SOURCE: "The Destroying Sea," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4760, June 24, 1994, p. 23.

[In the following essay, Hussein favorably reviews Reef.]

In one of the finest stories in Monkfish Moon, Romesh Gunesekera's evocative and tantalizingly brief first collection, the narrator tells us of his deep and inarticulate relationship with an artisan who becomes his servant, managing, with startling sparseness, to convey the troubled state Romesh Gunesekera

of Sri Lanka through the words and the silences of his characters. Reef, Gunesekera's first novel, reverses the story's central relationship to recount, this time in the words of the servant, the story of a similar relationship, explored in some depth with the author's customary precision and economy.

The novel begins with a London fragment. Triton, the narrator, now the self-possessed owner of a restaurant, meets, at a petrol station, a fellow-refugee. In spite of what they may have in common, they are...