Shrugging off truths

Randy Boyagoda’s second novel tells the story of a boy abandoned in Ceylon who grows up to pursue a life of belligerent self-interest, Lucy Scholes writes

An elephant at a temple in Sri Lanka. Kandy, the main character in Beggar’s Feast, works at a variety of jobs, including a stint as an elephant tender on a cargo ship. Palani Mohan / Reportage by Getty imagesShow less

At the beginning of the 20th century, in the small Ceylon village of Sudugama, a young boy’s fate is decided by ancient traditions and superstitions. His birth chart divines a troubling future: he “would never give when he could take, never serve when he could be served”, in short, he will “ruin” his parents.

Thereafter abandoned at the local temple, he endures three years of abuse at the hands of the monks before, at 13, he strikes out for independence, making his way to the port city of Colombo. He travels as a “blank slate”, reborn and renamed Sam Kandy among the hustle and bustle, emerging fully formed but without family or history, only his future beckoning enticingly in front of him: a life of his own where he will answer to no one; a life of aspiration and achievement; a life in which he will always get his own way.

On these “bright and steamy knife-edge” city streets “you could always find something to eat so long as you had teeth for bones and a taste for marrow”, and Kandy’s teeth are sharp and his taste buds indiscriminate.

As other reviewers have pointed out, Sam Kandy, the hero of Canadian-born Sri Lankan Randy Boyagoda's luminous second novel Beggar's Feast, has been cast from the same mould as Fitzgerald's character Jay Gatsby and Mad Men's Don Draper. Kandy is a papier-mâché creation, each sticky strip of paper a different fiction to the last, he's a man always hiding from the truth: "his answers about birth date and birth hour had moved around like sea-crabs and wall lizards". From the moment he's uprooted from Sudugama, he continues to shrug off subsequent lives with the sinister ease of a snake shedding its skin: "And so he was taken to robes and shaved to skin to begin a new life of desire and suffering, defeat and triumph, from which would come another, and another, and another, and then, at last, after one hundred years of steel and pride, fever and speed, another."

Before long, he finds himself in the bowels of a cargo ship heading for Australia, looking after a troop of elephants being shipped across the ocean, taking the place of a boy trampled to death by one of the beasts in front of Kandy’s eyes on the quayside – yes, the metaphor is as heavy-handed as the animal’s powerful foot, but it works. After leading, then ruthlessly sacrificing a gang of young pickpockets, Kandy inveigles himself into the employ of a wealthy businessman, stepping, quite literally, into the shoes of the man’s deceased son. But this, Kandy soon discovers, doesn’t win him a place in the family, so he forsakes his benefactor, taking to the seas again. By route of the back rooms of the brothels of Singapore, he arrives back in Colombo, where he schemes his way into business as a shipping agent.

There is, however, a method to his conquest – the ultimate goal is Sudugama, the birth-village to which he eventually returns victorious but unrecognisable. Churning up the dust of the country tracks with his motor car, he heads straight for the Walauwa, the manor house of the head of the village, the Ralahami, and asks for the man’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Nothing, it seems, is beyond his conniving grasp, no underhanded means too low for Kandy, no one immune to ending up his victim – the tricks of his trade blackmail, bribery, even murder.

And so, too, just as Gatsby and Draper are nothing without the context of their time and place – Gatsby is the American Jazz Age and Draper is Madison Avenue in the 1960s – Kandy’s backdrop is his country’s often violent road to independence, the story of the nation reflected through the defeats and triumphs of this one man. These men are like shifting sands, permanent but ever-changing; just when you think you know them, they slip through your fingers.

Kandy dominates the book but, even at the end, he remains something of an enigma — a man who retains our sympathy despite the terrible things we’ve seen him do. He’s both instantly recognisable but fiercely unique — a creation of rare talent on Boyagoda’s part and an apt protagonist for a novel of such raw, bright brilliance.

Lucy Scholes writes for a variety of publications including The Independent, The Daily Beast and The Times Literary Supplement.