Carl Muller As A 1990s Paradigm Shift

Carl Muller, who passed away in December 2019, was – is – the most original contributor Sri Lankan English fiction has had over the past three decades. Sometimes, we feel that there are certain books a writer shouldn’t have written, or that he should have stopped writing at a particular point.

- Vihanga Perera

A purely un-academic conjecture of a reader alone, if this assessment is to be applied to Carl Muller, he shouldn’t have published the sequels to Children of the Lion (1997): a series of supplements published soon after the War, which fail to live up to the mark a sequel to such an energy-consuming mammoth of a project such as Children of the Lion demands. Feeding the hungerpangs of a triumphalist, immediate post-war majoritarian nationalism, these sequels – The City of the Lion and the Grandeur of the Lion included – if at all complicate Carl Muller as a person who began his writing career by bringing back to the center stories of a people that were fast disappearing from Sri Lanka’s post-independence universe: the working class Burghers.