Arjie Chelvaratnam. the Tamil narrator and title character of this poignant Bildungsroman set against the tremors and eventual eruption of interethnic violence in Sri Lanka of the early 1980s, is first complicit with an aunt’s budding but forbidden relationship with a Sinhalese boy, then with his mother’s affair with a Burgher (descendant of European colonist) man she had been in love with before marrying, and, after he has a crush on a young Tamil protégé of his father’s, he experiences a doubly forbidden first love and first sex with a male Sinhalese fellow student, Shehan Soyza.

Like the author, Arjie’s parents had him schooled in Sinhalese, not in Tamil. Shehan protects Arjie during his first day at the school that is supposed to make a man of him, and Sinhalese neighbors and business associates save most of the family from being slaughtered in the 1983 Colombo riots. The interethnic dynamics are complex with plenty of erotic attraction across the increasingly widening ethnic chasm. In the opening chapter, Arjie is forced out of the paradise of playing the leading role among the girls of his extended family. He is confused to find himself labeled "funny" and "girlie-boy," and sees loneliness ahead of him: "caught between the boys’ and the girls’ worlds, not belonging or wanted in either"

The other Fall in the book is vaster: the tropical paradise of Sri Lanka turns into a hell (with not only the family’s home but his paternal grandparents being incinerated by Sinhalese mobs) before the family flees to Canada, feeling it "impossible to imagine that the world will ever be normal again.: His father sadly but wisely concluded "it is very clear that we no longer belong in this country," having failed to heed his wife who had reached that conclusion more swiftly.

Arjie has difficulty understanding what "funny" means in ominous reference to himself, and is shocked by his sexual initiation. Accepting what all the dire predictions had pointed to, he "felt a sudden sadness. What had happened between Shehad and me over the last few days had changed my relationship with her [his mother] forever. I was no longer a part of my family in the same way. I now inhabited a world they didn’t understand and into which they couldn’t follow me." Talking to his mother or his aunt about the parallel of his forbidden love theirs is not a possibility, even though he had himself been used as a cover for their illicit relationships. The only cover available for his own is friendship. His father and older brother see through it easily, but challenge it only obliquely.(Although homosexuality within the family is an unspeakable possibility, Arjie’s father is aware and fairly indifferent to sex between Sri Lankan beachboys and foreign tourists staying at the hotel he owns.)

In 1996, when I met Selvadurai, he said that he was not ready to write about his experience going to Canada as a refugee after the 1983 riots. His next book, Cinnamon Gardens (1999) which he was then writing, is set in the British colony of Ceylon in the 1920s (centering on a heterosexual romance). Like Arjie (who he has made two years younger, presumably to increase the plausibility of his naiveté), he had to accustom himself to not being elite and rich anymore in Canada. A major difference, he said, between his experiences and Arjie’s was that his own family is more liberal than the more typical family in the book. His parents read "funniness" as being artistic (and were ultimately proved right, I think!). Rather than trying to butch him up, they sent him to ballet school (in tights across a military camp, where no one hooted at him, he recalled).

Funny Boys is very funny, especially early on. Horrendous tragedies cascade down and the author's greatest accomplishment is showing how what we now call 'ethnic cleansing" appears to someone who is already sufficiently confused by adolescence. The reader sees his resiliency but also the horrors of violence and hatred that engulf the society and kill some of his most loved relatives. It provides vivid testimony from a particularly long-running interethnic war.

P.S. Since writing this, I have discovered that Shyam Selvadurai has a website that includes background information and reviews from Sri Lanka of both his novels. The address is:
www.interlog.com/~funnyboy/

On his second novel, >i>Cinammon Gardens,</i> see the enthusiastic review by hadassahchana at
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-7E68-387ED6E0-39BB9128-prod5

I also recommend two other books by expatriate Sri Lankans:
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje (another Sri Lankan Torontonian! This is a memoir of a quite eccentric Sinhalese family innspired by a visit "home")
ad Reef by Romesh Gunesekera (which reminds me of Remains of the Day, especially in having a servant unaware of the "politics" enveloping and soon to annihilate the domestic world he knows)





Recommended: Yes