Saltwater Memory: On Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef

Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef, first published in 1994 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, is a novel of quiet devastation. Like the coral reef it invokes, beautiful, intricate, and perpetually endangered, it is at once fragile and formidable. Set against the political tremors of pre-civil war Sri Lanka, Reef is not so much a historical novel as a memory text, a subtle meditation on love, loyalty, and the slow disintegration of dreams in a country sliding toward ruin.

The novel is narrated by Triton, a former houseboy now living in exile in London, looking back on the formative years he spent in the employ of Mr. Ranjan Salgado, a solitary marine biologist whose interest in coastal ecosystems parallels his retreat from the social world. In Triton’s recollection, the Salgado household becomes a microcosm of a society in flux; a place of shelter and domestic order amid encroaching chaos. Yet even this order is deceptive, riddled with absences and silences that speak to the unacknowledged violence of class, colonial residue, and political decay.

Triton is a curious narrator. He is deeply loyal to his master, but the narrative is never servile. Instead, what emerges is a portrait of two men; one master, one servant, each seeking refuge in forms of control: Salgado through the observation of marine life, Triton through the rituals of cooking and domestic management. Their relationship is charged with affection but also distance, marked by the long shadows of empire. Triton has no illusions about his place in the hierarchy, but neither is he naive. His tone is wistful, never bitter. Gunesekera’s genius lies in giving him a voice that is both deferential and quietly ironic, a witness to history who knows more than he lets on.

Much of the novel’s beauty lies in its restraint. Gunesekera is a minimalist, not in the postmodern sense, but in the way of a writer who trusts the reader’s imagination. He avoids melodrama, even when writing about betrayal, heartbreak, or national collapse. His prose is pared down, luminous, often arrestingly visual. A meal prepared by Triton; pol sambol, crab curry, tempered lentils, becomes an act of devotion, an assertion of dignity in a world that offers little of it. The textures of domestic life are rendered with such care that they acquire the weight of symbolism. In Gunesekera’s hands, the kitchen becomes a sanctuary, the reef a metaphor for ecological and emotional fragility, and the servant’s gaze a lens through which history is made quietly legible.

What is striking about Reef is how little “happens,” in the conventional sense. There are no grand plot twists, no overtly political debates. But everything is happening beneath the surface: the erosion of Salgado’s career, the encroachment of militarised politics, the slow unraveling of domestic certainties. Miss Nili, Salgado’s lover and the novel’s only significant female character, brings temporary disruption to this male world, but even she cannot arrest the slow slide toward entropy. Her relationship with Salgado becomes a proxy for larger failures of emotional, ideological, national proportions. When she leaves, it is not with dramatic flourish but with weary finality, as though she, too, recognises the futility of hoping for transformation in a world allergic to change.

At its core, Reef is a novel about arrested development. Not just of Triton, who comes of age through service rather than rebellion, but of a nation that cannot decide what kind of modernity it wants. Salgado, with his concern for marine conservation, represents a kind of liberal elitism; cosmopolitan, intellectual, impotent. He studies the reef but cannot protect it. He frets over rising sea levels but is blind to the political tempests brewing inland. His is a politics of distance, of abstraction, of “concern” unmoored from action. Triton, by contrast, is grounded, observant, and responsive. He does not theorise; he adapts. In the novel’s final act, when he reemerges in London as an older, wiser, and quietly thriving man, it is he, not Salgado, who has survived history.

There is a temptation to read Reef as an allegory of postcolonial inheritance, and indeed it lends itself to such a reading. Triton’s name itself is suggestive. It is the name of the Roman god of the sea, son of Poseidon, demoted here to a cook and cleaner. Like many postcolonial subjects, he inherits the debris of empire without the privileges of its power. He is schooled in the manners and expectations of a world that will never fully admit him. Yet he persists, improvises, even excels. The reef, with its delicate architecture and ceaseless vulnerability, becomes a kind of cipher for the postcolonial state: beautiful, endangered, caught between erosion and resistance.

But Gunesekera resists simple allegory. Reef is too intimate, too particular, too sensuous for that. Its politics are embedded in texture, in the sheen of a polished table, the sizzle of garlic in hot oil, the silence of a man who cannot say what he feels. It is a deeply embodied novel, concerned less with ideology than with affect: how it feels to be loyal, to be overlooked, to serve, to leave. In that sense, it recalls the quiet brilliance of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Triton, like Ishiguro’s Stevens, is both more and less than he appears. His modesty conceals not only intelligence but also grief.

One of the novel’s final images is of Triton walking along the Thames, remembering the reef of his youth. The contrast is stark: cold river, warm memory; grey skies, incandescent longing. And yet there is no rancour, no nostalgia. Gunesekera offers no redemptive arc, no vindication for the humble narrator. What he gives us instead is something more difficult and more honest: a character who has lived through history, absorbed its cruelties, and found, not meaning, but survival. In a time when novels often insist on grand gestures and climactic revelations, Reef is remarkable for its humility, for its insistence that life, like a reef, is shaped not by singular events but by the slow, persistent accretions of time, habit, and care.

To read Reef today, with the hindsight of Sri Lanka’s prolonged civil conflict and the ongoing crises of postcolonial states, is to be struck by how prescient it feels. Not because it predicts violence, but because it understands the quiet conditions that make violence possible: isolation, alienation, the erosion of public trust, the retreat into private sanctuaries. It is a novel about the fragility of ecosystems, both marine and moral, and the difficulty of living ethically in a decaying world.

Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef remains one of the most accomplished debuts of its era. It is elegant, understated, and enduringly resonant. In Triton, he gives us a narrator for whom history is not an event but an environment: something you breathe in, something that settles in your lungs and never quite leaves. His voice, like the reef itself, is a quiet testament to survival.