The book's final pages mention the war between Vietnam and Cambodia and the retreating Khmer Rouge armies, so it must end in the early weeks or months of 1979. There is a reference to the second anniversary of the Revolution and to Raami's ninth birthday. The second half chronicles the splitting apart of Raami's family as one relative after another is slaughtered outright or dies as a result of their enslavement. The first half of the book is a near moment-by-moment recount of the first weeks after the Khmer Rouge declares a new state on April 17, 1975. But it also renders some characters shadowy and incomplete and glosses over context that would have helped create a firmer narrative.Īlthough the book jacket declares the novel covers the four years of the Khmer Rouge regime, the action is heavily concentrated on the first days and weeks after the capture and exile of Raami's family. In many ways this is a grace, for it allows us to focus on the child's small world of her privileged family and their servants without being overwhelmed by the incomprehensible horror of Cambodia's civil war. Because we are seeing the events unfold through the eyes and within the heart of a seven-year old girl, we are twisted and wrenched by a child's vulnerability and hope but spared the most gruesome details of torture and obliteration. In the Shadow of the Banyan is a story that connects us to Cambodia's recent past and the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970's. They lead us back and forth across time and space and connect us to the entire universe.” The nanny of the story's narrator, Raami - the author's mirror character - says it best when she declares that stories “are like footpaths of the gods. Its outline is based on the atrocious Khmer Rouge regime, but the narrative floats on themes of family, mythology and the deadly beauty of the author's homeland. What Vaddey Ratner has accomplished with her striking and lovely In the Shadow of the Banyan is a tone poem. When the story is revealed as the author's own, the reader feels compelled to accept a fictionalized account as mere degrees of separation from the truth. Children are naturally fanciful, unreliable creatures - not dishonest, but only able to offer the truth as their immature brains can grasp and explain it.

To render historical, political fiction in the voice and through the eyes of a young child, a writer sets herself a tremendous challenge and takes on great risk. In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

In the shadow of the banyan