Ondaatje's Ghost Story

Seven years after Booker Prize-winning Michael Ondaatje won nearly universal acclaim for The English Patient, he returns to the literary world with Anil's Ghost-a tale that verges on the same dark terrain: war. Waiting years for him to publish again, one could not imagine where on the globe Ondaatje would choose to place his pen next. The Sri Lankan-born author (transplanted to Canada) who has written evocative pieces set in the old West, the early jazz era and World War II, chooses a different time and place for this story: the Sri Lanka of the present.

The story is in many ways similar to The English Patient. The title's Anil, like Hana in the earlier novel, is someone who chooses her path very carefully-even down to naming herself. She is faced with a country that is no longer hers. By the end of the novel, it is again, and the journey of that transformation is a finely crafted piece of storytelling. The atmosphere of his story is not entirely fiction. The teardrop-shaped island country below India has been ravaged by ethnic conflict for several decades; it has been plunged into war or near-war for nearly two. According to Ondaatje's carefully detached preface, "From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Sri Lanka was in a crisis that involved three essential groups: the government, the antigovernment insurgents in the south and the separatist guerrillas in the north... Eventually, in response, legal and illegal government squads were known to have been sent out to hunt down the separatists and the insurgents."

His protagonist, Anil Tissera, is a forensic anthropologist, returning to the war-torn country of her birth to work on behalf of a human rights center to find out who is behind the mysterious killings on the island. Her partner in the project is Sarath Diyasena, a local official whose loyalties are suspect.

Anil is caught in a web woven by an ensemble cast that includes Sarath, his physician brother Gamini, Sarath's former mentors and government officials. In typical Ondaatje fashion, the story's time is not linear, but instead meshes the narrative of her work in Sri Lanka with flashes of her childhood and her affair with a married author. The first major turning point of the story is the pair's discovery of a skeleton, who they dub Sailor.

Sailor becomes the focal point of the story as the struggle to name him becomes a struggle for power. Ananda is recruited to reconstruct the man's head as Anil pieces together the man's past through the history of his bones. Everyone suspects that if his identity is revealed, the government will finally be shown responsible for the killings.

Ondaatje's version of death in this novel is chilling in its anonymity. He describes family members lost during seemingly routine tasks. "Inside the Civil Rights Movement offices at the Nadesan Centre were the fragments of collected information revealing the last sighting of a son, a younger brother, a father. In the letters of anguish from family members were the details of hour, location, apparel, the activity.... Going for a bath. Talking to a friend," he writes.

Yet his description of the ethnic conflict submerging the island is dispassionate. Curiously, Ondaatje does not explicitly name the tri-faceted sides of the conflict. For one familiar with the ethnicities involved, this does not present much of a problem. But one imagines that the reader unfamiliar with this international landscape might have some trouble orienting the words Sinhalese and Tamil within the story.

Anil's own heritage, on which side if any she might fall, is never explained. But this is not to the story's detriment, although it is not really in keeping with his usual style of grounding in historical details. Still, he catches certain moments with such accuracy it is uncanny. One such moment: "It was like the Asian Nod, which included in its almost circular movement the possibility of a no."

That nod in many ways captures the essence of a book that takes a while to decide where it stands in this conflict. Ondaatje has taken on the dangerous task of describing a war about which few people know the truth. The media in Sri Lanka is often censored, and even as this review is written, the conflict is escalating. As a native Sri Lankan, Ondaatje presumably possesses a more intimate familiarity with the details. But information today is sparse and often edited by the government. Perhaps this is behind the looser setting-or perhaps Ondaatje is intentionally distancing himself from a painful reality.

ANIL'S GHOST

by

Michael Ondaatje

Alfred A. Knopf

320 pp., $25

by

Michael Ondaatje

Alfred A. Knopf

320 pp., $25