Anil's Ghost

Starred review from April 3, 2000
While he is generally considered a Canadian writer, Booker Prize-winner Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and he has chosen to set his powerful and resonant new novel in that country during its gruesome civil war in the mid-1980s. Written in his usual cryptic, elliptical style, much of the story is told in flashbacks, with Ondaatje hinting at secrets even as he divulges facts, revealing his characters' motivations through their desperate or passionate behavior and, most of all, conveying the essence of a people, a country and its history via individual stories etched against a background of natural beauty and human brutality. Anil Tessira, a 33-year-old native Sri Lankan who left her country 15 years before, is a forensic pathologist sent by the U.N. human rights commission to investigate reports of mass murders on the island. Atrocities are being committed by three groups: the government, anti-government insurgents, and separatist guerrillas. Working secretly, these warring forces are decimating a population paralyzed by pervasive fear. Taciturn archeologist Sarath Diyasena is assigned by the government to be Anil's partner; at 49, he is emotionally withdrawn from the chaotic contemporary world, reserving his passion for the prehistoric shards of his profession. Together, Anil and Sarath discover that a skeleton interred among ancient bones in a government-protected sanctuary is that of a recently killed young man. Anil defiantly sets out to document this murder by identifying the victim and then making an official report. Throughout their combined forensic and archeological investigation, detailed by Ondaatje with the meticulous accuracy readers will remember from descriptions of the bomb sapper's procedures in The English Patient, Sarath remains a mysterious figure to Anil. Her confusion about his motives is reinforced when she meets his brother, Gamini, an emergency room doctor who is as intimately involved in his country's turmoil as Sarath refuses to be. The lives of these characters, and of others in their orbits, emerge circuitously, layer by layer. In the end, Anil's moral indignation--and her innocence--place her in exquisite danger, and Sarath is moved to a life-defining sacrifice. Here the narrative, whose revelations have been building with a quiet ferocity, assumes the tension of a thriller, its chilling insights augmented by the visceral emotional effects that masterful literature can provide. More effective than a documentary, Ondaatje's novel satisfies one of the most exalted purposes of fiction: to illuminate the human condition through pity and terror. It may well be the capstone of his career. 200,000 first printing; Random House audio.

January 1, 2000
After 15 year abroad, forensic pathologist Anil returns to Sri Lanka to help identify victims of the civil war there. This follow-up to The English Patient is the first novel Ondaatje has set in his native country. A 200,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 24, 2000
YA-Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist, returns to her homeland of Sri Lanka as a member of an international human-rights group investigating abuses that occurred during the country's decade-long civil war. She teams up with Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist who works for the Sri Lankan government. Together they unearth a skeleton and, using their skills and training, patiently piece together parts of the man's life and violent death. Along the way, they each deal with ghosts of their own. Ondaatje weaves the present time of the story, sometime in the 1990s, with plenty of flashbacks to the characters' pasts. Several of the murders are mentioned in enough detail to relate how the victim was tortured, but none of the specifics are described. Intensely written, the book skillfully conveys the tension, fear, and stress Anil and Sarath feel as they discover the past life, another ghost, of the skeleton they have found. The author shows the hopelessness and inability of the general population to find any way of stopping the unrelenting massacres, all in the name of politics and beliefs. He deftly describes the effects of war on individuals, a nation, and a people as an entity. Young, attractive Anil and her story should appeal to teens who are interested in human rights, and have seen the movie or read Ondaatje's The English Patient.-Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Copyright 2000 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2000
Once upon a time, when one thought of Sri Lanka, one imagined an island paradise. The very name is lovely. How many of us know that since 1983 a ferocious ethnic war between Buddhists and Hindus has torn the island apart and wrought nearly 70,000 casualties? The poet-writer Ondaatje, who lives in Toronto, was born in Sri Lanka. "Anil's Ghost," his first novel since the widely acclaimed "English Patient" (1992), is about the horrible war in his native land. Ondaatje's peripatetic storytelling--the constant shifts from one character or bit of business to another and his poetic sensibilities that tease out just the right words to memorialize his characters--proves perfect for this story. Anil Tissera is a forensic pathologist, born in Sri Lanka and educated in the U.S., who returns as a representative of a human rights organization. In her Sri Lankan youth, "Anil had been an exceptional swimmer . . . and the family never got over it; the talent was locked to her for life." Anil has come to work with Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist, who on their first meeting greets her with, "So--you are the swimmer!" Their search for the group behind the organized murders on the island is the main plot and the conduit for revealing the nature of the war. Through Anil and Sarath, readers meet the physician Gamini (also Sarath's brother) and spend much time with him on M*A*S*H-like "forays into the bloody pit of war; members of the persistent Hindu Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam; and the lost artist Ananda Udugama, who helps Anil and Sarath create a face and identity for the skeleton "Sailor." Ondaatje's plea in this work, circuitous and beautifully told, is simple--a prerequisite of life is proof of existence. ((Reviewed March 15, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2000
In this lush yet acerbic new novel by Ondaatje--trumpeted as his first since The English Patient and, interestingly, the first he has set in his native Sri Lanka--Anil returns home after 15 years. Hers is not a sentimental journey, however. Anil is a forensic specialist who has recently been unearthing mass graves in Guatemala, and her mission in Sri Lanka is to conduct a human rights investigation. (In the late 1980s and early 1990s, government, antigovernment, and separatist forces clashed to produce countless deaths.) Anil is teamed with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena in an intimate yet uneasy alliance; she is never quite sure where he stands politically, as he is smart enough to have kept his head down. In a government-protected archaeological preserve, they find a skeleton that is assuredly not prehistoric, and Anil is up and running to discover its identity. The reluctant Sarath follows her lead, and as the country's recent tortured history is unfolded, he introduces her to a number of people who help them, including his own black-sheep brother, a doctor. In the end, their efforts come to nothing, and Sarath pays a supreme sacrifice to protect the sometimes puzzlingly na ve Anil. In fact, as the novel closes, it is the relationship and reconciliation of Sarath and his brother that, touchingly, takes center stage; Anil and her plight (we've heard about her abortive love life, her mortally ill friend) just fade. This powerful novel will educate even sophisticated readers who think they understand human brutality. Though it falls apart structurally toward the end, dissipating its energy as it fragments, this is still better (and more important) reading than much of what is out there. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/00.]--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.