The Hamilton Case

Michelle De Kretser

A flamboyant beauty who once partied with the Prince of Wales and who now, in her seventh decade, has “gone native” in a Ceylonese jungle.

A proud, Oxford-educated lawyer who unwittingly seals his own professional fate when he dares to solve the sensational Hamilton murder case that has rocked the upper echelons of local society. A young woman who retreats from her family and the world after her infant brother is found suffocated in his crib. These are among the linked lives compellingly portrayed in a novel everywhere hailed for its dazzling grace and savage wit – a spellbinding tale of family and duty, of legacy and identity, a novel that brilliantly probes the ultimate mystery of what makes us who we are.

De Kretser’s accomplished second novel (after 2000’s The Rose Grower ), set in the author’s native Sri Lanka in the years before its independence in 1948, is as much a haunting character study as it is an elusive murder mystery and a deep exploration of colonialism. At the heart of the story is Sam Obeysekere, a brilliant Ceylonese prosecutor and perfect English gentleman—who isn’t, of course, English.

Born into a privileged but unstable family—his “Pater” intentionally squanders their wealth; his “Mater” sleeps around, smashes expensive crystal and feels a “massive indifference” to her son; and his beloved sister seems bent on self-destruction—Sam, as an adult, focuses on his young son and his career. By all accounts, he’s prospering, able to take his place beside the island’s ruling class of Brits, Dutch burghers and Portuguese. But when he offers to help solve the murder of an English tea grower shot dead in the jungle, Sam makes a “central mistake” that destabilizes his life—and, in a way, the English-dominated life of his whole “mongrel” nation.

De Kretser’s self-deluding protagonist will no doubt remind readers of the butler in The Remains of the Day : it’s a sharp portrayal of assimilation that she manages to make complex and even poignant (“Are we to become a nation capable of talking only to itself, a lunatic on the world stage?”). But Sam is his own unique and problematic self, and like everything else in this lush, uneasy world, from the secondary characters to the ghost-haunted jungle, he is capable of shocking. De Kretser’s fine, brooding, mischievous style is sure to captivate fans of serious literary fiction.

QUOTE — Michelle De Kretser

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