finally warmer and more compassionate than Ishiguro's chilling novel. For even as she constructs an elegant, pointed cautionary tale against the false comforts of overly tidy narrative certainties, de Kretser also denies readers the easy luxury of shuddering primly at Sam's inhumanity. In one of his early, characteristically deluded moments of patrician serenity Sam asks, "Who isn't drawn to what he pities?" The signal accomplishment of de Kretser's hypnotic, lush and calmly observant novel is that we feel this same sentiment on Sam's own behalf, even after we learn in the story of his life how deeply suspect it must be. That is the final, remarkable mystery that endlessly enlivens The Hamilton Case.

Reviewed by Chris Lehmann

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
De Kretser’s delicacy, honesty and evocative style, which critics compare to Agatha Christie and Somerset Maugham’s, garnered praise in all quarters. Within a wholly compelling plot, she offers psychological insights rather than icy, intellectual dissections of the characters. However, the tale shifts through four points of view, a device disliked by several critics. Still, Obeysekere’s initially pompous, verbose, and mannered memoir struck some nerves. De Kretser handles the exotic material with authority, which is unsurprising given that the Sri Lankan author emigrated to Australia at age 14.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Author shows phenomenal talent
Some of the positive reviewers have already done a terrific job, I'll just emphasize a few points. First, this book is not a mystery, thriller or legal novel, although some people may get that impression from the title. There is not a lot of fast-paced action. That would be unsuited to the book, set in a hot, wet jungle climate mostly during the British colonial period. You can't read through it fast, because it is necessary to savor the author's use of language. This is a gourmet feast. If you have never been in a jungle at night, you'll learn exactly what it looks, sounds and feels like. Her description is strikingly original: the main character's brother-in-law has a hairy body. What the author says is "one longed to ask him if he'd had an accident with a bottle of hair restorer." The idea of Sam trying so hard to be an Englishman, while the British would always see him as Sinhalese (when he gets off the train at Paddington, a woman immediately assumes he's a porter, although he's been a barrister for many years) reminds me of the predicament of Hari Kumar in The Jewel in the Crown. The story is very intricate, and it is necessary to read to the end to see what may (or may not) have really happened. There are plenty of ghosts (real and figurative)that haunt this family. I think it may be necessary to read this book more than once to fully appreciate it.

"Obey by name, Obey by nature..."
Sam Obeysekere seems never to entertain a moment of self-doubt or humility, defined by his embrace of everything British, raised in a country whose values are dictated by the strict conventions and morality of a race affronted by the inherent messiness of Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

Educated at Oxford, Sam fashions himself in the English image he covets, given his race; he practices law in Ceylon with typical pompous satisfaction, the same air of conceit that marks him by classmates at school, "Obey by name, Obey by nature", a phrase that haunts his life. As the protagonist, Sam critically examines those around him, yet he is emotionally in thrall to his beautiful mother, frightened, simpering sister and later, his wife, a woman he treats with unbelievable disdain. Sam's marriage is one of convenience, his wife a pawn for his entrenched beliefs about women and his scorn for the weaker sex. This is a man who exists isolated in the world, his days carefully constructed in the English manner, rigid and unbending; late in life, alone and estranged from his son, Obeysekere is given to some introspection; it occurs to him that everything could have been different.

Early in his career, when a planter if sound murdered, Sam is given the assignment as prosecutor. The Hamilton Case should be a career plum, an opportunity for Obeysekere to display his mastery of the courtroom, yet the case is fraught with contradictions from the beginning. Rather than believe natives could be the perpetrators, Sam prosecutes an Englishman, a friend of the murdered man. Confident he has presented the perfect scenario, Sam has nevertheless created a conundrum for himself: a white man accused of a crime against a man of color in a country ruled by British vanity and arrogance. Obeysekere's misperception of the true nature of the task is a metaphor for his life, his name forever attached to a convoluted confusion of mores, suspicion and racial innuendo, a case that is discussed for years without satisfactory conclusion.

