4.5*

This was my first experience reading Michael Ondaatje and I have to say that I was impressed. His prose has an almost poetic quality that made me want to keep reading, and kept me enjoying the novel even when the subject matter was extremely disturbing.

Anil's Ghost is the story of a native Sri Lankan woman who has spent the past 15 years in America. Now she goes back to Sri Lanka as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group. She struggles with making her two worlds collide.

Beautifully written.

Michael Ondaatje, best known for The English Patient, is one of my favorite writers. He writes like a dream. In Anil’s Ghost he captures the spirituality and beauty of life amidst the unfathomable ugliness of war. Anil’s Ghost is a beautiful elegiac story about human beings trying to survive during a war as it erodes their very spirit. This entire novel reads like a poem to be read slowly and savored.

Anil is a forensic anthropologist who reconstructs the history of the dead in an attempt to bring them eventual justice. After fifteen years in the west, work brings her back to Sri Lanka, her native land, in the midst of war. There she meets Sarath, an archeologist, and his brother Gamini, an ER doc and trauma surgeon. Along with the tools of her profession, Anil brings with her the idealism of the west and the conviction that truth and justice will prevail.

But she is not in the west anymore. Anil seems unable to recognize the danger she is placing herself in, as well as Sarath, on her quest to reveal the truth about a young man murdered five years earlier. It’s as if Anil is no longer a Sri Lankan but has become a true citizen of the west. And, as such, she has lost her ability to grasp the complexity and danger of life in her native land.

Ondaatje often writes about work in his novels as if he is a master of many trades. Whether someone is diffusing a bomb in The English Patient or reconstructing skeletons in Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje brings you thoroughly into that world. He writes about emergency rooms and hospitals as if he’s been a doctor for decades. It’s a sort of magic that he weaves. In Anil’s Ghost we have a forensic anthropologist, an archeologist, a trauma surgeon and a sacred painter and miner; Ondaatje captures the minute moments of their work and their differing world views with a surprising clarity.

It is their work that keeps these characters from going completely mad while simultaneously pushing some of them to the brink of mental collapse. Their work saves and destroys them at the same time. But, ultimately, it is through the almost religious dedication to their work that the protagonists of Anil’s Ghost salvage what is left of their souls in the midst of a soul killing war.

Had to study this for English. Made me want to cry of boredom.