Anil's Ghost: A Novel

I read this book while I was in Sri Lanka. I think the stories and perspective really helped me to speak to the people while I was there. There was so much more I wanted to ask but was not sure what was appropriate. This book helped me to understand some of the conflict during the War.I wrote about this book recently:Article first published as Sri Lanka: To Go or Not To Go? on Technorati.After the 30 year civil war ended, we decided to go to Sri Lanka last summer. Our friends enjoyed a month of great travel in September 2009 and encouraged us to go.Wondering about the impact of so many years of war, I was worried about this trip. When we arrived, I learned that there had been 450 years of Dutch, Portugese and British rule before the civil war. I decided to ask as many questions as I could.During our six weeks in Sri Lanka, I was constantly amazed by the friendliness of the people. Everyone wanted to talk to us and tell us how happy they are that the war is over, that there is peace, and that they can now travel in their own country.The young students we met at Anuradhapurna were from the East and no one had been able to travel to this incredible ancient site for decades. A large group of adults came by bus from Colombo to Nilaveli Beach and all the men wanted to shake our American hands, offer us drinks and ask, "Sri Lanka good?"We told them, "Yes Sri Lanka is good. The people are so friendly." Perhaps the friendliest I have ever met in the 100+ countries I have seen! During our trip, I read several books of both fiction and non-fiction about Sri Lanka. Reading about string hoppers (noodles made of rice) while eating them for breakfast added to the entertainment.Reading about the government secret killings and clashes between Tamils and Singhalese in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost was spellbinding. What really happened I wondered? To read about the drama and struggle of women's daily lives from the point of view of Latha and Biso, two main characters in Ru Freedman's A Disobedient Girl, and then to see it was eye opening.I turned to Jewish World Watch to discover more about the conflict in Sri Lanka. In their June World Crisis Update, Susan Brooks wrote: "Since 1983, Sri Lanka has suffered from continuous conflict between the government and a separatist rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (often known as the Tamil Tigers).The conflict is estimated to have killed up to 80,000 people with over one million displaced...Both sides may have committed war crimes...Sri Lankan refugees are still living in transit camps while the land is being de-mined...The government continues to hold 11,000 alleged LTTE in 'rehabilitation centers with no legal representation, no access by human rights groups or relatives."Our journey did not include the North and Jafna, foreigners were told you needed permission by the government to venture to the Far North. Many locals told us that they can and will go to Jafna but we were not allowed. I am not sure what the conditions are but the JWW report makes me wonder and so does the book Not Quite Paradise by Adele Barker.Both sources indicate that there are ongoing issues. Staying at the YMBA (Young Man's Buddhist Association) in Kataragama and enjoying the pilgrimage festival, it appears that all is well. However, traveling the two or so "blocks" from our hostel to the beach in Nilaveli past barbed wire and Singhalese Buddhist soldiers makes me wonder. The security checks on the bus near Arugam Bay seemed more for alcohol than bombs but it is hard to know as an outsider.I hope that tourism will continue to flourish along with peace, sealed roads and more freedom to travel. This small island nation is beautiful with treasures of ancient cities, national parks filled with elephants and leopards and wonderful welcoming people. I highly recommend making the effort to visit this wonderful country. Auyobawan and Stuti (Good bye and thank you).

