Amnesty

As a fan of Aravind Adiga's books I was excited to get a copy to review, especially as it has been a few years since Selection day was released. I was not disappointed.
It is the story of young Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, Danny, based over 24 hours. Originally from Sri Lanka he came to Australia to go to a dodgy college in the hope of gaining residency. He however drops out of college & becomes an illegal, living in a storeroom over a grocery store in Sydney. He applied for refugee status but this was denied, so he earns money cleaning & being almost invisible to white Australians.
One day everything changes when one of his clients is murdered & Danny is convinced he knows by whom. Here the moral dilemma begins. Does he go to the police as he feels he should? He is in contact with the killer who knows Danny is an illegal & threatens to dob him in if he goes to the police. We live through a harrowing 24 hours with Danny, learning about his life & his deliberation.
It's not a fast paced book but the writing style grasped me so I wanted to read more.

Amnesty by Aravind Adiga is a great day-in-the-life of an illegal immigrant in Australia. Thought-provoking, riveting and suspenseful, this was a great timely book!

For four years young Sri Lankan man Danny Rajaratnam has lived an invisible life in Sydney as an illegal immigrant. He's suppressed his Tamil accent to achieve something that sounds - while not exactly Australian - quite neutral, he's paid to have golden highlights in his hair, he takes care to heed the particular instructions of his housecleaning clients to avoid confrontation and he always travels with a validated ticket on public transport.

"Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway; but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what."

Danny takes care to blend in because he was denied refugee status but is determined that he is never going back home.

One morning, while cleaning the home of Daryl the Lawyer, Danny becomes aware of something unusual happening outside. It's the police - big and loud. Of course he doesn't want to attract their attention, so it takes a little while for him to learn that the body of a woman who lives across the road has been found, murdered, in a creek. Then hardly any time at all to work out that the woman was Radha the Medicare Exec, another of his clients. He'd been cleaning the home she shared with her husband for two years, as well as their investment property in Potts Point, where she had installed her lover, Doctor Prakash, rent-free. For some time, Danny had played a willing third-wheel in Radha & Prakash's affair, accepting their free meals and a kind a friendship. So naturally, Danny's instinct is to call Prakash. And so begins a game of cat and mouse that plays out through the inner suburbs of Sydney during the rest of that day, as Danny wrestles with his conscience to decide whether he will tell the police about Prakash and risk deportation.

I really enjoyed this very contemporary and topical story of suspense. While there is a murder involved, it's not a particularly dark story; rather the suspense comes more from the will-he-or-won't-he vacillations of the endlessly likeable main character.

Adiga paints a vivid picture of inner Sydney with a perspective that we don't often get to read (about Sydney) - that of 'the brown man' - and does it very well.

"There is a buzz, a reflexive retinal buzz, whenever a man or woman born in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh sees another from his or her part of the world in Sydney—a tribal pinprick, an instinct always reciprocal, like the instantaneous recognition of homosexuals in a repressive society. Because even if both of you believe that one brown man holds no special significance for another in Sydney—a city and a civilization built on the principle of the exclusion of men and women who were not white, and which fully outgrew that principle only a generation ago—which is to say, even if you want to stay icebox or indifferent in the presence of the other brown man, you are helpless. You have to look at him just as he has to look at you. Eyeshock."

I was unsure whether he was being too ambitious, attempting to tell a story that, due to its constricted timeframe, is so reliant on detail. But I imagine that during the 5 years it's taken to write Amnesty, he must have spent a lot of time in Sydney, because apart from one or two small blips, he has nailed it!

Amnesty takes a very original take on the life of an "illegal". The narrative follows Danny, a young Sri Lankan who deliberately overstayed his visa and now resides in Sydney as invisibly as he can. He works as a cash in hand cleaner. One of his clients is murdered and he thinks he knows who is the murderer. His quandary is whether to talk to the police, a big no no for a non-person, or to live with his conscious.
His observations on Australians and racism, religion and the law is scarily accurate. His portrayal of life as an illegal is empathetic and believable. The book is full of witty observations, pointed barbs and sad truths. Its my highlight of 2020 reading so far.

Danny (Dhananjaya Rajaratnam) has been living as an illegal immigrant in Sydney for four years after arriving from Sri Lanka on an educational visa to study at what turned out to be a bogus college. He's managed to make himself nearly invisible on the streets of Sydney, dying the tips of his hair golden, smoothing out his Tamil accent and peppering his English with Aussie expressions. He has a girlfriend, a handful of friends who are also illegal immigrants and some regular work as a cash in hand cleaner. He lives in the storeroom on a convenience store in exchange for working in the store and giving the owner a third of what he owns cleaning. When one of his cleaning clients is murdered Danny suspects he knows who killed her but must decide whether to tell the police and risk deportation. This novel describes the course of a single day where Danny tosses up the pros and cons of going to the police.

Danny is a great character, intelligent, cheerful, hardworking and caring. Through him Adiga really helps us see what it is like to live in the shoes of an illegal immigrant, to always keep a low profile, put up with others treating you badly and be careful never to draw attention to yourself. It's very easy to feel sympathy for Danny who wants to do the right thing by his murdered client but doesn't want to be sent back to Sri Lanka where he was previously tortured by immigration officials and will have to face his family and the shame of returning empty handed. The prose is easy and flows freely through Danny's flashbacks to his life in Sri Lanka and his provoking and often humorous thoughts on Australia, Australians, racism and legal vs illegal immigrants. I was also very impressed with Adiga's knowledge of Sydney. I don't know how long he spent when he visited but he exhibits a superb knowledge of the city centre and inner city suburbs, as well as the suburban rail network.

Danny is an illegal immigrant working as a cleaner in Sydney, having left Sri Lanka for good. In the process of cleaning one of his regulars' places, he notices the police arrive at a nearby flat. He tries to keep out of their way, but soon understands that they are not interested in him; there has been a murder.

Danny also soon realises that he knows the victim; she was one of his former clients. He also thinks he knows who did it, and is now in a moral dilemma: does he tell the police what he knows, or keep his head down and not risk deportation? This decision is made even tougher when the man that he suspects, Prakash, starts calling him incessantly and demanding that they meet.

Adiga does an excellent job of showing the inner Sydney environment through the eyes of a recent immigrant; the book really has an excellent sense of place. He turns the screws on Danny relentlessly and ratchets up the tension in the novel accordingly, making the moral choice he must make ever harder. A very good read.

Avarind Adiga, 2008 Booker Prize winner (for "The Tiger") is, in my considered opinion, one of the most immersive, brilliant stylists alive. "Amnesty," his fifth novel, mashes us, within the opening page, into the mind of an illegal Sri Lankan immigrant working as a cleaner in Sydney, a young, earnest man on the cusp of a solid existence after three years of anxiety. When a cleaning client is murdered, Danny realizes who the killer is and must choose between justice for the dead and his own deportation. Told over one breathless day, a plotting triumph that weaves Danny's past into a thriller ripped from the headlines, the novel broadcasts the fraught, ridiculous sub-world of the illegal, a person without status, almost without existence. Not many novels can entertain superbly (a one-sitting reading this is, I guarantee) while speaking to our modern world, while bringing us into the mind and heart of a person irretrievably split between duty and self-fear. "Amnesty" is one of the finest novels of 2020 so far.