Anil's Ghost (Paperback)

The novel's action revolves around Anil Tissera, a young forensic anthropologist, born in Sri Lanka but educated in Europe and America, who "had courted foreignness", and "was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or on the highways around Santa Fe". Anil returns to the country of her birth after 15 years on a United Nations sponsored investigation into the escalating number of politically motivated murders engulfing the island. As Anil begins to realise the scale of the murder and horror which her investigations reveal, it becomes clear that "the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here". She reluctantly teams up with Sarath Diyasena, "the archaeologist selected by the government" to investigate a particularly sensitive murder; skeletons discovered buried in the Bandarawela caves, one of the most archaeologically sensitive sites in the entire country. One skeleton in particular fascinates both Anil and Sarath. Simply known as "Sailor", the quest for the skeleton's identity sucks both Anil and Sarath into the terrifying heart of darkness which makes up contemporary Sri Lankan politics. Ondaatje reflects upon the ancient history of Sri Lanka through the fragments of history and identity that Anil and Sarath uphold in the face of the murder and chaos which surrounds them.

Although Anil's Ghost is a poetic and beautifully written book, it is also a tough, uncompromising and brave novel about a terrifying conflict that the world has chosen to ignore. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
When forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera returns to Sri Lanka she finds the country ravaged by civil war. She has been sent there to investigate the organised murder campaigns that have engulfed the island and what follows is a story of love, family and identity and a quest to unlock the hidden past. Superb reviews for this new novel by the author of the Booker Prize winning The English Patient.

There is a territory that Ondaatje is marking out as distinctively his own. It is the area of war - World War II in The English Patient and the civil war in Sri Lanka in his latest novel, Anil's Ghost - and it is war as no one else has written of it: 'war for the sake of war', war as a way of life, where the tragedy, the terrible waste and horror of war is transformed into a kind of hallucinatory poetry. By setting the violence and ugliness of war in the mesmerizingly beautiful landscape of Sri Lanka - its forests and hermitages, its monsoon rains and bursts of sunlight, its music of cicadas and birds - he lifts the art of creating fiction from real events into another realm, closer to poetry. To step into his novel is to step into a paradise turned to nightmare, peopled by human beings who manage to remain human, with all that implies - cruelty, vivaciousness, indifference as well as yearning, desire and painful sensibility. There is Anil Tissera, the intriguing forensic anthropologist originally from Sri Lanka and returning there after years in London and the American south-west; Sarath Diyasena, the archaeologist who has devoted his life exclusively to the ruins and history of his country; Palipana, the blind master of the field under whom he studied; Sarath's brother Gamini, a surgeon who deadens himself with 'speed' in order to deal with the enormities of death and injury piling up for his attention; Ananda, the craftsman who can bring stone to life by painting in the final detail - the all-seeing eye of Buddha the Compassionate - although he cannot bring back to life the wife who disappeared; and a skeleton nicknamed 'Sailor' who has a central role to play in this story of carnage. The intersection of their difficult, complex lives creates an intricate embroidery that dazzles the eye and ear and engages our deepest concerns. They breathe an air so rare and fine that to close the book and leave their company - and Ondaatje's haunting voice - is to come down from a high mountain or return to the humdrum world from a magic island. Review by ANITA DESAI Editor's note: Anita Desai's books include Diamond Dust and Fasting, Feasting. Most people are aware of the ethnic war beng fought in Sri Lanka by separatist Tamil Tigers. But less is known of the silent war of terror and counter-terror in the Sinhala South waged by anti-government insurgents in the 1980s. Severed heads were found on stakes, bodies were washed up daily on southern beaches, hospital emergency rooms were piled high with the maimed and half-dead. Ondaatje excavates this period in Sri Lanka's buried history. Through the eyes of Anil, a Sri Lankan-born but American-educated forensic anthropologist sent by the Geneva Centre for Human Rights to investigate 'the disappearances', her local co-worker Sarath, a dour archaeologist, and his brother Gamini, a doctor who dedicates his life to mending the broken bodies of war, the horror unfolds. This is not a tale from Ondaatje's own Westernized and somewhat pampered class, whose self-indulgent concerns he humorously recalled in his earlier Sri Lankan memoir, Running in the Family. The story here, meticulously researched for seven years, is that of ordinary people caught up in a war not of their own making and of professionals trying to keep up with their consciences. Excavation is the theme - finding out exactly who had inhabited the body of a contemporary skeleton, nicknamed 'Sailor' by Anil, unearthed at a government archaeological site. But it is Anil, too, who is being unearthed, challenged, her liberal values tested on the touchstone of terror. Each character has his or her own ghost to come to terms with. Anil's ghost is not that of Sailor, but of Sarath, who, to enable her to have the evidence to expose to the world what is happening to his country, puts his own life at risk. But it is the people of the countryside who can finally lay the ghosts to rest. And it is a refurbished Buddhism that can restore to the island its vision and humanity. The style is at times as stark and spare as the skeletons themselves; at others, as lyrical as the land it lovingly paints. Reviewed by A SIVANANDAN Editor's note: A Sivanandan is the Sri Lankan author of a novel, When Memory Dies, and a collection of stories, Where the Dance Is. (Kirkus UK)

The aftershocks of the recent bloody civil war in Sri Lanka, and of doomed efforts to name and remember that afflicted country's ``disappeared,' are explored with commanding poetic intensity in this striking latest from the Canadian (and Sri Lankanborn) author of (this novel's immediate predecessor) The English Patient (1992). As he did in that earlier tale, Ondaatje analyzes the effects of political catastrophe on several deeply involved characters brought randomlyand explosivelytogether. Anil Tissera, a ``forensic anthropologist' who had emigrated to America and now works for an international Human Rights organization, returns to her homeland to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders. She is assigned to work with Sarath Diyasenaa phlegmatic archaeologist whose own political affiliations remain cloudyand is soon involved in the process of ``restoring' skeletons officially declared ``prehistoric remains' (though it's obvious they're the remains of recently deceased victims of torture). Ondaatje's plot is mined with ingenious surprises, but the storys structure is relentlessly meditative and ruminativeas becomes apparent when it expands to include other principal characters: Sarath's younger brother Gamini, a doctor abducted by rebel insurgents, who shares with Sarath a history of fraternal intrigue and sexual rivalry; Sarath's mentor Palipana, a venerable ``epigraphist' (i.e., an interpreter of ancient ruins) who has become a blind recluse; and Ananda Udagama, an ``eye-painter turned drunk gem-pit worker turned head-restorer,' whose unusual artistry is commandeered in the violent climactic pages. The actions and thoughts of these and several other dramatically conceived characters often exude a hallucinatory power; and as often, unfortunately, drain away the story's immediacy, in capriciously positioned flashbacks burdened with explaining their past lives and present interrelationships. The reader becomes lost in thickets of speculation and reverie. Impressive and often fascinating, but not a success. There's ample evidence that Ondaatje worked diligently, and perhaps for several years, on Anil's Ghost. But he doesn't seem to have finished it. (First printing of 200,000) (Kirkus Reviews)

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