Roma Tearne has followed up her much lauded Mosquito with a powerful Sri Lankan family saga, writes Bron Sibree.
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The first thing you notice about Sri Lankan-born novelist and artist Roma Tearne is her voracious passion for everything from politics and art through to the mundane details of daily life. That and her sense of humour.
Mention, for instance, the laudatory reviews bestowed on her Costa Award short-listed debut novel of love and war, Mosquito, and she chooses to mimic the voices of those British reviewers who brought up the subject of her age, "and here we have somebody in their 50s", intones Tearne, before launching into an impassioned explanation of why it is that people who've chalked up some life experience make better novelists.
The 53-year-old is also quick to tell you that, after spending over two decades of her life working as an artist and filmmaker in the UK, she is still getting used to her new identity as a novelist. "It's really very strange to see how Mosquito took off and had a life of its own in a way that you have no control over. It's all happened so quickly."
Indeed, literary life has moved remarkably swiftly for the Oxford-based Tearne since she picked up her pen just five years ago. With her second novel, Bone China, released and praise for her first still resounding in her ears, Tearne describes her inclusion on the short-list of the 2007 Costa Awards "as a kind of treat really. I didn't expect anything. I had no contacts in the literary world, all my friends were artists.
"I wrote a novel when I was 19, but didn't do anything with it, because I didn't know what to do with it, then I just went off to art school, and made a living, with great difficulty I might add, as a painter. So that by the time I came to write, it really was a compulsion. So it's really very strange."
Stranger perhaps - for a debut novelist at least - is the astonishing range and power of Mosquito, which dazzled critics and readers alike with its vivid portrayal of the horrors of Sri Lanka's civil war.
Set in Sri Lanka, London and Venice, it tells the story of Theo Samarajeeva, a successful author who returns to his homeland after the death of his Italian wife, only to fall in love with a young artist, Nulani, which brings devastating consequences to them both.
Lyrical and profoundly moving, it drew comparisons with Ondaatje's The English Patient, and was described by the Costa judges as "poignant, exquisitely told and a captivating view of unusual love and survival".
In many ways Bone China, which tells the story of a Sri Lankan family in exile, is a more conscious, restrained novel.
Set in England and Sri Lanka, it spans three generations as it tells the tale of Grace de Silva, wife of the spendthrift but charming Aloysius, her five children, and a deliciously politically incorrect pet mynah bird called Jasper.
But Grace has a secret, and when Christopher, the rebel of the family, is caught up in the brewing civil unrest, tragedy follows. The family is torn apart when four of the children decide to leave for England, where they struggle to find a foothold.
Tearne's portrayal of this eccentric and prosperous family's gradual disintegration is a sharply observed, often comic, often heartbreaking tale that brings home the costs of both war and migration.
Seamed with love and loss, the family's rivalries seem only to underscore those national jealousies that triggered Sri Lanka's long-running civil war.
For Tearne, who was born to a Tamil father and a Sinhalese mother and experienced firsthand the deep rifts between the different sides of her extended family, it was a case of "imputing stuff that I felt as a child". Tearne has drawn criticism from the subcontinent, where some critics have accused her of writing an "imperialistic sort of fairytale", and from members of the Sri Lankan community and her extended family, who were angry at the way she portrayed Sri Lanka's civil war in Mosquito. But she remains unapologetic.
"I'm not interested in the politics of it. I'm not taking sides. I'm interested in the human casualties of war. And I really think that the only answer is integration ... They can't go on killing people."
With a third novel about immigration and integration all but completed and a fourth under way, Tearne says: "I've no idea why I write. It's such a lonely business. Painting is quite a jolly activity by comparison. But it's the only thing I want to do. I'm very, very sure of that now.
"When I was a child my mother used to say, 'You're a liar' because I was always lying, but actually I wasn't, I was just making up stories. And so I think I wasn't a complete person until the day I began to write."
- Detours, HoS
