From Publishers Weekly
De Kretser's accomplished second novel (after 2000's The Rose Grower), set in the author's native Sri Lanka in the years before its independence in 1948, is as much a haunting character study as it is an elusive murder mystery and a deep exploration of colonialism. At the heart of the story is Sam Obeysekere, a brilliant Ceylonese prosecutor and perfect English gentleman—who isn't, of course, English. Born into a privileged but unstable family—his "Pater" intentionally squanders their wealth; his "Mater" sleeps around, smashes expensive crystal and feels a "massive indifference" to her son; and his beloved sister seems bent on self-destruction—Sam, as an adult, focuses on his young son and his career. By all accounts, he's prospering, able to take his place beside the island's ruling class of Brits, Dutch burghers and Portuguese. But when he offers to help solve the murder of an English tea grower shot dead in the jungle, Sam makes a "central mistake" that destabilizes his life—and, in a way, the English-dominated life of his whole "mongrel" nation. De Kretser's self-deluding protagonist will no doubt remind readers of the butler in The Remains of the Day: it's a sharp portrayal of assimilation that she manages to make complex and even poignant ("Are we to become a nation capable of talking only to itself, a lunatic on the world stage?"). But Sam is his own unique and problematic self, and like everything else in this lush, uneasy world, from the secondary characters to the ghost-haunted jungle, he is capable of shocking. De Kretser's fine, brooding, mischievous style is sure to captivate fans of serious literary fiction. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Michelle de Kretser's ambitious, gracefully composed second novel might best be described as an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Its title and opening section -- a first-person reminiscence by its central character, a public prosecutor in the former British Indian colony of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka -- prompt readers to expect a straight expository work of detection, in the great and elegant British tradition of Willkie Collins, Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.Our narrator, one Sam (né Stanley Alban Marriott) Obeysekere is indeed a diehard fan of the mystery genre, with an emphasis on "the sublime Mrs. Christie" and her serene-yet-bloody sorties into well-born British intrigue. Sam grew up in the Ceylonese capital of Colombo as the son of a high-living native-born estate holder of "iconic largesse," who managed to work the British takeover of the island nation into a mammoth personal land grab. The sight of his father whipping the son of a favored overseer instilled in young Sam a reverence for the cold and impersonal authority of British justice. Even though the boy was being punished unfairly, Sam intuited the workings of a grander design: "It was essential to the harmonious functioning of our little community that the boy paid publicly for his crime [of stealing coconuts] in spite of his privileged standing on the estate." Here was the germination of Sam's adult career as a prosecutor, which though "a stern and thankless calling" nevertheless "has a grandeur that the sentimentality of defense can never hope to rival." This paternalistic self-confidence, together with his passion for "the cold brilliance" of British murderers in fact and fiction, produces Sam's big break in the Ceylonese legal world, after Angus Hamilton, a British overseer of a colonial tea plantation, is brutally murdered while riding his horse home late one evening. Suspicion immediately falls on a pair of Tamil workers caught trying to pawn the victim's watch, but Sam applies the tried-and-true principles of the Christie yarn to the case. He directs the King's Advocate who is handling the investigation to a femme fatale, the wife of the victim's best friend, another British colonial hand named Gordon Taylor -- a bit of advice that propels Taylor's swift prosecution, conviction and suicide in prison.Don't worry: This is not giving away any key element of the plot of de Kretser's novel, for The Hamilton Case is really about something far more absorbing than the tidy and classic plot twists of a British murder mystery. Its real subject is the mystery of Sam's own thwarted life and career -- "a relentless whisper of frustrated endeavor" that haunts him well past the local 15 minutes of fame he earns in consulting on the prosecution of Gordon Taylor and into the waning of British rule in the mid-20th century, when the new Ceylon has even less use for a loyal colonial native son. We learn, after the narrative shifts out of Sam's voice -- the novel's initial false start is courtesy of an unfinished manuscript of Sam's memoirs -- that his ambitions to move up the civil service ranks in colonial Ceylon come gradually to naught. As his family's fortune continues to dwindle, and he ponders a loveless marriage into a moneyed family, he thinks of his life as "a thing of cardboard and paint, and a gale raged offstage, mocking him with losses." He has no idea. Ever drawn to things gothic and British, he sets up housekeeping with his wife in a rambling, garishly yellow seaside estate once owned by Allenby, a 19th-century English coffee baron who hanged himself after a leaf blight. The Dutch family who then came