Anil's Ghost

The disappeared are those whose stories are rarely told. In different countries, at different times, people have vanished without any record and without any resolution. Anil's Ghost is the story of Sailor, a skeleton found by Anil and Sarath, an expat Sri Lankan forensic scientist and a Sri Lankan archaeologist working to piece together Sailor's story. The book speaks in scales - one disappeared can represent millions. One person can represent a village.

Ondaatje is writing of the massacres in the 1980s, although the book could be written today. He clearly dove deep into the discovery of the disappeared when he wrote this, and constructs a narrative that is touching and personal, as well as critical and raw. A little predictable in its plot, the story nonetheless manages to give voice to the disappeared in a way I haven't read previously in a novel.

Anil's Ghost gets five stars from me because it's beautiful. Ondaatje's prose, the nuances he affects as well as the information that he does not give us lend magic to this glimpse into the lives of a few people during Sri Lanka's civil war. Sometimes, people need to invent endings to make peace and move on--and Mr. Ondaatje requires his readers to do that a bit here, as well. I care enough about the characters to be able to do that for them.

[author: Michael Ondaatje] has a poetic kind of lull to his writing; it draws you in slowly and puts a spell on you. It took me a little while to get into this book, but once I was in, I enjoyed it. His look at the warzone terror of Sri Lanka seems to be an attempt to step out of the mess of politics and power and violence, and into the inner human drama. At times I felt like I would have wanted to see some more delving into the reasons behind the atrocities, as in the story, the government, insurgents, and guerillas are presented as distant, unknowable perpetrators of violence. But perhaps this is Ondaatje's very point: that there is no excuse, no reason, no logic behind atrocity. His concern is with life.