"The girl would slip into the forest, nocturnal, still as bark, when Palipana died ... She had already cut one of his phrases into the rock, one of the first things he had said to her, which she had held onto like a raft in her years of fear. She had chiselled it where the horizon of water was, so that, depending on tide and pull of the moon, the words in the rock would submerge or hang above their reflection or be revealed in both elements ... He had once shown her such runes, finding them even in his blindness, and their marginalia of ducks, for eternity. So she carved the outline of ducks on either side of his sentence. In the tank at Kaludiya Pokuna the yard-long sentence still appears and disappears. It has already become a legend. But the girl who stood waist-deep and cut it into rock in the last week of Palipana's dying life and carried him into the water beside it and placed his hand against it in the slop of the water was not old. He nodded, remembering the words. And now he would remain by the water and each morning the girl undressed and climbed down against the wall of submerged rock and banged and chiselled, so that in the last days of his life he was accompanied by the great generous noise of her work as if she were speaking out loud. Just the sentence. Not his name or the years of his living, just a gentle sentence once clutched by her, the imprint of it now carried by water around the lake."
Michael Ondaatje is just one of those writers, he creeps under your skin in his subtlest of moments and waits to hit you with the most perfect line of prose you have ever read at the novel's emotional climax. He consistently creates instances of unbelievably grand high drama (recall the English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion - whew!), balancing the narrative on the most precarious of precipices, between a gorgeous and highly articulate style and the demands of a quick, interesting plot. Somehow he saves himself from melodrama and parody. (P.S. He can also act as a fantastic gateway drug for literary fiction....my mother loved the English Patient and I convinced her to read In the Skin of a Lion based on this alone) I have to admit, I have been waiting to read this novel for a long time. I devour his books and it helps to space them out, there is little more upsetting for wanting the voice of a specific author and having no new material!
Anil's Ghost is his fifth novel and in many ways his most subdued. Although it does use multiple shifts in narrative tone, focus and point of view, there is a consistent skeletal structure to the plot. The novel revolves around Anil Rissera, a Sri Lankan expatriate and forensic anthropologist who has returned to Sri Lanka to work on a United Nations project devoted to identifying bodies. Assigned to work with an anthropologist, Sarath, who she (and we) are never fully allowed to trust, she discovers a skeleton on a government site and begins to investigate (or attempt to) who this man was and at whose hands he died. In their attempts to identify him, they come to rely on an artist whose craft lies in painting the eyes of idols. Ondaatje firmly puts the task of truth telling in the hands of the artist, giving his interpretive act evidenciary value. Accurately captured is the pervasive sense of fear and paranoia that monopolizes the actions and reactions of a population immersed in multiple civil conflicts for decades. His characters are entrenched in a kaleidoscopic array of moral ambiguities, choosing by both profession and ethical imperative to confront horror and persist. Anil's Ghost attempts the most difficult of writerly tasks, the balance between the plot and character that tilts so many novels into forgettable territory. Gradually we learn details of the lives of our characters, Anil's love affairs, Sarath's wife and Gamini's tragic loneliness, but it all comes after the impact of the plot has already dominated your reading of the novel. In the attempt to create an emotional unity between the characters at the climactic moment, we are given a bit too little too late, relegating the characters to proxies for Ondaatje's larger moral arguments. I found myself wanting to know more, to spend more time with these people, whose depth was never developed beyond their own functionality as plot devices. The most effective and affective moments of the novel are in his signature meandering passages, the dream-like state he produces reminiscent of a slightly more grounded magical realism.
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