Anil's Ghost

Michael Ondaatje

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Review

This is a very good, thought-provoking novel…  Anil is a forensic anthropologist, educated in America, who is sent by an international human rights group to work in her native Sri Lanka.  She teams up with Sarath, a government-appointed archaeologist, to investigate the waves of murders perpetrated by terrorists, freedom fighters and, it seems, the government.  Their enquiry narrows to one of the skeletons they disinter, which they name Sailor.  “Who was he?  The representative of all those lost voices.  To give him a name would name the rest.”  They seek advice from a blind, hermetic archaeologist called Palipana, who recommends them to Ananda, an “artificer” who can paint eyes on sculptures of the Buddha.  They believe that this skill, or gift, will enable him to model Sailor’s head so that they can identify him.  All this occurs in an atmosphere of extreme suspicion and secrecy, against a background of random murder and brutality.

So far, this sounds like a political thriller: a grisly exploration of the horrors of civil war and an assertion of the value of individual identity. But this narrative is regularly suspended.  At intervals, we are told a surprising amount about Anil’s past in America; about Sarath’s brother, Gamini, a surgeon; about Palipana, and various others.  There are two domains, the public and the private, which reflect and influence each other…

“We are, and I was, formed by history,” says Palipana, though it might have been The English Patient pbk £6.99, clutching his Herodotus.  As a morphology of injury, Anil’s Ghost is just as acute as The English Patient.  And if this novel’s concerns sound more like the ghost of The English Patient than of Anil, I don’t think that qualifies as a criticism.  It suggests passion and commitment on the writer’s part, even if some readers might be disappointed to find themselves in similar intellectual territory... - review by Johnny de Falbe

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