into the mansion met with a similarly lurid fate, and the place is now rumored to be haunted. His wife, Leela -- who meets her connubial marital duties by all too literally lying back and thinking of England, i.e., reciting the names of the heroines of her beloved Walter Scott historical romances -- suffers a traumatic miscarriage and becomes ever more tormented by the notion that the spirit of her dead daughter inhabits the Allenby house. His sister, Claudia, marries a former schoolmate of Sam's who has now reinvented himself, in most unlikely fashion as a fire-breathing anti-Tamil and anti-colonialist demagogue, and meets a still crueler fate.As his reversals of fortune multiply, Sam becomes ever more resolute in his cold detachment from the all too implacable -- and, far from coincidentally, largely female -- suffering that surrounds him. He calmly waits out the inevitable exhaustion of his father's estate at the hands of his spendthrift mother, Maud, who has always uneasily co-existed with her distinguished son in a state of rigid mutual resentment, so that he can dispatch her to live alone in the family's final remaining cottage, in an isolated jungle settlement called Lokugama. There, as Sam all too confidently reckons, the once beautiful and urbane bon vivant goes slowly mad -- but not before she intuits a terrible secret gnawing away at the very core of the Obeysekere clan's fast-decaying fortunes. To say more about that would truly be giving away far too much of Michelle de Kretser's clear-eyed, artfully constructed fable about the most comforting, and hence cruelest, myths of a single man's long and dreadfully empty life. In its patient, layered portrait of a man's colossal folly in acquiring an entirely mistaken view of his role in life, The Hamilton Case -- originally published last year in de Kretser's adopted homeland of Australia -- has earned many comparisons with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Yet while de Kretser does share some of Ishiguro's icy precision in eliciting her characters' crabbed delusions, she has produced something finally warmer and more compassionate than Ishiguro's chilling novel. For even as she constructs an elegant, pointed cautionary tale against the false comforts of overly tidy narrative certainties, de Kretser also denies readers the easy luxury of shuddering primly at Sam's inhumanity. In one of his early, characteristically deluded moments of patrician serenity Sam asks, "Who isn't drawn to what he pities?" The signal accomplishment of de Kretser's hypnotic, lush and calmly observant novel is that we feel this same sentiment on Sam's own behalf, even after we learn in the story of his life how deeply suspect it must be. That is the final, remarkable mystery that endlessly enlivens The Hamilton Case. Reviewed by Chris LehmannCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
De Kretser’s delicacy, honesty and evocative style, which critics compare to Agatha Christie and Somerset Maugham’s, garnered praise in all quarters. Within a wholly compelling plot, she offers psychological insights rather than icy, intellectual dissections of the characters. However, the tale shifts through four points of view, a device disliked by several critics. Still, Obeysekere’s initially pompous, verbose, and mannered memoir struck some nerves. De Kretser handles the exotic material with authority, which is unsurprising given that the Sri Lankan author emigrated to Australia at age 14.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* "Life is bearable only if it can be understood as a set of narrative strategies." Yes, but the narrative we construct for our lives often bears little relation to the book others read. So it is with Sam Obeysekere, a lawyer from Ceylon in the middle of the last century who "strove to perfect a performance that never deceived its audience." Obeysekere's narrative starred himself as a British gentleman, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes, in fact, but it was all too elementary, both to his fellow Ceylonese and to the British colonists on the island, that the brown-skinned, stiff-collared "native" was not the right kind of gentleman. These dueling narratives come together in the infamous Hamilton case. Would Obeysekere's role in this murder investigation ensure his favored position among the British elite, or would it expose the folly of his dreams? De Kretser's elegant novel answers this question gradually, weaving its way through the often-tragic lives of Obeysekere and those closest to him and luxuriating in detailed descriptions of Ceylon near the end of the colonial era. It is difficult to write about so ultimately pathetic a character, but de Kretser, like Ishiguro in Remains of the Day, finds a heartbreaking dignity in her hero's pathos. This is far too subtle a character study to hold those expecting a literary thriller, but the novel has a way of insinuating itself into the reader's mind--first for its razor-sharp evocation of a place and time, and then, more deviously, for its crushingly sad vision of a man's self-imposed imprisonment in the wrong story. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Praise for The Rose Grower:
?Beautifully written, full of wit and pathos and evocative images?Michelle de Kretser?s final pages are a triumph, quietly moving and with only one victor: a deep red rose.? -- Guardian

