Michelle de Kretser: The urban jungle

The best stories lodge in the memory and return to haunt their readers. Michelle de Kretser, whose fiction often dwells on the ghostly afterglow of narrative, spooked my summer holiday last year. On a showery, late-monsoon August day in Sri Lanka, I took a cab through swamp to jungle to the lovingly-preserved home of Bevis Bawa. A soldier, lawyer and aesthete, Bawa carved a beautifully unlikely landscape garden out of the tropical profusion. I found myself viewing every classical statue, flowering tree and oddly displaced lawn through the lens of The Hamilton Case. In that novel, de Kretser captured a doomed clan's rage for order as colonial Ceylon was engulfed and smothered by a history that not even the most manic cultivation could resist.