Disclaimer: contains spoilers.
2024 saw a few too many boy-meets-girl comedies, but this year Shankari Chandran is delivering a kick in the guts to your summer read. Her latest novel, Unfinished Business, takes us back to the Sri Lankan civil war in the style of a CIA thriller. And in a thrilling twist, Chandran herself has spoken to Honi about the novel and her writing process.
This is the first time Chandran has explored the thriller genre, which she said was “a great fit when exploring the macro issues (e.g. super powers vying for supremacy across the world) and the micro issues (e.g. the impact of political intervention/non-intervention on the lives of normal people).”
Chandran’s James Bond-esque protagonist is a young Australian-American woman called Ellie Harper, who never hesitates before charging into conflict. Harper works for the CIA, and is sent on a mission to Sri Lanka in both 2005 and 2009, during the civil war. It was refreshing to see a strident female character being given this prominent a role, and even more so to see other fascinating female characters, of varying moral compasses, in positions of authority.
However, this is a deviation from Chandran’s usual characters, because of her American-Australian background. Chandran said that “Ellie Harper (Ellora Harischandran) needed to be American so she could join the CIA. I wanted her in the CIA so I could explore America’s role in global conflicts (past and present). I also wanted her to be Australian because I’m Australian, and she needs reasons to return here for a new mission in the future.”
The novel begins with the murder of a journalist, Ameena Fernando, who criticised the Sri Lankan government without reserve and wrote an obituary to identify her alleged killer, to be published after she was killed. Ameena and Ellie’s similarities are frequently brought into focus, with both portrayed as strong, fearless, and occasionally heedless of the life-threatening danger that both face as formidable women.
The symbolism in Unfinished Business is significant and purposeful; Ellie and her colleague Arjuna often find themselves pursued by clocks of motorcyclists, acting as a recurring motif, at once threatened and protected by the streets of civilians. The gaze of these strangers is redolent of the power of our own testimony as witnesses to atrocities. This sea of faces at once hides assassins but prevents them from doing anything. These frenetic moments of pursuit feel so powerful, at times skirting the edge of reality but always keeping up the frantic pace.
Something that took me a while to get used to was the frequent flipping between time periods, namely 2005 and 2009. They represent two times when Ellie visited Sri Lanka from America on CIA missions, when she intervened (or interfered, according to local authorities) in this sprawling war that destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands. The grisly conflict in both time periods sometimes felt hard to distinguish from each other.
Although Chandran’s trademark has been to write about the Sri Lankan civil war and its enduring effect on culture and memory, this is the first time she has written exclusively within the period of the civil war, as well as setting the novel within Sri Lanka itself. This provided a much-needed urgency and immediacy that slotted neatly into the thriller style.
Chandran explained, “I wanted to litigate the injustices that took place at the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, using fiction, because the mechanisms of justice failed to do so. I wanted to record what happens when power is absolute and exercised with impunity. I wanted to show what happens when superpowers play God in other countries; and when freedom fighters hurt the people they purport to protect. Genocide, statehood, the right to exist – the story of Sri Lanka is the story of every place and every point in human history. Somehow we forget and repeat the crimes. This novel is my way of remembering and reminding.”
She weaves history and narrative together beautifully, with a fine balance between fiction and vigorously researched nonfiction. Despite the monumental challenge of lining up plot points with real events, the novel succeeds in retaining believability without sacrificing pace or interest. It is a tricky subject matter, and with such a complex and bloody history sometimes the finer details of the civil war are lost in the fast-moving pace of the thriller genre, particularly for those who are not already familiar with Sri Lankan history.
Something that I appreciated greatly was how Chandran doesn’t spare accountability for anyone, and shines a piercing light on the guilt and complicity of every character in the book. One of the most complex examples is Gajan, a young Sri Lankan boy who is radicalised into the Tamil Tigers and trained to be a suicide bomber. A boy who has no support or security, Gajan views the Tamil Tigers as a way to defend his homeland against tyranny. Gajan is one of the most important characters because he represents the gulf between good intentions and desperation, when violence seems like the only way to fight violence.
The empathy with which Chandran treats her characters shines through on every page, particularly with characters like Gajan. She unflinchingly confronts the ugliness of the war and the hypocrisy of those who try to ‘help’ resolve it, including an interventionist CIA and profiteering Chinese diplomats.
In her acknowledgements, Chandran says that the novel was inspired by Sri Lankan aid workers and journalists who were assassinated in 2006 and 2009 respectively. She quotes Human Rights Watch in saying “tyranny has a witness.” She commented on these interview experiences to Honi, saying “I was so fortunate to interview… people who risk their lives to seek the truth, prosecute crimes, fight for justice and build a post-war country based on accountability and the rule of law. They shared their experiences courageously and generously, providing enormous insight into the challenges of life in Sri Lanka.” The book is informed by the testimonials of journalists, humanitarians and lawyers in Sri Lanka, and the violence in its pages is no less bloody than the gruesome conflict that lasted for decades.
She added, “It was a privilege to learn from them, and a terrible reminder of the personal cost of their work. At the end of some interviews, I would go back to the room I was renting in Colombo and I’d need to cry for a little while, call my children or seek comfort in writing.”
Ultimately, Ameena Fernando’s murder binds the novel together and provides a plotline to hang onto while the war is careening into disaster on all sides. But the point that Chandran makes about her murder is that there are so many people who would want to kill this journalist that justice for her death is unattainable. There is no such thing as safe journalism in a warzone, but every word holds power, and every writer has the ability to change something. Everything that is written carries more danger and more bravery than if written in peacetime, and every journalist risks their life to ensure that crimes are witnessed.
Unfinished Business was published on 1st January, 2025.
Amendment made to include belated interview content.
