The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne

The Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (2017)

Warning: this short story contains alcohol, suicide, religion and wonky physics. It’s best enjoyed if you can appreciate at least three out of the four. The omission of inverted commas is intentional and not a formatting error.

--From the front matter.

Nobody believes, but everyone prays anyway.

--116, having a transcendental moment.

Let no one say they weren’t warned.

This is an older book from one of my favorite authors. It’s a fascinating piece of work, one that is both as bleak as the name implies but also surprisingly uplifting and subtly funny. There were little rough patches as well, and I had the impression this was very much an experiment--that the author may have started from an idea, rather than than a fully-finished concept. If so, it worked well.

Rohan is effectively death-proof, thanks to an infusion of nanobots from his insurance company. The results have been…not great. It turns out that not being able to easily die is a fairly steep burden to bear. Rohan can’t even properly crumble under the pressure of enforced life, when he hears about an opportunity to crew a probe going to the event horizon of a black hole.

The journey here, maybe predictably, is not just through space. At the literal and figurative destination, at the moment of discovery, we get an unexpected and oddly affirming conclusion. Science fades and a larger mystery comes into play. “God” or something like God may have always been near Rohan — although not where or in the form you might expect.

Wijeratne is playing with big ideas and basic questions with his usual creativity and insight. It’s striking that the author and protagonist share a last name. The struggle perhaps is or was very real? (After all, not all nanobots are necessarily literal.) If so, and not to make light of another’s inner struggle, it sounds like he came by it honestly and judging from this book, put it to good use. For all that, the title is a bit morbid (it could as easily have been called “The Weltschmerz of Young Rohan”) but Wijeratne wraps it all up in a way I found satisfying and almost delightful.

“Let there be light,” indeed.

Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (Positively beautiful words in play here, including a “Clarke moment.”)

Immersion factor: Chest-high: 1.5 pts

Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts

Character/plot development: Above-average: 1.5 pts

Innovative/interesting: Average: 1 pt

Total: 7.5/10

Unlike the laws of physics, the laws that govern small talk are constant everywhere in the universe.

—The wisdom of Rohan.

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