In most other hands, the subject of ANIL'S GHOST would be a mere political thriller. Forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera accepts a UN mission to investigate atrocities in Sri Lanka, the country she left fifteen years before to study in England and the US. Among daily reminders of terrorist activities on all sides, she stumbles on evidence that the government also may be implicated in spreading fear by murder. Will she be able to confirm her suspicions? Will she be allowed to leave the country alive?But Michael Ondaatje (who was also born in Sri Lanka) is a poet, and he uses this narrative mainly as the armature for a meditation on the many ways the past can haunt the present. Several time-frames are at work simultaneously. Anil herself is in the immediate aftermath of a breakup from a lover in America only weeks before; there is a mystery concerning a close female friend of several years back; and of course her return to Sri Lanka brings back memories of her own childhood. Teamed in her investigation with a Sri Lankan archaeologist, she discovers a number of skeletons buried in the same site; the one which arouses her suspicions is obviously a recent death, but the others are over 100 years old, part of the buried record of a cultural history going back for centuries. Together, they visit the archaeologist's former teacher, an old man living ascetically in the depths of the forest, whose vision of history compasses millennia, intuitively subjective rather than scientific. Months, years, centuries, millennia: the time-frames intertwine, creating a tissue of memories that enfold the novel, the characters, and the country as in a web.Yet the memories are set against an all-too-immediate present. The contrast is seen most clearly in the two principal male characters, Sarath Diyasena, the detached archaeologist, and his brother Gamini, who is an emergency room physician dealing with the casualties from gunfire, bombing, and torture. Hooked on speed, Gamini lives in the hospital, snatching catnaps in waiting-rooms, living only for what he can do from one minute to the next. He is not so different from a colleague who, when captured by a terrorist group, went on practising his healing skills among the rebels, apparently with no desire to return so long as he was of use. The hospital sections of this book are unusually stark and focused, even as compared to  THE ENGLISH PATIENT , which also set Ondaatje's apparent fascination with medicine and nursing against a background of present war and the archaeological past.Above all, Ondaatje is a poet, and I cannot think of any of his novels (I have also read  IN THE SKIN OF A LION  and  DIVISADERO ) that show this so richly. Early on, describing the National Atlas of Sri Lanka, he revels in sheer poetry like the following: "The geological map reveals peat in the Muthurajawela swamp south of Negombo, coral along the coast from Ambalagoda to Dondra Head, pearl banks offshore in the Gulf of Mannar. Under the skin of the earth are even older settlements of mica, zircon, thorianite, pegmatite, arkose, topaz, terra rossa limestone, dolomite marble. Graphite near Paragoda, green marble at Katupita and Ginigalpelessa." And for his final chapter, Ondaatje leaves the original plot far behind, describing instead the restoration of a colossal statue of the Buddha by one of the last surviving practitioners of the Netra Mangala, the art of painting the eyes on a statue and thus bringing the dead stone to life. Pulling back from the carnage, yet not forgetting it, the author ascends with the painter to the head of the towering figure. "And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him...". The drawing together of these fibres is nothing less than the author's song of love for his native land.

This has the makings of a good story, as Ondaatje evokes Sri Lanka's bloody recent past and its "scarring psychosis", while celebrating the nation's enduring cultural treasures. Here, a skeleton comes to represent a record of official atrocity, and its journey stands for the attempt to unearth truth, quite literally, from official attempts to bury it. Later on, the eyes of a statue look to a horizon of hope beyond the immediate destruction.Meanwhile, universal ideas are inferred beyond this theatre of conflict, such as: "the main purpose of war had become war". Or "Sometimes law is on the side of power, not truth."But I found the frequent leaps back and forward in time to be overdone and off-putting. So too are the essays inserted into the mouths of Ondaatje's characters, by way of conversation, in a way that could not be natural speech. Also, at times, he fails to identify his speakers, meaning I had to re-read some of the conversations to figure out who was talking.Worth a read, perhaps, but there's room for improvement.

Anil arrives alone on a Human Rights mission to uncover evidence of atrocity; she is a fragile yet strong character, very similar to the Hana of earlier novels by Ondaatje and as interpreted by Juliette Binoche in the film The English Patient, but her family background lies in Sri Lanka rather than Canada. In the end, redemption from her fraught visit eludes her although she is instrumental in bringing it for others. If you are not familiar already with the dark past of civil war in that beautiful island then you will be both shocked and amazed in equal measure. We also learn much about her own complicated backstory. Nobody wants the truth, she finds. Hard to put down once started.

Although this novel is set in Sri Lanka there is little to describe it. The main landscape is of a society undergoing the pressures of long term war and terror. The submissions and rebellions of everyday life, the not knowing who is with you and who against, and the devisiveness of that situation. It is a novel of ghosts both alive and dead.This is not "The English Patient", but why should anyone wish to read the same novel in different guise. What one should ask of any writer is that they give us something fresh each time. Ondaatje does this. What is Ondaatjean is the texture of the prose, his facination with the details of processes - in 'The English Patient' it is bomb disposal, here it is in the artists processes for painting the eyes of the buddha (perhaps a metaphor for the situation in Sri Lanka at the present and how people have to deal with it, for if the statue of the buddha has no eyes painted or carved in, then he has not taken up residence and cannot see). It is in the forensic archeology, in the bones.This is a quiet novel about unquiet times and worth your attention.

Atmospheric. He interweaves the characters into a disturbing and melancholy tale. It is written in a discontinuous time line. Although fiction I’m sure many such things occurred during the civil war. He is a good writer, and I enjoyed the English Patient too.

A delicate and awfully sad piece. Written with elegance but at the same time intense emotivity. I would have expected nothing less from such an author. Ondatje casts his troubled characters against the shadow of a terrible and extremely complicated civil war very successfully, so much so that one is brought to hard consideration of mankind's tendency to unspeakable cruelty. I strongly recommend this book to a more involved and sensitive readership.