Lost innocence as empires are born to die

The year is 1964, in Ceylon, Jay and Kairo have debut meeting, “ I needed a guide, a hero, illumination, Jay, I now know, needed an acolyte” says Kairo, the narrator of the book, when  Ceylon is on the brink of change with schools closed, the government in disarray, the press is under threat and the religious right are flexing their muscles. Kairo’s hard-working mother blows off steam at her cha-cha-cha classes.

Two boys who come from dynamically opposite backgrounds, one wealthy, the other more ordinary, but both have something the other needs. This need creates a strong and dangerous relationship.

Sixty-five-year-old Romesh Gunesekera, born in Colombo in 1954, a decade before the events that run through Suncatcher, he moved to England in 1971.

Suncatcher highlights the world of magnetic teenage, a budding naturalist and rebel born Jay and Kairo, in which the boys tour the jungle for bird sightings, pickup Batman, Zane Grey’s western, Beano and Commando comics from Ismail’s book store.

Kairo’s father gambles on horses in England and is about to land on the wrong side of the rising wave of Sinhalese nationalism, and Jay’s family is fragmented with fractures.

When Kairo visits Jay’s massive white gilded castle with secret passages called home for the first time he is mesmerised by the aquariums and aviaries, Jay’s wealthy father fuelled by anger, glamorous mother Sonya and by his uncle Elvin’s collection of cars and horses, a suave and worldly is his encourager.

Kairo’s life seems tame as he shuttles between Mr. Ismail’s bookstore and reads the young socialist at his father’s urging, but most of the time waiting to grow up, and awaiting childhood’s demons to die essentially waiting for my life to start”. On Jay’s arrival, Kairo is jolted out of his passivity.

Jay introduces him to a girl Niromi as Kairo begins to understand the price of privilege and embarks on a journey of devastating consequences.

Luminous, graceful and wild  Suncatcher, charts the loss of innocence and our recurring search for love or consolation bringing those extraordinary lives into our own.  Jay commits an act of deliberate recklessness that places another boy at risk, without thinking about the consequences of his actions. 

Suncatcher delves into the darker elements of friendship- the enthralment, the fatal attraction exerted by the charmer over the charmed, the places into which one will dive, the other drawn along against his better instincts, laden with heavy-footed symbolism.

Jay. Kairo and their families are as caged as any of Jay’s birds, and Gunesekera highlights lost freedom.

Suncatcher is a portrait of a country – Ceylon before it became Sri Lanka – exposing the moment before it loses its innocence.

“I wanted to begin again, with no bad things ever having to happen” Kairo opens up a familiar heartache.

Suncatcher by Romesh Gunesekera, Bloomsbury £16.99, 312 pages.