In the opening of Unfinished Business – the new novel by Miles Franklin-winning author Shankari Chandran – Ameena, a leading Sri Lankan political journalist, is gunned down at close range in the busy streets of her Colombo neighbourhood. The shooting raises enough eyebrows in America that CIA agent Ellie Harper is sent to investigate (although not so deeply as to stir up any real trouble).
This scene, short but brutal, is reminiscent of Chandran’s previous book Safe Haven which also opens with a death that provokes a similar political investigation. In both cases, the opening scene exposes the violent systems of injustice and oppression that prop up western politics – but in both books the subsequent investigation does little to shift them.
Although there are similarities between the two, Unfinished Business is a more satisfying and sophisticated read than Safe Haven. Chandran seems to have hit her stride as a more commercial author and her latest novel has all the ingredients of a true page-turner. Ellie is a CIA agent who has been out of action for four years, working in USAID – “the land of global aid, unicorns and rainbows” – as a way to both hide and recover from a previous mission gone wrong. The details of this mission, which also took place in Sri Lanka, are revealed as flashbacks throughout the novel, establishing the personal stakes for Ellie, who blames herself for the events that killed her team and left several of her friends severely wounded.
It’s a compelling backstory, given extra depth by Ellie’s prior romance with Sathyan, Ameena’s partner at the time of her death. Sathyan is the reason that Ellie goes above and beyond her mission brief, digging too deep into Ameena’s murder in an attempt to assuage her own guilt at having left Sathyan, grieving, without warning four years earlier. She’s a feisty, fully realised character whose penchant for speaking her mind and ignoring orders get her into plenty of tight situations that call for a quick getaway or a burst of action.
Sathyan’s presence in the narrative also provides Chandran with a mouthpiece to trouble dominant Western narratives around aid and conflict. He and Ellie first meet at a human rights conference where he’s delivering a lecture on the failings of US trade subsidies, arguing their responsibility in the radicalisation of Muslims worldwide. Reiterating this position to Ellie later, he tells her that US intervention into conflict zones “gives the fundamentalists exactly what they want – a reason to hate you and a way to radicalise hundreds of thousands of Muslims who would otherwise have wanted to live peaceful lives”.
Both Sathyan and Ellie are appalled at the number of Tamil citizens whose lives are sacrificed as collateral damage in Sri Lanka’s attempts to wipe out the Tamil Tigers. Not uncritical of violence on either side, Sathyan curses both the Sri Lankan army, “who made it so easy for children to be radicalised against them”, and the Tigers, who “wouldn’t win this war, but they wouldn’t end it either”. But he is also aware of the inevitable appeal of rebel groups – his father was killed by the Sri Lankan army, a loss that inspired his younger brother to fight, and ultimately die, with the Tigers.
If this calls to mind current events, it should. Although the novel’s present day is 2009 (with its flashbacks taking place in 2005 during the Sri Lankan civil war), its criticisms of the “Great White Saviour” and the brown bodies sacrificed to global economic interests are very much a thing of the present.
But despite these pointed parallels, Sathyan’s articulate critiques and the depth of political corruption Ellie manages to expose, Unfinished Business doesn’t really agitate against these existing systems. Chandran certainly doesn’t shy away from the reality of war, or from graphic depictions of the terrible violence that is inflicted on brown bodies by political super powers, but she is careful in apportioning blame; it’s complicated. The scenes of violence are uncomfortable but not new, and wrapped in the comforts of a familiar thriller they are perhaps too easy to turn away from once the book is finished.
Still, it’s refreshing to read a thriller set in the world of diplomatic and political intrigue that actually engages with its problematic landscape. Unlike novelists who avoid grappling with issues of racial violence and political oppression by relying on the comfortable stereotypes of heroes and villains, Chandran leans into the grey areas, for the most part creating a more complex cast of characters who resist easy categorisation. The beats are still familiar, the satisfying urgency of the thriller is still there, but set against the dirtier truths of the real world.
Unfinished Business by Shankari Chandran is out through Ultimo Press ($34.99)
