Anil's Ghost

Great writer, impressive book.

My least favourite Ondaatje book. It all felt a bit flat to me. So much so that I'm struggling to think of anything interesting to say about it. Perhaps the main problem is the central character Anil who never came alive for me. She's something of a cliché, the career woman floundering in an affair with a married man. There's not much psychology in his creation of her. I never quite found her plausible, likeable or even interesting. Odd, because we're told too much about her rather than not enough. The most memorable thing she does in the novel is stab her boyfriend in the arm when he won't let go of her hair. This happens in America and seemed a wholly gratuitous and melodramatic gesture which had no follow up. The male characters were much more successful.

Anil's Ghost has all the ingredients to be a bewitching novel. As usual Ondaatje uses his novels to learn and write about exotic professions. Here we have a forensic pathologist, an archaeologist, a surgeon, an epigraphist. The setting is war torn Sri Lanka so he's writing about his native country. And yet all its compelling components never fell into place for me. Neither was the writing as inspired as is generally the case with him.

Ondaatje is brilliant at creating all the components of a thriller and then wilfully ignoring the simple formula for thrillers. The central quest here is to identify a skeleton and establish it's a murder victim of government forces. A kind of mystical sculptor is employed to give the skull features. This part of the novel didn't work for me. One night this man stabs himself in the neck, another bit of gratuitous melodrama that echoed Anil's stabbing of her boyfriend. I was never sure what all the hard, dangerous work was likely to achieve. No one, after all, is any doubt that government forces are murdering people. The identity of the skeleton, which might have been a compelling mystery, is passed over as of little interest to Anil and her companion. They simply need to confirm that his death was recent.

The characters are all solitary individuals, some by design, some by default. I'm not quite sure why no one in the novel was capable of sustaining a relationship. Is Ondaatje saying it's this failing that leads a country to fight with itself? Ultimately, I don't think I understood this novel very well, whether that's my fault or his I'm not sure…

n  In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed. If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was a scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it. There had been years of night visitations, kidnappings or murders in broad daylight. The only chance was that the creatures who fought would consume themselves. All that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power.n

Anil is an expat Sri Lankan, expert in the forensics of old bones. She returns to Sri Lanka to examine archeological remains and discovers evidence of recent atrocities. This is a portrait of a Sri Lanka riven with murderous conflict, a fascist state in which dissent yields death. Thousand are murdered on an ongoing basis, and no evidence of wrongdoing will be allowed to reach daylight.

Anil fights her own memories of life in Sri Lanka, family, relationships. There are several memorable characters, including a disgraced anthropologist reduced to blindness and an austere life that he found satisfying, another anthropologist who gets Anil involved in the atrocity evidence. It is very interesting. Recommended

I read some people in Goodreads saying that this book is composed of fragments. I would rather say it is composed of silences between them. So many things are untold in “Anil’s Ghost”, but can be perceived and felt so clearly. To me this eloquent mosaic of silences was as important, as beautiful and poetic as Ondaatje’s words in this fragmented story. And what can better transmit the fear of the people caught amidst the Sri Lanka civil war than silence?

Ondaatje loosely tells us about the situation in Sri Lanka during some of the worst years of the civil war, where people felt trapped in the conflict between the government, the antigovernment insurgents and the separatist guerillas. During these years people were disappearing in big numbers, their bodies later appearing in the sea, rivers, fields or crowded hospitals. More often, they became lost forever. The three conflicting groups were the main players in this terror, none better in its methods than the other, which meant that the only way for people to survive was keeping their heads low and being silent. Not asking questions. Not looking for the answers, not wanting the truth.

Anil, a forensic pathologist who left Sri Lanka, her country of origin, fifteen years ago, comes back on a seven week mission to investigate the infringements of the human rights in the country. She is determined to identify a victim whose bones were found in the area protected by the government. Will her quest for truth be successful? Could naming one victim help her name and stand for all of them? Does it really matter which group is responsible? Can the truth be more important than peace?

Anil’s local partner in the investigation is Sarath, a Sri Lankan archeologist, who finds solace in his studies. Archeological artefacts serve him as an anchor, the only things that are stable in his life, never changing throughout thousands of years. Sarath seems to Anil remote and impenetrable, difficult to trust because of his contacts in the government.

And then there is Gamini, Sarath’s younger brother, one of the most beautifully crafted characters I have met in my literary life. Gamini is a doctor who is not capable of sleep, except for maybe a short moment in a bed of a ward, who almost lives in the hospital, never finding peace anywhere else, who is afraid of the dead, afraid to see their faces, lest he recognizes them.

A doctor, a forensic pathologist and an archeologist. A study of the living, the dead and the immortality.

