Friday, Dec. 17, 2004
The Hamilton Case By Michelle de Kretser
That rare treasure, a perfect novel. Set in the British colony of Ceylon in the 1930s, The Hamilton Case tells the story of Sam Obeysekere, an Oxford-educated, thoroughly assimilated, supremely English Ceylonese lawyer who takes on the murder of a respectable English planter. As the plot grows darker and more complex, de Kretser's prose gleams with sinister beauty. Her sentences sparkle like precious things; you want to keep them in your pocket on the end of a watch chain. The more he tries to untangle the mystery, the more deeply tangled Sam becomes in his own loyalties and prejudices. "Time never simplifies — it unravels and complicates," de Kretser writes. "Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken."