Ashley Halpe's English translation brings Martin Wickramasinghe's Sinhala novel to readers without Sinhala, in this edition from Sarasa Publishers. The original is a boyhood adventure and a coming-of-age story, set among the villages of the southern coast of Ceylon.
Upali Giniwella has lost his mother young and resents the stepmother who has taken her place. He leads a small gang of village boys and keeps up a steady run of mischief alongside his devoted companion Jinna. When his misbehaviour goes too far, the two leave home. They find work with a farmer, Podigamarala, who teaches them cultivation, and then settle on Madol Doova — a deserted island thick with mangrove — which they begin to clear and plant. A light on the island that the boys take for a ghost turns out to be a fugitive hiding from the law. A man called Punchi Mahattaya later joins them and works alongside them. Word eventually reaches Upali that his father is ill and he returns to the village; by the close, the holding on the island has become a working plantation.
The title means "island of mangroves" in Sinhala, and the island itself is a real one, among those in Koggala Lake on the southern coast. Wickramasinghe was born at Koggala and spent his childhood there. His ancestral home on that site is now the Martin Wickramasinghe Folk Museum, and he is buried there.
Wickramasinghe is commonly described as the father of modern Sinhala literature, and his other novels include Gamperaliya and Viragaya. Madol Doova is among his best-known books. It has been translated into Tamil, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Romanian and Bulgarian, and was filmed in Sinhala as Madol Duwa, directed by Lester James Peries with music by W. D. Amaradeva.
The book is classed as a children's novel as well as a coming-of-age story. It is widely read in Sri Lanka, where Sinhala readers commonly meet it in childhood. In English, it suits readers who want an entry point to Sinhala fiction, families reading with older children, and Sri Lankans abroad who grew up with the Sinhala text and want a version their children can read. Anyone with an interest in the southern coast — Koggala, the lake, the villages behind the beach — will find the setting drawn from the ground Wickramasinghe knew first-hand.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Publisher: Sarasa Publishers
- Published: 2013
- Language: English
- Pages: 137
- ISBN: 978-955-6950-07-6
