Sand Trap

This is Chandraratnas second tale of life and death in the desert; his first novel,Mirage,was received with gratifying acclaim. The blurb describes Chandraratna as being born in Sri Lanka. Like most of the characters in the book,he has had experience working in hospitals in Saudi Arabia,though one is not told what he did there,before moving to Northamptonshire in the UK,where he now lives with his family. So,one can assume that he has parlayed his experiences in Saudi,into a work of fiction,though it is more in the nature of neatly observed vignettes,recorded in black and white with a box camera.

In An Eye For An Eye,he makes the mistake of taking up the thread of his first book where it had reached a moment of tragic intensity,with the false indictment of Latifa. A young woman from the village,she is unable to adjust to life in a shanty town,with Sayeed,her husband who works as a porter in the hospital,and feels lost. She is to be stoned to death; her alleged lover is to be beheaded in public,by order of the local mullah. Sayeed is mad with grief,and in this novel he has to decide whether to take revenge or not.

It is stirring stuff if you have been fed the usual line about how the discovery of oil has destroyed the ancient culture of the tribes that once used to traverse the burning sands of Saudi Arabia. One has only to recall the luminous prose of the early desert travellers like Wilfred Thesiger,who lived among the Bedu tribes and became a part of them,and Gavin Maxwell,to mourn the difference. Of course,both these early writers had predicted the end of a traditional way of life. Chandraratnas story only re-affirms the end of a harsh pact between man and nature. There are passages that evoke the strange beauty of the landscape,but for the most part,the author seems to kick at the carcass of events that underline images of decadent Arab kingdoms and fundamentalists on the rampage.

He should have stuck to the first book,the lone camel in the desert.