Rating: 
Summary: The author goes missing
Review: Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost is a sensitive, lyrical,
and ultimately disturbing work. It is disturbing
since the reader is fooled into believing that the usual contract between
the author and reader will be the met: closure at the end.The novel starts out with the vitality and dramatic promise of good
political murder mystery. The plot begins much like Cruz-Smith's Gorky Park,
where recent human remains are found that may be linked to a
state-sponsored murder. In fact, the plot parallels between Anil's Ghost and
Gorky Park are striking (although the writing styles are as different as
hot and cold). These parallels, while coincidental, are ultimately helpful in
understanding Ondaatje's work. In each novel, a talented, withdrawn, totally uncorruptable forensic
investigator operates within a totalitarian state, trying to solve, at some
personal peril, a possible state-sponsored murder. Learning who the victim
was, his occupation, habits, locale, becomes the early focus. In each case the
investigator is assisted by a colleague who may or may not be in collusion with
the state. The investigator seeks out advise from an historian who
knows the country's past. The investigator takes the skull of the victim
and, in secret, has the face reconstructed. At every turn, the state machinery
works against the effort. This is where the parallels end. While the Gorky Park detective, Arkady,
is working against specific evils, greed and megalomania, and where
confrontations are possible, Anil is swimming through an endless sea of evil.
The fact that the Sri Lankan landscape is infused with a gentle beauty and
a quiet ancient eastern spiritualism makes the creeping evil of the death
squads in the night, torture, and killings, even more stark. There are three
secret terror armies afoot: those of the illegal government,
the anti-government forces, and the separatists, who are all murdering
people with casual callousness. In Gorky Park, when the truth is learned
- when the body is identified, the evidence amassed and the story known,
Arkady stuffs it all into an envelope and mails it to the
Chief Police Authority and then all he has to do is stay alive and
wait. But there is no such social moral authority
present in all of Sri Lanka for Anil. Anil surfaces,
is publicly humiliated, slapped-down, and ejected from the country, and this
was the good option; had she stayed, she would be killed.
She tried to surface, but the sea of evil is much too strong. It is around this time that the author Ondaatje also begins to depart,
- leaving us remaining with only traces of the story. It has become
something now more like a Samuel Beckett play, where all the
characters are either vanished, dead, or left twisting in the wind,
and the very plot itself goes missing. I don't think this is
accidental. When it is explained how the person who as helped Anil escape
death is rewarded for his trouble, we cannot even tell if it is because he has
done too much, too little, or for some other reason altogether. Nor does it
seem to matter much, except, as the author explains,
that it helps to connect two estranged brothers. Some closure comes when we learn that some of these characters do survive
(ironically, those most unbalanced). At the close, the character who we've
seen suffer some of the worst, experiences a moment of grace. Ondaatje
seems to be telling us that in times of such evil, this is maybe the very best
we should expect.
Rating: 
Summary: Great background on Sri Lanka, poorly developed characters
Review: The story of a Western educated Sri-Lankan women who returns to her native land as a forensic anthropologist investigating murders of the skeletons she finds. I found it hard to truly relate to or care about the characters in this book. But it's an easy to read story and gave me some insight into the human rights abuses in Sri Lanka as well as descriptions of the landscape.
Rating:
Summary: The real Sri Lanka
Review: This book is Michael Ondaatje's portrayal of passion for his native Sri Lanka. It is a brilliant maze of ethnic war, archaeology, forensic science, Buddhist art and culture, all woven into the story of Anil Tissera. A young forensic pathologist who shares her cultural and filial ties with Sri Lanka but not its' political and social affirmations. Ondaatje cleverly spins the web of a war that devours its people, and drives Anil into a deep dark pit of ethno-political uncertainty. Anil's only aim is to use her forensic skills to prove a silent killing. While she digs for the truth, she discovers her cultural and nationalistic roots. Sarath Diyasena the archaeologist, seeking the same truth through the eyes of the historical past and his brother Gamini, the doctor, the voice of reality, who dissolves history and science for a more gory blood-stained truth. The thread that links them is the passion for their profession. This driving passion is their survival in an unworkable system. In his poetic genius, Ondaatje describes modern day Sri Lanka as it is. A must read.
Rating:
Summary: Truth is Water...
Review: To appreciate Anil's Ghost, is to appreciate the subjectivity of people's experiences in war, in love, in anything -- Ondaatje produces a wonderful story where truth is running water and the characters are trying to determine that boundaries of its stream. Anil Tissera, the Western educated forensic anthropologist is sent to Sri Lanka, with a United Nations mandate to discover more about the vast "disappearances" during the civil war. Sarath Diyasera is her older (wiser?) government-appointed partner. Through their eyes is laid a story of discovery and exploration, not in the action-movie sense, but in a more realistic sense. We feel the weight of time and history -- and its effect on those who experienced the war. This is not a simple book and it makes no attempt to be clean about the quest for the identity of a skeleton that Anil and Sarah unearth. As with other Ondaatje books, the tangents off the main story line provide us with more subjective experience to help color the difficulty of bringing the truth (ever elusive) out to the world. The poetry of Ondaatje's prose is outstanding, and the images very colorful. The diversions from the "story" are essential in the way that daydreams are essential -- they add rather than subtract. While it does give a fragmented and disjointed feel to the story, I personally found it fascinating. Ondaatje seems more focused in his prose in some senses (versus his earlier books), while at the same time he seems to include more "stories" -- which make it hard to put down the book and pick it up again. The subtleties seem to last for pages, and the harmony of the different stories is hard to pick up on after leaving the book for a day. My advice is to not ask "why?" too many times when reading -- just keep reading and you'll find that Ondaatje has placed his (poetic) pause in a different place and time. I found it beautiful, personal, striking and subjective -- who'd want to read an objective story of human rights abuses, anyway?
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