ABSTRACT
Carl Muller is probably Sri Lanka’s most versatile anglophone writer. A former signalman in the navy, he went on to become a journalist in 1964, working in newspapers in Sri Lanka and the Middle East and later as a political columnist for the Lanka Monthly Digest. He came to prominence with his award winning novel The Jam Fruit Tree (1993) and has written a further five novels, three volumes of poetry, short stories, several monographs and collections of essays, experimenting with genre, style and dialect. His work straddles historical novels, satiric poetry, epic saga, personal and political essays, cultural biography and science fiction, encompassing a plurivocity that suggests that he, like Rushdie’s Grimus, is trying to find a suitable voice to speak in. It repeatedly transgresses the boundaries of fact, fiction, and myth, personal and public history employing, in his Burgher trilogy, a mongrelised Sri Lankan English idiom that is explicitly related to his own hybrid status as a Burgher of mixed ancestry. Yet despite the virtuosity of his linguistic excess, most evident in The Jam Fruit Tree and Children of the Lion (1997), and the generic multiplicity of his oeuvre, a clear and consistent method of explicating the past is evident in his texts – one that, despite his self-professed ambition to be a ‘dig in the universal rib’, 1 appears to contain reactionary and even nationalist implications.
