Funny Boy, by Shyam Selvadurai is a book about “growing up gay in Sri Lanka” (Kirkus Reviews) and for that I would love to love this book. Books that can take new information or a difficult topic and make it interesting and engaging to me as a reader are easily my favorite types of books. It is for those reasons that I do like this book. Before reading Funny Boy I probably couldn’t have found Sri Lanka on a map. I certainly had no understanding of its people, culture, or the violent tensions that have been tearing the country apart for a very long time. In terms of educating me about the setting, the people, and the culture of Sri Lanka, this book was extremely effective.
The problem, for me, arises when confronting the rest of the book. Arjie is the main character, the “funny boy” who grows up in front of us and it is through his slow understanding of his own sexuality and his immersion into the tension filled adult world that we are introduced to all of those things. He is the medium through which the information in the book is presented and he is blindingly uninteresting.
One of the most important aspects the Main Character of a book should have is willful activity. In order to relate to a character, the audience needs to see in that person something they think they are. We, as humans, believe that we have wants and needs and that we are actively pursuing the things we want. Therefore, a main character should have distinct wants and needs and be actively pursuing them. For the most part Arjie doesn’t. Yes, he fights at the beginning to stay in the girls’ group, so that he can keep playing bride-bride, but after one serious confrontation about the issue he simply gives up. Later we see him make a decision and stand up for himself and his boyfriend by messing up the poetry reading in front of the school. But what does it get him? He does it to defend himself and his boyfriend against the principal but we never see if it works or not. Is Shehan saved? Does the Principal lose control of the school? There is no emotional pay-off for the reader in that conflict. Instead we are merely dumped into the next bit of plot, completely unconnected in almost every way from the previous issues. In a way just like Arjie is dragged along by other, far more interesting and willful characters, into their lives and their stories. In a way, it almost seems like this story would be more interesting with just about any of the supporting characters replacing Arjie as the main narrator.
The other thing that bothered me about the book was its one-foot-in-each-world feeling, not about the conflicting emotions Arjie has, but the writing style. In a lot of ways, this books seems like it can’t decide if it’s supposed to be an adult novel or a YA novel. It has many of the criteria of YA lit, with the first person narrator, the teenage main character, and the coming of age issues, but it is written in the voice of an adult. It isn’t merely first person past tense, it is first person nostalgic, a look back at the narrator’s childhood. It puts a distance between the audience and the immediacy of what is happening that detracts from the action.
That being said, the prose in this book is very pretty and, as I said, the book is very informative. But overall I would say that reading this book is like drinking a glass of apple juice with a layer of salt in the bottom. Everything tastes just a little bit off and every so often you get a really nasty mouthful.
Works Cited:
Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. San Diego, CA: Harvest, 1994. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment