FROM OUR EDITORS

Anil's Ghost

Halfway into Michael Ondaatje's new novel, Anil's Ghost, there is a scene so quietly devastating that it alone makes the novel worth reading. It is the mid-1980s, and a civil war is raging on the tiny island nation of Sri Lanka. Each day, fresh corpses inundate emergency medical clinics—many of them so mutilated that they are unidentifiable and can only be classified as "disappearances." Anil Tissera, a 33-year-old forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka and educated abroad, returns to the island as part of a United Nations human rights campaign to prove that mass murders are taking place. In the hope of identifying the corpses, she takes the unusual step of hiring a local "face painter" named Ananda, who, with mud, soot, paint, and sheer instinct, reconstructs the ghostly visage of one suspiciously disinterred body. Anil then shows the image around the local villages, hoping that it will be recognized. This grisly mask becomes Anil's Ghost, and she raises it high to reveal to the world, and the government of Sri Lanka, that she knows what has been going on.

In addition to being his best story yet, Ondaatje's tale is a similarly brave and grisly act of reanimation: It conjures a dark period in Sri Lankan history and reveals how the atrocities directly affect the three main characters. The novel begins with Anil's arrival on the island and builds outward from there. Forty-nine-year-old archaeologist Sarath Diaysena is assigned by the Sri Lankan government to be Anil's official guide, but in spite of his expertise, he never really warms to the role. Sarath wants nothing to do with stirring up trouble. Since his wife's suicide, he has withdrawn into his work, attempting to buffer himself against the horrors being perpetrated all around him. His brother Gamini, a doctor who works in the field clinics, cannot afford the luxury of denial; the grim casualties of war are wheeled into his clinic by the hour. Unlike Sarath, he knows that one day soon he will recognize one of the victims.

When Sarath and Anil leave the city for the remote villages where Ministry of Health officials rarely, if ever, go, it becomes all but impossible for Sarath to remain uninvolved. Severed heads are staked out along the roads as a warning to anyone thinking of joining the resistance. Even the reticent Sarath admits that small guerrilla groups can hardly be the cause of such widespread brutality. Gamini, meanwhile, is so overwhelmed with triage and autopsies that he turns to his own supply of pharmaceuticals in order to stay awake. Despite the obvious signs of mass murder, Sarath begs Anil not to continue her investigation. He knows how the government will respond to an outsider who tries to exhume its dirty secrets. But Anil knows that it is this very fear that must be overcome if the murders are to be stopped. When she and Sarath find a person who can help them confirm the age of a body interred in a government-controlled cave, there is no turning back.

The remainder of the novel chronicles Anil and Sarath's quest to learn the origins of this body and its identity. Even in the last 20 pages, the novel's crucial questions remain artfully suspended: How much safety is Sarath willing to sacrifice in order to bring these atrocities to light? Will the body be recognized? Will Sarath ever open up to Anil? Will either of them back down when their snooping comes to light? Anil's Ghost is the closest Ondaatje is likely to come to writing a page-turner; many readers will likely devour it in one sitting.

But what makes this more than just a thrilling tale, and invites rereadings, is the way Ondaatje textures his characters' interior lives. And this is where we get vintage Ondaatje. Using flashbacks and brilliant set pieces, Ondaatje spreads out their histories before us like a cartographer, and through this careful mapping we feel his characters' pain and disillusionment. There is Anil's growing guilt over having left Sri Lanka before the disappearances began, and her attempt to expiate that guilt by working to bring these events to light. There is Gamini's struggle to keep hope alive after so many bodies have died in his arms. And finally, there is Sarath's judicious approach to each new atrocity, an attitude that mirrors his technique of keeping a close lid on his heart.

In Ondaatje's literary universe, it is through loving that we define ourselves, and his characters reveal their essential natures by how they do and do not love. Anil has recently run out on her boyfriend after stabbing him in the arm with a small knife. The face painter Ananda's own wife is numbered among the disappearances. When reconstructing the faces of the missing, he gives each of them a serene portrayal, in the hope that his wife, too, will find peace. Sarath's wife, who killed herself at the height of the disappearances, is a more indirect casualty. At the nexus of these three characters is Gamini. Like Anil, he is living on the edge—giving his life to the cause of helping others—but unlike Sarath, he is willing to risk his heart by trying to find true love.

In Ondaatje's previous books, his characters transcended their war-ravaged condition through sexual connection. Here, however, sex is the ground upon which the political battles raging around the characters turn personal, where people learn their fates. Ultimately, what brings home the crushing truth of the atrocities is the extent to which each character gives up on romantic love. Yet in the midst of such emotional decimation, Anil never abandons her struggle to bring the murders to light. Matters of the heart are defined by what we sacrifice. And by risking everything for truth, Anil delivers her most profound expression of love to her reclaimed country.

—John Freeman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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￯﾿ﾽs 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￯﾿ﾽs landscape and ancient civilization, Anil￯﾿ﾽs Ghost is a literary spellbinder, Michael Ondaatje￯﾿ﾽs most powerful novel yet.

SYNOPSIS

With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize￯﾿ﾽwinning 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Time Magazine

An exquisitely imagined journey through the hellish consequences of impassioned intentions . . . The uncanny power of Anil's Ghost stems largely from Ondaatje's refusal to frame his tale as a struggle of good and evil . . . The author notes at one point the ancient rite of painting the eyes of new statues of the Buddha . . . Anil's Ghost reflects not a god's eyes but something equally unknowable.

Salon.com

Michael Ondaatje breaks the rules. He forces the novel to do things it isn't supposed to do and he gets away with it. His fiction plays an elusive and dazzling game of tag with a dreamlike other reality...Anil's Ghost is an impressive achievement. Like all of his books, it is a work of high moral and aesthetic seriousness, suffused with a deep affection for and understanding of human beings and compassion for their lot.

Robert Allen Papinchak - USA Today

Anil's Ghost is virtually flawless, with impeccable regional details, startlingly original characters and a compelling literary plot that borders on the thriller.

Keith Phipps - The Onion AV Club

If Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient was about the spaces in war that allow humanity to slip through, the same can be said of his follow-up, Anil's Ghost. That it deals with an entirely different sort of war, however, makes a great difference. Set in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje's birthplace and home to an ongoing, undeclared war between the government and various factions of rebels, Anil's Ghost concerns the efforts of Anil, a Western-trained forensics expert returning to her homeland and finding the chance to prove an unidentified skeleton the victim of government assassination. Aided at various times by an archeologist, his estranged doctor brother, and a drunken artist, she encounters obstacles at nearly every turn. Less concerned with the mystery than what it means to pursue it and what pursuing it means to each character, Ondaatje's richly textured novel explores its explosive scenario by portraying the aftermath--the weary camaraderie of the overcrowded emergency room, the haunted lives of those left behind--with the poetic grace and awareness of moral ambiguity he brought to The English Patient. In the process, Ondaatje makes his story recognizable as all too universal. "Only our weapons are state-of-the-art," a character laments at one point, and the reference could apply just as easily to Somalia or Central America. That Ondaatje musters up something like a hopeful ending says much about the generosity of spirit at work in his book, and it says even more that it can ring true after such an unflinching portrayal of violence, absurdity, and loss.

Elizabeth Bukowski - Wall Street Journal

Anil's Ghost has a collage-like structure that hops among scenes from the past and present of different characters' lives. The fragmented narrative heightens the sense that these characters only halfway inhabit their lives; the constant terrors of the war, and in Anil's case, the sudden death of her parents more than a decade earlier, have forced them to build up their emotional defenses.

Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan who lives in Canada, is a master poet is evident on every page. His shimmering prose, along with the novel's surprise ending and insights into the way political turmoil affects individual lives, makes Anil's Ghost a worthy successor to The English Patient Read all 17 "From The Critics" >

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