?The Rose Grower is much more than a love story. It?s an intelligent novel that breathes brilliant life into a pivotal period in Western history.? -- Boston Globe

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Evoking the exotic culture and racial tensions of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in the early and mid-20th century, de Kretser offers a beguiling story of an ambitious man whose own weaknesses crush his dreams of glory.

Sam Obeysekere is born in Ceylon to a privileged family. His father is an adviser to the British colonials, and Sam is educated at Oxford, returning home to practice law. When he's approached to give his thoughts on the Hamilton case, a shocking murder under investigation, Sam is flattered by the request and handily declares an Englishman guilty of the crime. But his accusation will have devastating consequences, and Sam will spend the rest of his life with the knowledge that his involvement in the Hamilton case precipitated the derailment of his future.

The Hamilton Case is not only an intriguing whodunit but also a powerful psychological novel. Sam's pride of accomplishment masks a deep insecurity, and his ego suffers further injuries when he jealously watches others attain what he has longed for. A Sri Lankan who moved to Australia as a teenager, de Kretser hails from a corner of the world few readers know well. Her story of the flawed hero, Sam, combined with her depiction of Ceylon, makes for a remarkable book, both classic and fresh. (Summer 2004 Selection)

ANNOTATION

Second-Place Winner of the 2004 Discover Great New Writers Award, Fiction

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Having come of age on the island nation of Ceylon, Sam Obeysekere is a lawyer whose life is guided by the British culture that dominates his homeland. Educated at Oxford, with a dazzling career in his sights, Sam is more English than the English. Only his flamboyant, unruly mother, exiled to a jungle estate, reminds him of his family's real heritage and a different set of home truths." Sam's undoing arrives in the form of the Hamilton case, a scandalous murder that shakes the upper echelons of island society. Guided by grandiose visions of Sherlock Holmes, he becomes convinced he can solve the mysterious case - and that his good standing with the English will insulate him from the unrest the case has exposed. In the end, Sam grapples with a life that has been "a series of substitutions," the darkest of human misfortunes.

FROM THE CRITICS

William Boyd - The New York Times

The Hamilton Case does enchant, certainly, but -- more important -- the book admirably and resolutely sees the world as it really is.

Chris Lehmann - The Washington Post

In its patient, layered portrait of a man's colossal folly in acquiring an entirely mistaken view of his role in life, The Hamilton Case -- originally published last year in de Kretser's adopted homeland of Australia -- has earned many comparisons with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Yet while de Kretser does share some of Ishiguro's icy precision in eliciting her characters' crabbed delusions, she has produced something finally warmer and more compassionate than Ishiguro's chilling novel. For even as she constructs an elegant, pointed cautionary tale against the false comforts of overly tidy narrative certainties, de Kretser also denies readers the easy luxury of shuddering primly at Sam's inhumanity.

Publishers Weekly

De Kretser's accomplished second novel (after 2000's The Rose Grower), set in the author's native Sri Lanka in the years before its independence in 1948, is as much a haunting character study as it is an elusive murder mystery and a deep exploration of colonialism. At the heart of the story is Sam Obeysekere, a brilliant Ceylonese prosecutor and perfect English gentleman who isn't, of course, English. Born into a privileged but unstable family his "Pater" intentionally squanders their wealth; his "Mater" sleeps around, smashes expensive crystal and feels a "massive indifference" to her son; and his beloved sister seems bent on self-destruction Sam, as an adult, focuses on his young son and his career. By all accounts, he's prospering, able to take his place beside the island's ruling class of Brits, Dutch burghers and Portuguese. But when he offers to help solve the murder of an English tea grower shot dead in the jungle, Sam makes a "central mistake" that destabilizes his life and, in a way, the English-dominated life of his whole "mongrel" nation. De Kretser's self-deluding protagonist will no doubt remind readers of the butler in The Remains of the Day: it's a sharp portrayal of assimilation that she manages to make complex and even poignant ("Are we to become a nation capable of talking only to itself, a lunatic on the world stage?"). But Sam is his own unique and problematic self, and like everything else in this lush, uneasy world, from the secondary characters to the ghost-haunted jungle, he is capable of shocking. De Kretser's fine, brooding, mischievous style is sure to captivate fans of serious literary fiction. Agent, Sarah Lutyens. (May) Forecast: The Hamilton Case got great reviews in the U.K., and interviewers seemed positively charmed by de Kretser herself. With a four-city author tour and national advertising, this Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick should find itself a sizable and appreciative audience. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

At the heart of de Kretser's dark and twisted second novel (after The Rose Grower) is a murder trial, with which Oxford-educated lawyer Sam Obeysekere hopes to make his career. Born into the moneyed class of colonial Ceylon, he is continually thwarted in his ambitions to be accepted by the ruling British. Then Hamilton, an English coffee grower, is found murdered, and as the appointed prosecutor Sam believes he can solve the case-and win a judicial appointment in the bargain. Suspicion shifts from two native workers to Hamilton's friend and estate manager (also English), whose pregnant young wife takes the stand to refute his alibi and provide his motive-her husband had become enraged when she confessed that Hamilton had been stalking and harassing her. Many years later, long after Sam's personal and professional fortunes have foundered, the truth is revealed in a short story by an old schoolmate. Although there is little to admire in Sam's heartless, conniving character, readers will be drawn in by de Kretser's fine writing, evocative descriptions of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and swift pacing. The author is Sri Lankan and lives in Australia. For most public libraries.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews