Running in the Family: Travels in Ceylon Summary & Analysis

Ondaatje thinks that Ceylon feels miniscule after the grandeur of Canada and India. The country is crisscrossed with railroad tracks, which Mervyn had a fraught relationship with. Trains are common places to drink in the 1920s and 1930s, and as an officer in the Ceylon Light Infantry, Mervyn can ride for free. He frequently gets drunk while riding and acted recklessly. In his 20s, Mervyn gets drunk and pulls out a gun, threatening to kill the driver unless he stops the train so that Mervyn’s friend can join him; the train is held up for two hours. After several such episodes, Mervyn becomes notorious on the railways. Noel often has to come retrieve him from his drunken antics.

On a different occasion, Mervyn strips naked and jumps from the train, running into a tunnel. The Navy won't let Noel go retrieve him, so Doris has to instead, marching into the pitch black with a suit of clothing for Mervyn to wear. When she finds him, they argue for an hour and a half until Doris coaxes Mervyn away from suicide. At this point, they’ve been married six years. Doris lasts 14 years with Mervyn, though she realizes on this day that Mervyn is different from most. Ondaatje notes that Doris seemed to lose some of her ability to write during the 1930s, as if she’d forgotten and had to relearn.

Resthouses are common in Ceylon, appearing every 15 miles or so on each road with a restaurant, bar, and place for travelers to sleep. At Mervyn’s favorite resthouse, a spiteful man named Sammy leaves a long list of complaints about him in the visitors’ book. Mervyn, in turn, leaves a snide comment about Sammy. This triggers a “literary war” between the two where each man writes a half page of insults and vitriol about the other and their family in every resthouse visitors’ book they can find. The offending pages are torn out of most visitors’ books, destroying a “good archival history of two semi-prominent Ceylon families.”

Mervyn is finally banned from trains after an event in 1943. As fears of Japanese attacks fester, Mervyn takes to getting drunk and ordering whole battalions to set up along various coastlines, sure that Japanese boats are approaching. On his last day on the train, Mervyn knocks another officer, John Kotelawala—who later becomes Prime Minister—unconscious. Mervyn steals Kotelawala’s gun and takes over the train, ordering it to drive back and then forward again for hours. He strips mostly naked and finishes a bottle of gin every hour. At some point, Mervyn becomes convinced that the Japanese have hidden bombs on the train, so he orders all military personnel off and starts breaking all the lights, believing they are heating the bombs. Mervyn searches all the luggage and finds what he thinks are 25 bombs—which are actually curd pots—and finally gets off the train so he can drop them all into the river.