Cinnamon Gardens

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

In the early 1920s, Cinnamon Gardens was the most exclusive neighborhood
in Colombo, capital of the British colony of Ceylon. To an outsider,
Cinnamon Gardens appeared to be a sedate collection of stately homes,
genteel citizens, and unyielding traditions. But behind the well-trimmed
lawns, the community was a Byzantine battleground of competing cultures,
religions, and families. Set in Cinnamon Gardens, this novel centres on
the actions of a Tamil family that, although affluent, chafes under the
autocratic rule of its patriarch, a devious old man known simply as the
Mudaliyar.

Balendran is the Mudaliyar’s son. Although he relishes his status as
a beloved son, Balendran is forced to risk everything when his former
lover, an Englishman named Richard, arrives unexpectedly in Ceylon.
Annalukshmi is Balendran’s grandniece. All she wants is to become a
teacher instead of being forced into marriage like most women her age.
Both Balendran and Annalukshmi are caught up in the turmoil of the times
as Ceylon gropes its way toward independent statehood. Their lives are
further complicated by the machinations of the Mudaliyar, who is
determined to preserve both his position of power and his personal
secrets.

Stylistically, Selvadurai’s prose contains hints of Jane Austen, the
Brontлs, and Thomas Hardy. Unfortunately, his writing is not quite up
to the standard he imitates. His prose often sounds forced, and most of
his secondary characters are two-dimensional. Although this novel is an
interesting experiment in Sri Lankan Gothic, most of the time it reads
like a Harlequin romance.