Anil's Ghost

Ondaatje, Michael

3.58

17,927 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 037541567X ISBN 13: 9780375415678

Publisher: Random House Audio, 2000

Read by Alan Cumming
7 CDs, 8 hours
From the author of The English Patient and winner of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Canada Governor General's Award, comes a new novel of electric artistry and impact confirming Michael Ondaatje's reputation as one of the world's foremost writers.

The time is our own time. The place Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition smf forced into the late 20th century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a government divided against itself.

Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in America, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island.

Bodies are discovered. Skeletons. And particularly one, nicknamed "Sailor." What follows, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love, about family, about identity and the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past and all propelled by a riveting mystery.

Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a compelling literary spellbinder and worthy successor to The English Patient, a novel admired and treasured by countless readers around the world.

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Review:

In his Booker Prize-winning third novel, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje explored the nature of love and betrayal in wartime. His fourth, Anil's Ghost, is also set during a war, but unlike in World War II, the enemy is difficult to identify in the bloody sectarian upheaval that ripped Sri Lanka apart in the 1980s and '90s. The protagonist, Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan, left her homeland at 18 and returns to it 15 years later only as part of an international human rights fact-finding mission. In the intervening years she has become a forensic anthropologist--a career that has landed her in the killing fields of Central America, digging up the victims of Guatemala's dirty war. Now she's come to Sri Lanka on a similar quest. But as she soon learns, there are fundamental differences between her previous assignment and this one:

The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was 'eighty-eight and 'eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it's secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing.

In such a situation, it's difficult to know who to trust. Anil's colleague is one Sarath Diyasena, a Sri Lankan archaeologist whose political affiliations, if any, are murky. Together they uncover evidence of a government-sponsored murder in the shape of a skeleton they nickname Sailor. But as Anil begins her investigation into the events surrounding Sailor's death, she finds herself caught in a web of politics, paranoia, and tragedy.

Like its predecessor, the novel explores that territory where the personal and the political intersect in the fulcrum of war. Its style, though, is more straightforward, less densely poetical. While many of Ondaatje's literary trademarks are present--frequent shifts in time, almost hallucinatory imagery, the gradual interweaving of characters' pasts with the present--the prose here is more accessible. This is not to say that the author has forgotten his poetic roots; subtle, evocative images abound. Consider, for example, this description of Anil at the end of the day, standing in a pool of water, "her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her." In Anil's Ghost Michael Ondaatje has crafted both a brutal examination of internecine warfare and an enduring meditation on identity, loyalty, and the unbreakable hold the past exerts over the present. --Alix Wilber

From the Publisher:

6 1.5-hour cassettes

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