Haunting Writer

Nine years after the brilliant success of The English Patient (Booker winner 1992), Sri Lankan-born author Michael Ondaatje has written another novel, worth the long wait. Reading Anil's Ghost brings today's newspaper pages to life _ or, rather, clarifies the slow, painful death creeping through parts of Sri Lanka. The novel combines the eye of a journalist, the passion of a countryman, and the language of a poet to sift through "archives of terrible sadness".

Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist who bought her name from her brother at age 12, returns in the early 1990s to her native Sri Lanka after a gap of 15 years. On behalf of the Geneva-based Centre for Human Rights, and teamed with Sri Lankan archaeologist Sarath Diyasena, Anil uses her specialty to investigate politically-motivated, organised murders rampant in the battle between the government, northeastern separatists, and insurgents.

 

For seven weeks, they work to prove that bones found at ancient sites and mass graves in fact belong to victims of recent, violent death. Their attention centres on a skeleton they call Sailor, who in Anil's mind comes to represent every victim of the bloody civil war. With the help of professor Palipana, the artist Ananda who reconstructs Sailor's face, and Sarath's younger brother Gamini, who works as a doctor in warlike hospital conditions, they make chilling discoveries about a the climate of political terror in which even Sarath's affiliations are suspect.

Anil's Ghost is less gorgeously lush than Ondaatje's previous novel, and more meditative (the eyes of the Buddha are a powerful, dominant image), but it uses some of the same thematic instruments: a three-way relationship in several combinations, characters within a violent context interacting in deceptively peaceful ruins and a language of medical and forensic science that is precise without being technical. It is a work marked by Ondaatjean virtues: deeply intelligent and compassionate, thoroughly researched, naturally poetic. It is a work from which one learns something new on almost every page.