Anil's Ghost : A Novel

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?

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful imagery, but a meandering mess
Review: Perhaps Michael Ondaatje is more of a poet than a novelist, as his eleven books of poetry (compared with four novels) might suggest. Or perhaps I am just not a fan of his narrative style, which involves multiple characters and viewpoints, coupled with frequent and lengthy lapses into the past. All I know is that while listening to the audio version of Anil's Ghost over the past week and a half, I was frequestly lost and contemplated giving up.

The book is set in modern Sri Lanka, a country ripped apart by civil war, in which families endlessly seek word of their missing fathers, sons or brothers who have mysteriously disappeared amidst the chaotic violence. Protagonist Anil Tessera is an anthropologist and a native Sri Lankan, U.S. educated, who returns home as part of a human rights organization trying to identify the remains of victims and chronicle human rights violations.

One body in particular fascinates Anil and her partner Sarath, a skeleton they nickname "Sailor" who was apparently tortured and killed about 4 years ago, and then reburied in an area in which only the government might have had access. Although the government's role in the killings seems obvious to the reader, apparently Anil and Sarath believe that Sailor might provide important proof in the government's participation in the bloodshed. Therefore, the search for Sailor's true identity passes for mystery in this novel, amidst Ondaatje's trademark murky flashbacks, evocative settings and short glimpses of very poetic prose. However this great mystery is not terribly satisfying when ultimately solved, since Ondaatje doesn't bother letting readers know exactly how our protagonists identified Sailor.

There are memorable scenes to be sure, such as flashbacks of Anil's days in the U.S. watching old movies with her friend and trying to rationalize the bulletwounds received by characters in western movies, or present-day scenes of Anil and Sarath bathing in remote Sri Lanka lakes and stumbling across tortured drivers on the roadway. The problem is the scenes don't go anywhere - the author spends so much time drifting back into the pasts of slight characters, the reader (or in my case listener) loses interest and frequently forgets exactly who is being discussed. (ie are we discussing the past of Sarath's brother Gamini, a doctor kidnapped from his family and forced to care for rebels a la Dr. Zhivago, or is this chapter still about Sarath's mentor Palipana - and who cares?).

...

If you loved the novel The English Patient, and didn't mind frequent passages where the author uses the male pronoun and you have no idea to whom he is referring, than this may be the novel for you. To make matters worse here, narrator Alan Cumming used virtually the same voice for every character in the novel, male and female, which often added to my confusion. Maybe the novel works better in a few longer sittings, as opposed to frequent half hour intervals which comprise my commute, but I ultimately found Anil's Ghost an occasionally mesmerizing, but ultimately aimless tale.

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: Hard to digest...
Review: Just having finished reading "Anil's Ghost" I am still feeling oppressed by the images of the Sri Lankan civil war that are being evoked again and again throughout the book. Indeed, it may not be a far-fetched idea to interpret "Anil's Ghost" as a book written in order to denounce the atrocities of war, given the importance the author attaches to the subject by making it the book's recurring theme.

Actually, the story is quite multi-layered: The reader's attention gets focussed mainly on Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educated abroad, who is sent back to her home country by an international human rights group. Her job will be to work together with local officials in order to help them discover the perpetrators responsible for the large-scale killings that took place on the island. Once she has arrived in Colombo, Anil is instructed to team up with the archaeologist Sarath Diyasena, and their efforts to identify one particular skeleton take them on a trip across Sri Lanka and its most scenic - albeit now partly ravaged - spots.

As he did in "The English Patient", Mr Ondaatje in "Anil's Ghost", too, along the way introduces the reader to various subjects apparently disconnected from the main plot. Among the topics dwelt upon this time are archaeology, research techniques of forensic anthropology and Sri Lankan Buddhism. However, all these expositions are effectively dwarfed by the omnipresent descriptions of war and its horrible consequences. What's more, I found the main characters such as Anil or Sarath rather difficult to assess if not downright unapproachable. This is why I should call "Anil's Ghost" a powerful and compelling book, but one that is hard to digest and that I will probably never come to love.

Rating:
Summary: Another beautifully written book ...
Review: The only other book I've ever read by Michael Ondaatje is "The English Patient" and I really love that book too. This book is superbly written ~~ with Anil's past, present and future all interacting with the civil war happening in Sri Lanka. Anil leaves home at the age of 18 and returns years later to a different country than she had left and she tries to reconcile the two separate countries with one another only to leave in confusion.

Anil is an forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing Sri Lanka. She meets up with Sarath, her partner and his brother Gamini who is a surgeon who really sees the carnage of war. And in her search for truth, Anil embarks on a path of self-discovery along the way.

This is a beautifully written book ~~ very lyrical and lush. It isn't your typical fast-paced novel ~~ then again, life in the tropics aren't fast-paced except maybe in war. Ondaatje takes his time in developing the plot of the novel as he seems to want the reader to slow down and drink in the words he is putting forth about this island and its troubles. And you won't have trouble following along with Anil's story which is also interwined with other stories. Ondaatje keeps the same thread of idea with every one of the stories and ties them up neatly at the end.

I really enjoyed "The English Patient" and this book is just as good. Ondaatje is definitely a writer to keep an eye out for. He should be considered a classic writer ~~ he writes with a beautiful pen and brings the story with a subtle closure. His books aren't fast-paced as he wants you to think about what he is writing, especially when a person comes home and realizes that "you can't come home again." He explores the relationships between people, brothers, lovers and friends. You know where he's coming from because you've experienced it.

