The Kendal Residents’ Website is delighted to offer you another book review by resident Hope Cooke.
It follows:
“Recent acquisitions of the KoH library include Amnesty by Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga, Scribner 2020.
“I found myself literally holding my breath reading the last chapters of this taut thriller which also happens to be the most powerful tale of the ‘undocumented’ I have ever read despite the blooming of the canon as desperate global migration grows. In the case of Amnesty, the undocumented protagonist is not one of the world’s most wretched refugees by the harsh standards of today’s asylum rules, simply a lower middle-class Sri Lankan who happened to be on the wrong side of its civil war, a Tamil casually tortured in the cause. Danny, as Dhananjaya Rajaratnam is known, is not one of the miserable boat people trying to reach Australia by sea who get stuck for their lifetime on miserable ministate islands paid by the Aussies to defend its shores, but a student with funding to buy his way out of danger in Sri Lanka by enrolling in an Australian college sight unseen.
“The college turns out to be a scam, so Danny forfeits his student visa for life without papers after failing an official refugee screening. Forced to work at menial jobs off the books due to his lack of legal status, Danny, despite his penchant for libraries, his middle-class Australian girlfriend, his essentially knowing, cosmopolitan views, has to live as a chameleon dodging eye contact with brown skinned Sydney dwellers who might sense his illicit status, kowtowing to employers who know his vulnerability, pretending he’s a vegetarian to fit his girlfriend’s idealized notion of him. Even the vacant but relentless stare of a (blue-eyed) baby on a tram frightens him. Even non-human beings connected with the State have this power: the flare of a police horse’s nostrils a danger signal to his limbic brain.
“Midpoint in this slim novel Danny has the misfortune not just to witness a homicide, or to believe he does, but to alert the possible killer (who is known to him) that he has witnessed the deed. His already hypervigilant brain grows fervid with fear as he races through the city haunted by a possible killer as well as an unforgiving government with possibly the harshest migration laws of any ‘western’ land. The exquisitely observed detail of Sydney’s neighborhoods that Danny runs through is like Leopold Bloom’s tour of Dublin on speed combined with a bad acid trip. (I’m told.) Through his heightened subjectivity the city undulates into a terrifying inscape lending no shelter. There is a Dostoevskyan twist however—as much as Danny wants to hide, his middle class morality wants to see justice served or, even more deeply, some part of him wants to assume agency. BUT, if he turns the murderer in, the authorities will learn whom he is: not a civic do-gooder, not even a man, simply an ‘illegal’—what should he do? His pursuer can’t be far; the taunting cellphone calls come closer and closer…even writing this now I can scarcely breathe.
TEN STARS out of FIVE.”