Product Description

Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist, has returned to Sri Lanka, a land steeped in culture and tradition, to investigate organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. This is a story of love, family, and identity, set in a country torn apart and ravaged by civil war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22318 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 311 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Anil's Ghost is Michael Ondaatje's eagerly awaited follow-up to his classic Booker prize-winning novel The English Patient. Drawing on Ondaatje's own Sri Lankan heritage, wonderfully explored in his travel narrative Running in the Family, Anil's Ghost is located in contemporary Sri Lanka, in the midst of interminable internecine civil war between government forces, separatist Tamils and antigovernment insurgents.

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

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)

About the Author
Michael Ondaatje is the author of three earlier books of poetry including The Cinnamon Peeler. Selected Poems. He is also the author of several works of fiction including In the Skin of Lion, Running in the Family, Coming through Slaughter and The English Patient, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1992. He lives in Toronto.

Customer Reviews

Curiously uninvolving
There are many good things in this novel but ulimately it doesn't add up to the sum of its parts.

The first half is particularly good setting the scene in Sri Lanka in a state of civil war and the descriptions of the lives of the medical staff are particularly involving and moving. He also does a good job of setting all this in the historical background.

However, about 2/3rds of the way through Ondaatjie seems to loose interest in his nominal 'plot' -the search for the identity of a skeleton found by the main protagonists. We then get a long digression into the life of what had previously been a minor character. When we finally get back to the plot it ends in such a perfuctory way that I was left with a feeling of is that it?

Some wonderful writing, but a lack of coherent structure or plot, plus characters who remain somewhat enigmatic means that the whole thing is much less involving and moving than you might expect.

Maybye the whole thing works much better if you know something about Sri Lanka?

Harrowing, tender but not everything I'd hoped for
I had read the hype and had the book praised beyond all others by the person who bought if for me. I have visited Sri Lanka and know a woman who escaped to the UK as a political refugee, living with the fact that her cousin was one of the many Tamil suicide bombers. So I held this book in high anticipation. And although it is tightly written I did not see the story.

I lived the scenes and the matter of fact way that so much human devastation was a cold fact of life. I enjoyed the relationships as they developed and the turmoil of Anil's journey through her work, but I missed the links. Perhaps I am too simplistic in my expectations for a novel, but I needed more continuity in the story and a way to draw it all together. Ondaatje is clearly a professional writer and deserves the awards he has receieved. It's just that in Anil's Ghost I thought I would be captivated and absorbed and the truth is I was not.

Anil's Ghost: A critical comment
Anil's Ghost" is Ondaatje's fictional response to the violence that gripped his native land in the eighties. Although the author had described some actual events or had created similar events, and in spite of its terseness at times, to me the novel as a whole is weak and unconvincing.

The novelist does not provide or allude to any analysis of the cause of political terror. Ondaatje who left the country more than four decades ago (in 1962, or so) when he was barely twenty years, understandably does not seem to have a grasp of the social, economic and political changes that had taken place in his native land to depict their effects. Neither does he seem to have a proper understanding of the cultures of the people. One must live in the land among its people to develop such intimacy and knowledge. It is extremely unlikely that Ondaatje had witnessed the war or the terror either, the theme of his novel. Use of Anil as his protagonist, and the novelist's expatriate stance appears to be a clever ploy intended to overcome these deficiencies.

With his obvious limitations and the lack of knowledge of his native land, the novelist has opted to become a passive observer to the tragedy. Hence his tone of voice. Making no distinction between the Sinhala and the Tamil militancy, he says tautologically, "the reason for war was war" which also appears to be the novelist's point of view. His apolitical gaze is a convenient way to avoid the real tragedy- the cause of the terror and the crisis. Given that politics pervade to all aspects of life in a country such as ours, this "attitude" seems irresponsible, apart from also being an insincere and unsympathetic view of the plight of all those victims and the survivors.

With the unfolding of the melodramatic and somewhat weird episode relating to Sailor, Ondaatje provides an account of the personal tragedies of Sarath, his brother Gamini and the alcoholic artist Ananda. Conflict between Sarath and Gamini and their lives is probably intended to symbolise the moral crisis of the society. Without much subtlety of psychological analysis or insight to the culture of the people or the traditions of the land, these descriptions only lead to pages and pages of jejune and dull reading. The visit to the Grove of Ascetics, where we are introduced to Palipana, the blind epigraphist spending his last days in a forest almost like a monk- looked after by his orphaned niece, is a digression- though written well. Episodes relating to the abduction of Dr Linus Corea, assassination of President Katugala (the faithful re-enactment of President Premadasa's death) have no apparent purpose in the novel, apart from possibly being intended for the consumption of the western reader. There is a fine piece of writing (when taken separately) at the end describing the reconstruction of the Buduruvagala Buddha statue where the author brings back Ananda, his alcoholic "apologist", to paint the eyes. We are told: "if he (Ananda) did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation."

The novelist has essentially chosen to portray the JVP victims (southern guerrilla group) and how the insurrection in the south was crushed in 1988 -90 era. Although he speaks analogously about a Hundred Years War sponsored by gun and drug-runners and backers being on the sidelines in safe countries, nothing is really presented (mercifully) on the fighting in the north or the Tamil victims of the war. As if suddenly becoming conscious of his oversight, in a clumsily contrived episode Ondaatje places Gamini in a Quickshaws Taxi and sends him to Trincomalee from Nugegoda for a holiday in Nilavali Beach Hotel- with a day's sojourn at a forest monastery near Arankale! We are then told about his brief encounter with the youthful Tamil militants at Trincomalee to whom Gamini acts as a doctor under bizarre circumstances. There is also an earlier similar episode in the novel relating the reunion between Anil and Lalitha, her Tamil Ayah who had been quite close to Anil from her childhood. This episode loses whatever its intended significance as Lalitha vanishes from the convoluted narrative and from the mind of the reader- as soon as Anil leaves her.

In the absence of a "plot", Ondaatje seems guilty of resorting to techniques used by inferior novelists to "propel" his novel. One technique is to provide a prelude of one or two pages about a character (or an episode) in italicised font, before the reader could make the acquaintance of that character or the significance of the episode is related in the proper place of the novel. These preludes or premature insertions could be a hindrance to a first time reader. Probably Ondaatje is attempting to achieve brevity here. More irksome are those interruptions to the narrative where details of Anil's life overseas are forced on the reader. We are thus told intermittently and convolutely about Anil's failed first marriage, her tutelage, her childhood details, and her friendship with a married American man whom she stabs, and her close friendship with the lesbian lover, Leaf who is dying of illness. To me these details are impossibly boring and insipid.

Jayantha Anandappa (Australia)