The timeless mysteries of yearning and striving

The island republic of Sri Lanka -- formerly known as Ceylon -- is slightly larger than West Virginia. Predominantly Buddhist with a Hindu minority, it was occupied by the Portuguese and then the Dutch until the British took possession of the Pearl of the Indian Ocean in the late 1700s, reaping the wealth of her tea and rubber plantations until the general blowup of empire in 1948.

Such bare facts underlie Michelle de Kretser’s opulently atmospheric second novel, “The Hamilton Case,” set in the author’s native land. Presenting itself as a classic murder mystery (with an emphatic nod to Agatha Christie) and spanning the better part of the last century, “The Hamilton Case” unfolds at an old-school deliberate pace. In hewing for the most part to the occluded viewpoint of one Sam Obeysekere, an Oxford-educated Sinhalese born to extravagant wealth squandered by extravagant parents, the narrative can seem to meander and retrace its steps, driven much like any human life by obscure personal compulsions. But the impression of serendipity proves dead wrong. At the close, a chain of revelations sews together chance and innuendo in surgically tight stitches, for a radical restructuring of the inexplicably painful past.

“Obey by name, Obey by nature,” taunts Sam’s nemesis, the future demagogue Don Jayasinghe, when the boys first clash at school. The jibe aims at Sam’s tattling to British masters, as well as his forefathers’ alacrity in adopting the religions of successive hegemonies. “I could have pointed out,” the adult Sam reflects, “that what Jaya had said of the Obeysekeres was equally true ... of all our leading families. I could have argued that there is no shame in adaptability and keeping an open mind. But Jaya didn’t operate within the parameters of rational argument. His popularity was founded on the base instincts ... the cheap laugh, the dagger in the spine.”

This early passage could stand as a DNA sample of Sam’s character. There is the “I could have” -- indicating a thing left undone, amid an icky whiff of cowardice. There is the pompous egotism. Rationality undermined by rationalization. A sense that this man likely misreads those around him, not to mention himself. Finally, there is that ugliest of passions, envy, along with the warped talent it engenders -- spite.

In other words, as the teller of his own tale for the first third of the novel, Sam presents all the virulent symptoms of the unreliable narrator. What’s more, although he suffers primally from unrequited love for his dashing, icy mother, and from an awful inner isolation, it’s hard to dredge up empathy for such a self-absorbed wannabe. Even after the novel’s somewhat awkward gear-shift to third person, the discomfort of Sam’s unreliability persists, broken only when the point of view changes, most notably to his mother, Maud. Penniless, incarcerated by Sam in a decaying country estate house, she flirts with madness as she once flirted with men. These are virtuoso passages in which De Kretser details the inexorable shames of aging with dismaying intimacy.

When it was published last year in Britain and Australia, “The Hamilton Case” was likened to Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day.” Even more striking parallels emerge to that author’s grand recent novel, “When We Were Orphans”: not only in the studied voice of the protagonist, but in his Euro-Asian dilemma and the flight into Holmesian fantasy.

Sam’s nature predestines him for law, with an affinity for prosecution. The “Case” of the title revolves around the murder of an English tea planter and is plotwise something of a red herring. While Sam’s stroke of insight bolsters his career and reputation, the whole affair plays out in only a few pages. Its true function in the novel is as an accompanying metaphor, an echo to the mystery festering in the heart of Sam Obeysekere.

The most vital organ of “The Hamilton Case” is neither plot nor character, but style. The denouement leaves an itch of incredulity, and one has met Uncle Toms like Sam before, and fey vamps like Maud and opaque Ophelias like Sam’s sister. It is the style that seduces, a somersaulting bird of paradise. Words like “dado,” “aperient” and “embrocation” crop up in tropical profusion. Sam’s Victorianisms transmute to poignant irony, Maud’s losses bloom into poetic exactitude. Given De Kretser’s gifts and insight into the colonial disease, one wishes the novel had taken a fiery leap beyond the middle-class domestic drama, however in demand that genre may be. She’s almost there. As one of Sam’s colleagues comments, “We crave finality, an end to interpretation, not seeing that this too, the tying up of all loose ends in the last chapter, is only a storyteller’s ruse.”

Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”