With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past–a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder–Michael Ondaatje’s most powerful novel yet.
"Ondaatje transports us to Sri Lanka in a time during the 1980's and 1990's when the government was embroiled in a civil war that produced a reign of terror and plenty of dead and disappeared people. Anil returns to her homeland as a forensic expert and representative of an international human rights organization. In a plot that is a bit mystery but so much more, we come to know Anil and Sarath (an archeologist), along with secondary characters like Ananda (artist extraordinaire) and Gamini (Sarath's brother and a doctor). We see the cost of the war and a chronicle of lives lived in the remains of skeletons, for example ankle bones that reveal work in mines. We see brothers torn and bound by familial love, a young woman trying to make sense of her identity and what it might mean to love, and a society charged with the fear that is essential to war. We see doctors who are forced to work for opposing sides in the war, yet go about their days saving their enemies as they would their families. Anil's Ghost paints a picture, the outlines of which are finally hazy as they blur into our notion of war and its reckoning.
There are also lots of asides that are really insertions of historical facts. Did you know that if you place a stone on the earth above a ribcage of a corpse to act as a marker, it takes nine years for the stone to fall into the ribcage? There were "halls for the sick" in what is now Sri Lanka four centuries before Christ? And an archeological site in China: underneath stone slabs, rows of timber were cut and stripped as if for a floor, but it was a ceiling, and when the timber was removed, a water tomb was discovered, three pools of underground water.
I don't know how Ondaatje does it, because the narrative is really a bit of a muddle. A back and forth pulled along by a moving narrative, but jumpy all the same. Do we need to know so much about Anil's one-time lover, Cullis? Or Palipana, Sarath's teacher? (The Grove of Ascetics, the section that describes Sarath and Anil meeting Palipana is beautiful, though.) Also, there are italicized sections here and there and their relevance wasn't always clear to me nor how they fit with what preceded or what followed them. But my focus on the narrative's jumpiness might be because structure fascinates me. I'm always trying to learn from how a novelist puts together a story, how it's presented to us and when the rationale isn't crystal clear, it's frustrating because I feel I'm not seeing something that I should.
Ondaatje's language is beautiful and there are passages and sentences that took my breath away, not always for their beauty but for their clarity and ability to convey something profound in few words. Remembering a few:
"The hospital would run out of painkillers during the first week of any offensive. You were without self in those times, lost among the screaming."
"Gamini rarely saw himself from the point of view of a stranger. Though most people knew who he was, he felt he was invisible to those around him. The woman therefore slid alongside him and clattered about in the almost empty house of his heart. She became, as she had done that night of the operation, the sole accompanist to what he thought, what he worked on."
"I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there's a story."
"When he wrote, he slipped into the page as if it were water, and tumbled on. The writer was a tumbler. (Would he remember that?) If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer's hoods and pencils and . . . you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing."
"American movies, English books--remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.""
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Sorayya (5 out of 5 stars)