So immanent a metaphor offers risks for a writer. It is the microscopic polyp that gives the protective but dead, and sometimes deadly, reef its living skin. The staggering consequences of delicate shifts and subtle notions and the vast disjunction caused in society by small initial breaks in civilisation are each, in this book, embodied in the danger posed by poison and technology to the polyp, the tiny creature that built the coral reefs which form the ramparts of Sri Lanka. Romesh Gunesekera's Reef manages to align and illustrate these two congruent ideas. Chaos theorists tell us that a butterfly that stamps may begin a sequence that ends with the crashing of a typhoon upon a city. IN HER introduction to Edith Wharton's novel The Reef, Anita Brookner suggests that 'to follow a scruple to its ultimate conclusion is Edith Wharton's whole concern'. The Independent Review of Reef : Faint Grumblings heard in Serendip by Candia McWilliam
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