The author follows their award-winning debut with Mister, Mister, a spikily-narrated picaresque
The voice of the next book was there for Gunaratne right away: “Spiky, and intriguing in a way that was discomforting”.
For the answer, Gunaratne looked to the picaresque, the 18th-century genre that often centres on a lovable, occasionally off-putting narrator who endures life’s peaks and troughs before blossoming into a fully formed being. Not so for Yahya, who Gunaratne talks about as if he were a sweet but stressful friend who’s taken up a lot of their time lately. “It seemed he wants to unravel and resist the idea of cohesion,” Gunaratne says.
In conversation, Gunaratne is both careful — continually clarifying previous statements in ever-evolving but always articulate sentences — and playful, name-checking the book’s influences, from queer theorists to musicians . The figure we return to, and the one who looms largest over, is Charles Dickens. Yahya’s mother is called Estella, the detention centre — both punchline and gut punch — is called Bleaker House.
Revisiting these epoch-defining events, whether war, torture or terrorism, was gruelling, especially while also handling the demands of being a parent. It became a time of what Gunaratne refers to as “self-inquiry”: “When you’re sitting with the novel, and you’re questioning and pulling at threads to do with identity and performativity, you can’t help but clarify things about yourself.
It does not — it cannot — escape either of our attentions that, the morning we speak, Shamima Begum lost her appeal against the ruling that stripped the 23-year-old of her British citizenship. It’s a useful, if heavy, reminder that these issues are as alive as ever. “I don’t think that these are neat stories that have confined conclusions — even with the appeal being overruled, that’s not the end of the story. That’s not the end of the question about what Britishness or what citizenship means.
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