Cooking up a Storm : A servant keeps it together in a disintegrating world : REEF, <i> By Romesh Gunesekera (The New Press: $20; 190 pp.)</i>

It was 10 years or so into the bloody political and ethnic violence that, since the late 1950s, has afflicted the beautiful island that once was Ceylon and now is Sri Lanka:

“All over the globe revolutions erupted, dominoes tottered and guerrilla war came of age; the world’s first woman prime minister--Mrs. Bandaranaike--lost her spectacular premiership on our small island, and I learned the art of good housekeeping.”

“Reef,” a novel about a youth who comes precariously together in a disintegrating world--like learning to fly in a plane that has already begun its fatal corkscrew plunge--shares the fragrant sweetness of its setting and its agony of change. It works them into the first-person narrative of a poor farmer’s son for whom a job is wangled in Colombo as apprentice houseboy to Mr. Salgado, an eccentric intellectual who is the island’s leading marine biologist.

Romesh Gunesekera has taken the risk of telling a large story in the tiny, almost cloying constriction of meals, recipes, furniture polishing and a boy’s besotted reverence for the figure for whom he performed these tasks. There are times in “The Reef”--the loving preparation of a festive tea, a nerve-racking experiment with a Christmas turkey--when we could almost be reading a wry food-page feature about the perils and pleasures of Third World cookery. We are reading something quite different.

When Triton, the narrator, comes to work for Salgado, it is not simply a job. It is passage from the primitive countryside to the complex tasks and ceremonies that mark the highly civilized world where people read books, govern countries, enjoy wealth and travel to England. (And, as he will learn, where all these things wax and wane and collapse in struggles as bloody and primitive as any endured in the countryside.) Triton’s reverence for his work and his master is the page’s reverence for the knight he serves and for the order of chivalry that mastered the universe until the coming of the crossbow.

When the departure of Salgado’s cook and principal houseboy leaves Triton to do everything alone, it is not a burden handed to him but a sword. Through ordeal and peril to glory: He works and studies to become the perfect cook, butler, valet and housecleaner, and to please Salgado and Salgado’s ravishing girlfriend, Miss Nili. Thus, after a tea at which Nili ate every one of Triton’s meat patties and lavishly praised--and consumed--his cashew-studded love-cake:

“ ‘Triton made it,’ Mr. Salgado said. Triton made it. Clear, pure and unstinting. His voice at those moments would be a channel cut from heaven to earth right through the petrified morass of all our lives, releasing a blessing like water springing from a river-head, from a god’s head. It was bliss. My coming of age.”

It would be only the first coming of age. Triton’s account begins long afterward on a cold night in London where he has lived for many years and has managed to set up, after hard struggles, a successful restaurant. Cooking is no longer a joyful salvation but simply a way to survive. It is the particular achievement of Gunesekera that he has been able to weave into Triton’s buoyantly and comically ecstatic account of life as a servant, more complex glimpses of Salgado, Nili, Sri Lanka and himself, and of the hard things that change was bringing to all of them.

Salgado is a wonderful mix of abstraction and urgency. He drifts about the house like a cogitating wraith until Nili smites him; whereupon he fusses continually. He works himself into a tizzy over the Christmas turkey--16 pounds; will it burn? will it rot?--while the now-adept Triton handles things with Jeeves-like panache. Nili, sexy and frail, turns Triton into a buzzing circuitry of desire. The fact that he reveres her and his master too much to do anything about it only makes the erotic charge more powerful.

The growing strife and displacements of Sri Lanka and the world infiltrate the feudal glory of Triton’s kitchen. Salgado’s devastation at the loss of Nili is only a variation of a slower loss. Political polarization and radical urgencies endanger and ultimately destroy his scientific mission: the ecological preservation and careful development of the Sri Lankan coastal waters, with a particular view to protecting the fragile coral reefs offshore.

Coral is Salgado’s passion and the book’s central metaphor. A coral reef is alive, but only at its skin. Its billions of tiny organisms multiply and build on the surface, leaving their calcified bodies as the reef’s mass. The violence of politics and change, in this image, destroy the living integument while seeking to give it more vital forms. Civilization is at the surface, not deep down; destroy the surface and the life that preserves it will die.

Gunesekera’s point, like his coral, is not calcified but alive. As Salgado leaves his post and takes a modest job in Britain--a number of his friends have been killed in the growing violence--his life changes but does not come to an end. Neither does Triton’s; he accompanies his master and continues to serve him, though more modestly. He shops at supermarkets and defrosts vegetables for supper. Encouraged and helped by Salgado, he reads, studies and starts a snack bar that will eventually grow.

The rich but fragile culture that the two of them had known has perished in violence and change. They retain their humanity. Triton will stay, work and prosper. Well, badly--the author makes no effort to say; the verb is now, the adverb comes later. Without prospects, Salgado returns to Sri Lanka to take care of Nili, who has become an invalid. Humanity means using whatever is left, even when it is only the past. Before Triton drives him to the airport, his former master tells him: “You know, Triton, we are only what we remember, nothing more . . . all we have is the memory of what we have done or not done; whom we might have touched, even for a moment.” Perhaps, after all, coral would talk that way.