Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize - A Reader's Review
A young man travels across his home country of Sri Lanka for a funeral, reflecting on his family, romantic relationships and the turbulent national history. Started well but a meandering, plodding plot and style left me unmoved and wondering what he was trying to say. And with a lot of 'telling not showing', it made me think of a person who finds their own inner musings infinitely more interesting than any one else would! I enjoyed learning a bit more about Sri Lanka, which I don't know much about, but even there it read at times more like an earnest essay about the Tamil Tigers than a novel. I'm no expert but it seemed to me the writing lacks maturity - but looking at his picture on the back cover so does its author. Or maybe that's what it's like getting old - even the Booker Prize authors seem young ? - Tanya Carus
It begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother's former care-giver, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances, at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall. The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier while living in Delhi, bringing with it the stirring of distant memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for the funeral, so begins a passage into the soul of an island devastated by violence.
Written with precision and grace, A Passage North is a poignant memorial for the missing and the dead, and a luminous meditation on time, consciousness, and the lasting imprint of the connections we make with others.
