The careful book in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s ‘Brotherless Night’

V.V. Ganeshananthan doesn’t write books very often, but if they’re as good as Brotherless Night (Penguin, 2023), then we should hope for a limited number in the future.

As the 2024 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the prize establishment agrees with that sentiment.

Brotherless Night tells the story of Sashi, a Tamil medical student in civil war-era Sri Lanka during the 1980s. While Sashi tends to the wounded, three of her four brothers suffer physically from the war—either as fighters or innocent victims.

Sri Lankan civil war

The Sri Lankan civil war was instigated by unrest from the minority Tamil population, particularly in the north of Sri Lanka. Separatists wanted a sovereign nation-state in the north of Sri Lanka, to be called Eelam, but the central Sri Lankan government in Colombo refused.

Civil war followed.

Over its 26 years, the United Nations estimate somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 people died. Most of these people were innocent, non-military citizens.

This is the second time in recent years that the Sri Lankan civil war has been the focus of award-winning writing. In 2022 the Booker Prize was won by Shehan Karunatilaka for his darkly satiric The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. By contrast, Brotherless Night is realist in style, rather than fantastical.

It is also interesting that in 2023, the Booker Prize was won by Paul Lynch for Prophet Song. His novel catalogued a dystopian future in Ireland that depicted a civil war there. There must be something in the waters that these two topics are emerging with literary force in the 2020s.

Medicine and care

A major thread in Brotherless Night is Sashi’s commitment to caring. As a trainee doctor, she is conscious even as a teenager that she must treat whomever needs her help—for whatever reason, on whatever side of a debate or a war:

I want to be like my grandfather, I said, helping anyone who needs it. First do no harm, I quoted.¹

This commitment is tested when K., her neighbourhood crush who has become a Tamil Tiger—a proscribed terrorist organisation—asks her help to treat an injured fighter. She keeps him alive, so K. comes back to ask a bigger favour: to attend the field hospital to treat the injured.

Instinctively, Sashi responds that ‘”If someone is hurt, I want to help”‘ (p. 163). Her commitment to care is absolute, almost as if she has swallowed whole Martin Hediegger’s own urgent call to care. For Heidegger, Dasein—his word for ‘Being’ or ‘human-in-the-world’—’reveals itself as care’, and that even aspect of living such as ‘will, wish, predilection, and urge […] are themselves founded on’ care.²

In a way, care has no specific ethical requirement, because care is absolute: it is what makes a human, human. There is no alternative to caring; or, at least, it only gains an ethical value when people refuse to care, because that decision then becomes unethical.

Sashi is resolutely ethical.

Historiography

Brotherless Night is also about the ethical duty to record the passage of time. One of Sashi’s medical professors, Anjali, sets about recording and publishing a ‘true history’ of the civil war, including the violations committed by then Tamil Tigers on the people they supposedly fight to liberate.

These Reports were published anonymously, but they became established declaratives: ‘The Report authors said yes, everything we had gone through had actually occurred.’ (p. 233) Sashi soon discovers that her professor, Anjali, is the co-author of these reports, with her husband, Varathan, and requests to join them. Anjali and her husband explain that ‘”[i]t is slow work […]. In some cases we can’t figure out what happened and we have to write that down. Then we include all the different versions and our limitations’” (p. 263). This is what Michel Foucault would call ‘counter-memory’.³

This considered approach to history writing is called historiography, in the sense that Anjali and Varathan are figuring out the most appropriate method to capture, record, and to transmit the information.

This demand for writing proper history It is an ethical call-to-arms because ‘[w]e were trying to return our history to its place, to call it by its name, to see the mistakes of others, and to reckon with our own’ (p. 267). It is innately reflective as well as communicating outwardly. It is important work—perhaps ranking alongside Sashi’s own commitment to medical care.

The careful book

Between the three of them, they write a book. The authoring and publication of the book even survives one of its three authors (Anjali is taken and killed by the Tigers).

The book’s publication becomes of the utmost importance to Varathan and Sashi. In its testament to what has happened—incomplete, but at least not directed by propaganda from either side of the war—the authors ‘had wanted to make the book meticulous, open, truthful, compassionate’ (p. 313). This final word—compassionate—belongs to the collection of words associated with ‘care’.

In this sense, the book constitutes what I’m calling ‘careful writing’. Careful writing fulfils Dasein‘s obligation to care, and becomes an extension of Dasein—that human-being-in-the-world—beyond the physical body and into the cultural spheres of existence and action.

Varathan recognises the powerful obligation to finish the book when he chooses to do that rather than to save Anjali’s life. When offered the chance, he weighs his options:

He imagined her voice: What would you want me to say, love? What would you want me to do? He had thought he would have given anything to have her back, but in fact what he wanted then was to do what she thought was right, because she was the measure of rightness he had always used. (p. 313)

To write carefully is a more significant call to care than to save his wife’s life.

Sashi ends her narrative—which is also the end of the novel—confirming that Brotherless Night really is about this careful book. This careful book, and others:

You must understand: this is not the book for which Anjali died. You can find that book in your library. This is the one next to it on the shelf. I can promise you there will be another, and another. (p. 341)

This commitment to careful writing is the real success of Brotherless Night—and to the future stories we tell and we read.

1. V.V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night (London: Penguin, 2023). ↩︎
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2008 [1927]), p. 171. ↩︎
3. See Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 160. Here, Foucault describes counter-memory as the ‘transformation of history into a totally different form of time’. The point is that where traditional history—or historiography—concerns the telling of stories in chronological order to justify or explain how large social or political movements came to change, counter-memory prizes social memory and un-told stories. These might not be part of, say, the history of the Enlightenment, but they more closely align with what actually happened—just as Anjali, Varathan, and Sashi want. ↩︎