The book evolves slowly, taking us back and forth in time, peeling off the layers of its characters, getting us closer to their nature, revealing one startling and uncomfortable truth after another, until we are sucked in, immersed in this wearisome journey and until it spits us out burnt-out and wasted and, perhaps, a little less ignorant.

It’s the civil war in Sri Lanka. Anil, the novel’s heroine, is a forensic anthropologist and part of a team investigating possible war crimes. She is paired for the investigation with a government-selected archaeologist named Sarath, an enigmatic man 16 years her senior. Together Anil and Sarath find four skeletons whom they nickname Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Sailor, the last a source of obsessive fascination. The task is to give Sailor back his identity in order to incriminate the government of war crimes. In the process Anil will have her own identity given back to her.

As you’d expect from Ondjaate this is a novel brimming with beautiful prose. Its central theme is a kind of archaeology of the soul. Anil in the course of the novel will sift through layers of the soil of her own being and of her native country’s history, raising ghosts. On one level it’s a detective story but runs much deeper than that. Though not quite as far reaching as The English Patient it shares a similar structure - a mosaic of fragmented events that are eventually artfully interlocked.

It’s a violent, eerie, surreal novel about war crimes, the meaning of identity, and the unnecessary brutalities of civil war and unrest. It's definitely a haunting read.

Note- this was one of my early 2009 Goodreads reviews, which was Facebook Book Shelf. The days before Goodreads morphed into its own social media site. I will have to reread and expand on this.

n  Against the obscenity of large numbersn

When a writer, dauntless and unflinching, turns his piercing gaze on mass murder, how does he drag it back into the realm of the human? In 2666 Bolano gave to each and every one of the women murdered in Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juarez), a name, or the clothes they were wearing, or where they were murdered, or, at the very least, how they were found and what happened to the corpse afterwards. He turns each one into an individual, even in the relentless cataloguing of their deaths we never lose sight of the individual human being, loved and missed and mourned. Some 300 pages that retain a steadfast sobriety, as any descent into bathos would become unbearable, self-defeating. Now, that is perhaps just possible when dealing with numbers that creep into the hundreds, but what do you do with this particular breathtaking footnote of history? The civil war that flared up in Sri Lanka in 1983: by early 2000, 18 years of war had claimed the lives of more than 64,000, mostly civilians. Sixty four thousand. Sixty four thousand.

One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims. In a sixth century Buddhist monks' burial midden, located in a government archaeological preserve, four modern skeletons are found. Anil Tissera is a forensic pathologist, sent by a Geneva Human Rights organization, teamed with a Colombo archaeologist in a seven week project as a gesture to placate trading partners in the West. Anil and her partner name these four skeletons Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Sailor is the only skeleton with a skull. They work to uncover the truth of his particular fate. Proof of one type of crime, that will speak for many crimes. One victim that will speak for many victims. But at a time of war the truth is a flame against a lake of petrol. Anil's status as a delegate of a Western organization might protect her - but what of her colleague?

Ondaatje uses a narrative style that skirts around the story. Obtuse, dislocated, off-centre, like Anil herself, born in Sri Lanka, now ex-pat, she has created a new centre of self around her intellect and her scientific, rational approach to life, an approach which holds her at a distance, protects her from pain. The narrative too holds us at a distance which makes the swift and sudden incursion of horror all the more intense. Gradually, like the reader, Anil is made to look straight at the face of death, rather than busying herself with the details of forensic evidence. In a process that reflects precisely what this novel does, Ananda, the artist, recreates an individual face out of the skull. But Ananda has lost his wife in the terror, so the face is peaceful: "It's what he wants of the dead."

Anil rose and walked back into the dark rooms. She could no longer look at the face, saw only Ananda's wife in every aspect of it. She sat down in one of the large cane chairs in the dining room and began weeping. ... Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could see the rectangular shape of a painting and beside it Ananda standing still, looking through the blackness at her.

When I’ve been digging and I’m tired and don’t want to do any more, I think how it could be me in the grave I’m working on. I wouldn’t want someone to stop digging for me ...

Anil Tissera is a forensic anthropologist, educated in England and America, but born in Sri Lanka, an expatriate not unlike the author himself. She comes back to the country of her birth, sent by a human rights organization to investigate allegation of crimes against humanity. Anil firmly believes that the truth shall set us free, and is diligent in trying to use science and hard facts to make her case, yet her journey is hampered by terrible secrets.

‘Most of time in our world, truth is just opinion.’

The observation comes from Sarath, an archeologist appointed as her direct supervisor by the government. He has stayed behind when others left the country, taking refuge in the studies of the past and hoping the violence will pass by him. ( I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there’s a story. ) Sarath tries to warn Anil about the dangers of careless words in a country engaged in a violent civil war, but sooner or later his conscience will clash with his survival instincts.

In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed. If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was the scarring psychosis in the country.

