Description
Product Description
Life on a tea plantation in 1930s Ceylon obeys none of the tyrannical clocks that rule the world outside; time there is measured
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by the seasons of twining growth, by the rainwater dripping off bright blossoms. This must be earth's version of paradise. It's also the only world Chandi knows. Son of the housekeeper, he enjoys a privileged, in-between life. Best friends with Rose-Lizzie, the English planter's daughter, he shares her schooling, her freedom, and the secret hiding places the misted hills yield only to them. Their friendship is innocent in its purpose and perfect in its understanding, yet troubling to those--servants and masters alike--who know what can happen when social taboos are violated.
Rose-Lizzie's father, John, is trapped in a marriage whose aridity mocks the lushness that surrounds him. He finds his eyes turning more and more often toward Premawathi, Chandi's lovely young mother, as she serenely goes about her duties in the great house. The ferocious strictures forbidding love between the ruling class and the natives keep them apart, but this only makes the electricity between them spark higher. When they finally let convention slip away, their love rends the delicate fabric of plantation life that had seemed so impervious to change.
And now the war, which has been convulsing all of Europe, reaches even this remote outpost of the British Empire, bringing to a boil the unrest simmering below the colony's placid surface. Adult sins and sorrows have encroached on the children's Eden, and Chandi and Rose-Lizzie must do what they can to save it.
The Flower Boy captures the magic that haunts the intense attachments of childhood and the bittersweet dangers of forbidden desire. At once a tender love story and a poignant evocation of an empire's last days, The Flower Boy will transport you.
Amazon.com Review
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 onl
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