Amnesty
-
-
3.3 • 16 Ratings
-
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
From the Man Booker prize-winning author of The White Tiger
Danny - Dhananjaya Rajaratnam - is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, denied refugee status after he has fled from his native Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he's been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal Australian life.
But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. When Danny recognizes a jacket left at the murder scene, he believes it belongs to another of his clients - a doctor with whom he knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported, or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of a single day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Adiga (The White Tiger) briskly captures an undocumented immigrant's moral dilemma over whether to help the police solve a murder or remain under the radar in this engrossing tale. After leaving Sri Lanka to attend college in Sydney, Dhananjaya "Danny" Rajaratnam quits school, loses his student visa, and fails to gain refugee status, but he stays in Australia out of fear for his safety back home, where he was misidentified as a Tamil terrorist. He sleeps in a grocery storeroom and earns cash cleaning homes and doing odd jobs. For four years he escapes notice by authorities; even his leftist Vietnamese girlfriend, Sonja, doesn't know he's in the country illegally. After one of his clients Indian-born Radha Thomas is murdered, Danny deduces that her murderer is her lover, a violent man nicknamed the Doctor. Danny knows Radha and the Doctor frequented the creek where Radha's body was discovered, and that the Doctor owned a jacket resembling the one wrapped around the body. Adiga recounts Danny's thoughts, memories, doubts, and hesitation as well as his aborted phone calls with police and ominous contacts with the Doctor, all within a single day. With nuance and vivid faced by a range of Asian Australians while highlighting the dangers faced by the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Adiga's enthralling depiction of one immigrant's tough situation humanizes a complex and controversial global dilemma. This review has been updated.
Customer Reviews
The other side
Author
Indian. Born in Chennai, which was still called Madras in 1974, and grew up in Mangalore. Family migrated to Sydney when he was a teenager. He completed his secondary education there, then studied literature at Columbia University, NY where he was salutatorian, which is not a weird sect of veganism. Rather, it means he graduated second to the valedictorian. Moved on to Magdalen College, Oxford and shone there too. Now lives in Mumbai. His literary mentors include Simon Schama and Hermione Lee. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the Times of India. His debut novel, The White Tiger (2008) won the Man Booker Prize that year. A serial overachiever in other words.
Plot
Dhananjaya Rajaratnam aka Danny is a Tamil who came to Sydney on a student visa to attend one of those dodgy colleges that went bust. He should have gone home to Sri Lanka, but didn't. He maintains it was an honest mistake; the authorities don't see things that way. Neither do legal immigrants from the subcontinent, who eye him suspiciously as he ekes out a living as a cleaner while trying to stay under the radar. To fit in, he moulds his speech patterns to sound Australian and even dyes a bleach blond flash in his hair, and finds a girlfriend on a vegan dating site, even though he's not vegan. He's cleaning one day when the police appear at a nearby property—one he used to clean—because the owner, a woman named Rahda, has been murdered. Danny knew Rahda and her lover, both of whom were gambling addicts, well. He struggles with his conscience about whether to share information with the police, which would lead to his deportation.
Narrative
First person stream of consciousness by Danny, all in the space of one day. The short chapters are identified at minute intervals. (Minute as in time, not as in small, although that too. Not all 1440 of them, but quite a lot.)
Prose
A mercifully shorter and easier to read Bloom's day revisited in the millennial antipodes.
Bottom line
Danny is a compelling narrator. Mr Adiga is a compelling writer who lays out the many travails facing illegal immigrants in this country in cogent and largely non-judgemental fashion. I learned a lot. As an old white guy, I'm still a villain, but there's plenty of non-white ones about too.