THE SWIMMER
Roma Tearne
Harper Press, $32.99, pbk
She became an international "name" in literary fiction with her 2009 novel Brixton Beach, like all her work based on events in her home country (which she left at age 10), and especially about the consequences of the civil war with the Tamil Tigers.
If this sounds an unlikely basis for a growing wealth of really top-notch story-telling, then I suggest you read all her books, and especially her latest novel, The Swimmer.
It is set in Britain one hot summer in the Suffolk coastal country, atmospherically reproduced here in spare, visually descriptive prose, around the life of Ben, a youthful Tamil doctor arrived by illegal means from Sri Lanka, who is working (and being exploited) as a labourer on a farm while awaiting the hopeless prospect of being granted asylum.
He meets Ria, 18 years his senior, the occupant of an isolated home outside the village - she finds him swimming in the river bordering her property - and in time they become lovers.
So we learn Ben's story of dislocation; Ria's story of isolation; and Ben's mother's story, left back in Sri Lanka fighting for survival as the fascists take charge after the Tigers are defeated, and coping with the loss of the unknowable life of her only son.
A dissonance is provided by Ria's eccentric and wise ancient female neighbour, Lydia.
But this is modern Britain, after all: elements of the story are bound to include - and do - intolerance and race relations, how citizens of the old Commonwealth are being so contemptuously treated today by the mother country; the prospects of a mixed-race eventually emerging with real power and the fear this is causing; and, finally, the shocking consequences of the uniformed authority of the State acting without restraint.
The Swimmer is chiefly a love story, beautifully told from the perspectives of three utterly different women, but it is also a murder story; even, underlying everything, a story about climate change and the bleak prospects of human survival.
Above all it is about loss - although there is a kind of redemption by the end.
I don't want to over-egg the pudding but this book seems to me to represent story-telling as it ought to be, written with a painter's eye.
• Bryan James is the Books Editor.
