Tournament of Books '12: Looking for THE LAST BROTHER

When an adult narrator looks back on his childhood the author gets to have it both ways. The confusion of not understanding what's going on can be an operant to success, only to reveal all with a swoosh; as the child comes to understanding, so does the reader. It's all so clear now! Well, as clear as the intervening years can make it.

The old man who narrates Nathacha Appanah's THE LAST BROTHER is some 60 years away from the events he describes, but the regret he pours over them seems freshly tapped from some interior source. Raj is the last surviving son of a prison guard and a seamstress growing up in Mauritius, a solitary and dreamy child who plays and dreams unnoticed. In one of the earliest memories described, Raj witnesses a storm that will claim the life of his older and younger brothers while they were out playing -- just one of the several natural disasters overshadowing his childhood.

His loneliness lifts a little once Raj befriends a boy named David in the prison where his father works, who he meets in the hospital. Parentless and apparently bored, David doesn't even share a common language with Raj, but the boys pick up a fast friendship, in the course of which Raj sneaks David out of the prison.

It is here where adult-Raj and I wish to interject that the character David is part of a real-life thwarted migratory pattern in the early 1940s during which European Jews traveled en masse on boats to Palestine, only to be refused entry by the British colonial authority and "deported" to Mauritius. (I dispute the word "deported" on the grounds that the refugees were a. never let into the country into the first place, b. sent to another colony of the same empire and c. imprisoned on site in that colony.)The attempt to address David's religion via the Star of David around his neck is clumsy, and it seems as if Raj would understand little about that aspect of David's situation anyway; what he does understand is that his playmate is imprisoned and he wants him out.

There's something disingenuous about all this sorrow for what amounts to an accident of global displacement, and maybe that's the point: Mixed with his regret for having contributed to David's eventual death (this isn't a spoiler; it's revealed very early in the book) is a sort of secondary creeper of sorrow for forcing David to fill that void in Raj's life, without respect to what David might have been going through. Adult-Raj is aghast at his own insensitivity over this, but perhaps he could cut his younger self some slack. If he would acknowledge his own tragedy, it might go down a little easier. 

ToB first-round opponent: Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.