Whether he is a victim of the British Empire, albeit a willing one, or an emotionally inept young man starving for peer acceptance, Obeysekere surrounds himself with curt denial of family and country, isolated by childhood distortions that reach like tentacles into his adult life. Every thought paraphrased in English vernacular, Sam is a product of his particular generation, as this foreign mentality usurps an entire culture for over a century. When the English finally desert the continent, Sam is adrift in a civilization that has little relevance to the Ceylon of his imagination.

Kretser's extraordinary gift shines in her translation of the ubiquitous Brits into the very marrow of certain personalities, jolly good fellows like Sam Obeysekere, shadow images of themselves. Kretser's language is otherworldly and transcendent, nuanced by time and place; this is a precise and penetrating vision of social hypocrisy against a remarkable canvas of profligate island beauty, laced with the imminence of decay. A kaleidoscope of shifting colors and shapes, The Hamilton Case is a heady mix of mystery and myth. Michelle de Kretser guards her secrets carefully, Obeysekere's raison d'etre based on a faulty premise, resulting in a life slightly skewed and greatly distorted. Although compared to Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, I found The Hamilton Case more reminiscent of C.S. Godshalk's Kalimantaan for its wealth of lush images and the contrast of Victorian convention in tenuous coexistence with a violent culture. Luan Gaines/ 2004.

Exotic setting, deep secrets and a troubled family
The author, now living is Australia, is native to Sir Lanka, the setting for this rather complex 2003 novel. The country was called Ceylon before independence in 1948 and most of the action of the story takes place then, under the yoke of an English colonialism which penetrated into every aspect of life. The first few chapters introduce our main character, Sam Obeysekere, born in the early part of the 20th century to a privileged dark skinned Ceylonese family. There are troubles though and deep secrets which are only hinted at in the beginning. But as we get to know Sam better, there are some things that start us wondering. Sam grows up, is educated at Oxford, and comes back to Sri Lanka to become a prosecuting attorney. That's when he encounters the Hamilton Case. A wealthy tea grower had been murdered. At first it was blamed on the coolies who worked on his plantation. But after a little investigation, that an Englishman was put on trial, something unthinkable at the time because this was a Ceylonese court. Even after the case ended, there were loose ends that were never tied up, but that was only halfway through the book.

As the story goes along we meet some memorable characters, most notably Sam's mother Maud. She was once of the privileged set, the type of woman who raised eyebrows in the 1920s with her flamboyance. She drank and smoked and went to parties and usually was the subject of gossip. As she aged, however, and her husband died, she depended on Sam who was now a wealthy man, married and with a son of his own. By now my own feelings about him had changed as he treated both his wife and his mother badly. Basically, Maud was allowed to live in the home of her young womanhood where Sam was born. This home was at the edge of a jungle and she was virtually a prisoner there even though she had two servants, who are themselves interesting characters. It was in this portion of the book that I learned more than I ever imagined I wanted to know about insects, snakes, plants, humidity, monsoon storms, leaking roofs and deep loneliness. And I got to love Maud who somehow never lost her spirit and energy even though she started losing her mind.

The author uses words well, a flowery style that seems a bit too over-decorative in places, but yet is entirely appropriate to the characterizations of the people and the worship of the English language at the time. Through it all though, there is a rumble of discontent, and we're also introduced to the revolutionary who once was educated in the same English school as Sam. He was also privileged but chose be "of the people", insisting on wearing sarong at all times, even with an English jacket. Early on, he marries Sam's sister. But that is another part of this convoluted story that at first seems disjointed but yet all comes together in the final chapters.

One of the things I loved about this book is because it took me to a time and place I knew nothing about. It enriched my understanding of colonialism and its many effects which still resonate today. And it also introduced me to some very memorable characters, each of them flawed in different ways. This book was quite an undertaking for the author and I applaud her efforts even though there were parts that dragged a little. No doubt about it though, this is a fine book. No wonder it was chosen by The New York Times as one of their notable books of the year.