For me, this novel is every bit as powerful and evocative as ‘The English Patient’, with an added layer of pathos coming from the blood connection of the author with the tragedy of his country. Anil and Sarath, with later in the novel Gamini the surgeon and Ananda the painter of eyes, are the tools Ondaatje deploys to pull back the veil of silence and secrecy from the horrors of the civil war. To remain silent and aloof would have probably been a betrayal for him. The numerous atrocities described in the novel are soul crushing, yet the greatest achievement I think is in the little details that make Anil and the others human in their frailty and despair. We get to know Anil, the anchor of the whole story, though flashbacks of her childhood on the island, her studies, her failed first marriage and later her affair with a married man, a tender connection with a fellow forensic investigator (‘Between Heartbeats’ is such an apt chapter title) and a nervous breakdown. In the present, she rediscovers the lush tropical scenery, the noisy street life and the spicy food of her homeland while still pining for her distant lover and listening to Steve Earle – ‘Fearless Heart’ on her walkman. Sarath, Gamini and Ananda get their own backstories, as the main plot, such as it is in this multilayered novel, deals with the study of a skeleton nicknamed ‘Sailor’.

“Nothing lasts”, Palipana told them. “It is an old dream. Art burns, dissolves. And to be loved with the irony of history – that isn’t much.” He said this in his first class to his archeology students. He had been talking about books and art, about the ‘ascendancy of the idea’ being often the only survivor.

Palipana is the mentor of Sarath in his archeological studies. Here he reiterates one of the themes dear to Ondaatje: the role of art in a world gone mad. We will be pulled out of the ashes by the lessons of history and by the vision of artists, if only we are capable of listening to them. One of the the most memorable scenes for me in the book is a repeat of a similar act from the previous Ondaatje novel. There, an Indian soldier takes a nurse to a ruined church and, using ropes, pulleys and torches, illuminates the paintings of saints on the remaining walls. The moment is well captured in the movie version of ‘The English Patient’. Here, Sarath and his teacher go to the ancient cities on the island.

There are images carved into or painted on rock – a perspective of a village seen from the height of a nearby hill, a single line depicting a woman’s back bent over a child – that have altered Sarath’s perception of his world. Years ago he and Palipana entered unknown rock darknesses, lit a match and saw hints of colour.

Those images in caves through the smoke and firelight remain his guiding light and his anchor in the present troubles.

Sarath has a brother, Gamini, who works as a surgeon in the emergency room of a hospital in Colombo. Although clearly struggling with depression and witnessing daily the human cost of the war, Gamini has not given up on humanity. He saves what lives he can and eliminates everything else from his life, including sleep and a home, as trivialities.

This was when he stopped believing in man’s rule on earth. He turned away from every person who stood up for a war. Or the principle of one’s land, or pride of ownership, or even personal rights. All of these motives ended up somehow in the arms of careless power. One was no worse and no better than the enemy. He believed only in the mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so the children would be confident and safe during the night.

We would all live in a better world if we refused to embrace any cause that calls on us to hate or to kill other human beings. As Howard Zinn once said : “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” Gamini is even more brief:

Just no more high horses, please. This is a war on foot.

Ananda is another casualty of the war. A former artist and restaurator, he turns to drink and backbreaking labor after his wife is kidnapped, never to be seen again. He is pulled into the work of Anil and Sarath in order to help identify a human skeleton discovered in an ancient cave. Anil believes it is of recent, not archeological origins, and wants to make ‘Sailor’ the keystone of her case. Ananda used to paint eyes on the statues of saints. In Sri Lanka that means mostly Buddhas, and the operation is held in high esteem since ancient times.

‘Without the eye there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence. Later he will be honored with gifts.

Ondaatje uses the local artist as a path to redemption, but before we get there, all four of the main characters will go through hell and back. I will try to give no spoilers other than to say you cannot escape from the horrors of a civil war. You can only survive, if you are lucky. And you can try to make the next one less likely to happen, if you have a conscience and the courage to speak out. For Sri Lanka, any solution would have to come from inside, as Gamini gives voice to his disillusion in the so-called Western democracies:

‘American movies, English books – remember how they all end? The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’

For the artist, the redemption is symbolic, as in the final pages of the novel Ananda is called to put back together a giant statue of Buddha that was blown to bits.

The face. It’s one hundred chips and splinters of stone brought together, merged, with the shadow of bamboo across its cheek. All its life until now the statue had never felt a human shadow. It had looked over these hot fields towards green terraces in the distant north. It had seen wars and offered peace or irony to those dying under it. Now sunlight hit the seams of its face, as if it were sewn roughly together. He wouldn’t hide that.

For the countless victims of the war, the new painted eyes on the restored Buddha offer a brief epitaph as they watch birds flying towards distant hills:

A small brave heart. In the heights she loved and in the dark she feared