The Flower Boy: A Novel

The charming and resourceful 4-year-old at the center of Karen Roberts's The Flower Boy enjoys roaming around his environs, and who wouldn't: this 1930s Ceylon tea plantation is so splendid and enchanted that "one almost expected to see a gnome scuttling away into the undergrowth, or a couple of fairies swinging from the vines." But Chandi's mother is a housekeeper, his father is too poor to give up his job in a distant village, and the child dreams of "a house of his own, not a room off the kitchen. He wanted his mother to wander through gardens picking flowers." In other words, he wants the life of John Buckwater, the English planter his mother works for. And although Chandi has an enterprising business of hawking stolen flowers to the English upper crust, he sees a trip to England, where everyone "seemed to have huge bungalows and beautiful books and red-and-green checked shorts," as a faster way to achieve his goals. As the years go by, the slowly developing relationship between Buckwater and Chandi's mother, Premawathi, gives him hope that someday he'll continue his education in England.

Lush with period detail, Roberts's debut is elegant and moving. The characters are without much moral shading, either good or evil; even so, the author avoids some obvious stereotypes, undermining the predictable power struggle of employer and employee (or imperialist and native) in favor of a more complicated theme, the intense solitude of love doomed by circumstances. Much of the novel is limited to Chandi's consciousness. Where an adult narrative voice takes over, or where the point of view switches to an adult character, Roberts achieves in a few sentences what the Chandi passages, with all their discoveries and overheard, scarcely understood ideas, can take pages to convey.

That said, Chandi's education is vital to the story, and it is here that The Flower Boy is at its most dramatic. The affair between his proud mother and the gentle Buckwater, which parallels the illicit friendship Chandi has cultivated with Buckwater's daughter Rose-Lizzie, violates an entire package of social norms (not only are they breaking a racial taboo, but both are married). These are decent people following their hearts--yet in a situation where doing so will lead to disappointment, if not tragedy. Roberts is most effective when showing how this reality, intertwined with a distant war and the crumbling of an empire, cuts through Chandi's naive perspective and willed paradise. --John Ponyicsanyi