This is one of the best books I’ve read this year (2011).

Let me start with telling this first, I used to like and play cricket a lot. But over the time I just got dragged away from the game and lost all interest in the game. Now I hardly watch or play it. I am not interested in cricket anymore.

So for exactly this reason I was reluctant to pick this book up, thinking of it containing all sort of cricket clichés and stuff, which is another way of making myself bored. I only bought it on the forced recommendation of a friend who also doesn’t like cricket but told some good things about this book. Although, I bought it, it stayed in my ‘to-be-read’ bucket for longtime after my buying it.

Finally when I decided to read this book, I wasn’t expecting much and thought I wouldn’t be able to go beyond first few pages. So I wanted to get done with it asap, without wasting my time on something I wasn’t interested in.

But to be honest I was sucked right into it from the start despite my lack of interest in the cricket. Shehan’s got brilliant writing style that never feels tedious or overbearing. Writing flows from one heading to another at quite reasonable intervals so you don’t feel stuck under same chapter for long. Book is actually divided into 5 main parts (2nd being the longest).

Reading the blurb would make you think that its chockfull of cricket terminologies that would require thorough background knowledge of the game on your part as pre-requisite. Well, I cannot say completely no to it and I can understand if someone is not aware of cricket, it could be hard to digest this book for him, but you don’t need to know the game in detail. And knowledge about name of certain cricketers will let you enjoy this book a lot more.

What I realized that it wasn’t as much about the game of cricket itself rather it portrays Srilankan society, its culture and its ugly politics both in and out of the game. Cricket is part of the story but these other stuff makes this book very interesting.

I must slightly caveat this 5* - if you're interested in cricket, the subcontinent (especially Sri Lanka) and have a tolerance for fictional unreliable memoirs, then you may love this book. If you are deficient in any of these criteria, this may not be the book for you.

However- for those still with me - I think this is a wonderful book. All about unfulfilled ambition, and legacy. And the beauty of sport. The beauty and the glory and the capriciousness and the tragedy - in short, the romance. All set against the backdrop of the history of Sri Lanka, with its civil war and corruption and bigotry, and punctuated by cricket matches. It is sad and sweet, and suffused with the wisdom and acceptance of old age (impressively, this despite being the first novel by Karunatilaka).

The book is named for the stock delivery bowled by an unorthodox left-arm spinner - the main delivery bowled by the main character. The plot follows a dissolute sports writer W.G. (Wije) Karunasena and cricket fan trying to find out what happened to Mathews, the greatest bowler Wije had ever seen.

Is Mathews fictional or real? It is difficult to know what's real and made up - certainly I recognised many of the cricketing stories. Having done a little bit of research I would say the vast majority is fiction, but Karunatilaka has done a great job of weaving the two together. This greatly enhances the "unreliable narrator" aspect of the book - if you don't know what bits have been borrowed from the real world, it's impossible to know which bits are supposed to be made-up in the suspended-disbelief fictional world.

In my googling, though, I found a couple of faked up websites about Pradeed Mathews - versions of cricinfo.com and crikipedia (with a strategic '1' in place of an 'i') - clearly created as supporting material for the book (one of these pages is featured in the book, but I only reached that after I found the page myself). So you have a fictional book that uses stories from the real world, with fictional bits leaking back out into the real world - it's kinda fascinating (and I'm certainly not saying it's unique, but it was very pleasing and effective to stumble across these fictional spillages).

http://pradeepmathew.com/
http://cric1nfo.com/player/srilanka/achive/1992/june/
http://crickiped1a.com/record/engine/asia/srilanka/player/pradeep_1992/

Minor faults: it is somewhat romaticising of alcoholism (this is well reversed by the end, but may be jarring during the reading). And I found it a bit tricky to keep track of all the side characters. This is partly due to unfamiliar Sri Lankan names, but also because of the discursive nature of the narrative. I don't think these hamper the book particularly.