Parliament is a fragmented immigrant-family grief novel that tries to make broken chronology, sensory repetition, and low-punctuation lyricism stand in for actual dramatic shape. It follows Loyola, or Loy, a Sri Lankan-British writer drifting in Berlin after the death of his mother, Rani, and after the collapse of his relationship with Katrine. Intercut with his memories are the life of his father, Syma: leaving Sri Lanka, working as a chauffeur in London, buying property, loving and failing Rani, and eventually returning with Loy to Sri Lanka after his brother Peter’s death. The book wants to be about distance, inheritance, grief, migration, masculinity, care, political rupture, and father-son tenderness. Mostly, it is about taking very familiar material and arranging it into misty fragments until it looks more difficult than it is.
The beginning is already overdesigned. In 2021 Berlin, Loy walks Katrine’s dog, Max, through a park and notices the graffiti word “kinder,” which he first reads as an instruction to “stay kinder,” then remembers it also means children. This is exactly the kind of symbolic double-use the novel cannot resist: one word must carry relationship failure, lost pregnancy, gentleness, childhood, Germany, and accusation. Loy is living in Katrine’s apartment after two years together, with a dog he loves and a woman he may not love enough. Katrine has told him, “You’re the same as the day I met you,” and the book immediately starts presenting his whole life as evidence for and against that diagnosis.
Max then finds a dead rabbit in the mud. The dog tears at it, and Loy ends up on his knees, covered in blood, mud, and shit, prying the carcass from the dog’s mouth. He buries the rabbit under a tree and later washes Max in the bathtub, scrubbing blood from his teeth, tongue, fur, the tiles, the grout, and himself. The scene is so obviously meant to introduce the novel’s grammar of grief—dead animal, dirty hands, burial, washing, care, shame—that it feels less like an opening than a workshop prompt. The body is ruined, the son must clean, the dog is innocent, the corpse is symbolic. It is all very deliberate.