This is a definite keeper in anyone's library. Don't wait to pick this book up ~~ read it now and be entranced by Ondaatje's words of beauty and sorrow.

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: A Ghost of a Book; This is No English Patient
Review: I loved Michael Ondaatje's THE ENGLISH PATIENT, both the book and the film, so I really expected to love ANIL'S GHOST as well. Instead, I was greatly disappointed in the book. It seemed more like an outline for a very good novel than an actual novel, itself.

ANIL'S GHOST begins when thirtysomething Anil Tissera returns to her native Sri Lanka after an absence of fifteen years. Now a forensic pathologist, Anil has come to Sri Lanka as part of a human rights investigation into suspected mass murders conducted by the government of this lushly beautiful island nation.

Anil is an idealistic woman, determined to find the truth and expose it and, at first, she is not completely aware of all she is up against. He government assigned co-worker is an archeologist named Sarath Diyasena (probably the most interesting character is the book, by far, but, sadly, very underdeveloped). Sarath isn't hostile to Anil, but it's clear that his function and her function are diametrically opposed...at least at first. As someone who has lived his entire life in Sri Lanka, Sarath is more politically aware of the consequences of exposing the mass murders (and the murderers) than is Anil and his view is, perhaps, the more wiser, though less humanitarian.

Anil, however, eventually makes a discovery that leads her to "proof" of the government led mass murders. With Sarath's help, she unearths the bones of a victim, whom she nicknames "Sailor." The book would now seem to be treading into very dangerous waters, yet I felt no real sense of suspense, no desire to know "what happens next."

Anil and Sarath are very thinly drawn characters, something that surprised me greatly given the rich and complex characterizations found in THE ENGLISH PATIENT. However, even more thinly drawn are the secondary players, Sarath's younger brother, Gamini and a drunken painter/artist named Ananda. I was so saddened by this lack of characterization. I would have been willing to read a book twice the length of ANIL'S GHOST if only Ondaatje would have developed his characters more, would have made them come alive and given us something to care about. As it was, they were the real "ghosts" of the book, being little more than cyphers with no emotional depth at all.

Ondaatje's wonderful prose is still very much in evidence, though the prose in ANIL'S GHOST is much "leaner" than it was in THE ENGLISH PATIENT. I didn't have a problem with this, however, because I thought leaner prose "fit" this book very well.

To Ondaatje's credit, there are some lovely and heartbreakingly beautiful scenes and set pieces in ANIL'S GHOST but they are simply too few and too far between to make this a "good" book and one worthy of being read. (The most beautiful scene occurs at the book's end and involves Ananda.)

The ending of ANIL'S GHOST was quite abrupt and the plot line involving "Sailor" (and even Anil) just petered out. It seemed to me like Ondaatje just got tired of them and decided to concentrate on Sarath and Gamini instead.

I would only recommend ANIL'S GHOST to people who have absolutely nothing else to read (not likely) or to those who love the work of Michael Ondaatje so much that they want to read everything he's written, be it good or bad. Anyone who begins ANIL'S GHOST expecting a book on par with THE ENGLISH PATIENT is going to be terribly disappointed. Michael Ondaatje never gives us a story or characters with any meat on their bones in this book. Instead, he simply circles the periphery, much like a ghost, himself.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Writing, Stark Subject Matter
Review: I didn't like the English Patient, I thought it was tiresome. In fact, I almost didn't read this book because of that.

Anil's Ghost on the other hand, has some of the most beautifully written prose I've ever read. Part One drew me in and made me ache that anyone could have such talent with the written word.

The book isn't told in a traditional way. It takes energy to follow it, there are a lot of leaps the reader must make, especially toward the end, to keep track of the characters and storyline, but it wasn't impossible and given the subject matter, it wasn't a surprise either.

In my opinion, the non linear way the story was told made it more like storytelling than a book and as such, I thought it a very clever way to approach the subject matter. Death squads are never easy to deal with, government sponsored murders, rebels kidnapping doctors, criminal shortages of medical supplies - these things are horrifying, so horrifying the first impulse is to look away. Instead Ondaatje tells us the story of loss and hopelessness through the lives of the characters, which enables us to hear it.

Humans are fallable, that people stand by and say nothing while great atrocities take place is not only cowardly, it's human nature. I think that to make the characters in this book three dimensional and real, Ondaatje crafted them with flaws. Anil's inability to connect, Sarath's government connections, Gamini's distaste for people in general - these are all ways of drawing the reader in. The goal isn't to make us like Anil or Sarath, it's to tell the story through them, through different perspectives.

Rating:
Summary: I wanted to like this book
Review: I wanted to read this book. I really wanted to like this book, but I really could never get into it. I thought the style was beautiful. Although Mr. Ondaatje is a very poetic writer, the plot did not capture my imagination or attention.

Rating:
Summary: Elegantly empty
Review: Like several of my fellow reviewers here, I really wanted and expected to like Anil's Ghost. I am attracted to elegant writing in general, and to author Michael Ondaatje's work in particular. And the setting -- amid the problems revolving around the Sri Lankan Tamal Tigers -- is something I know about only from newspaper headlines and have been eager to know about on a more personal level.

Unfortunately, although I found this book wonderfully written, it seemed to be about almost nothing, at least nothing I could recognize. Open its pages and read almost any paragraph and the images and word choice will enchant you. But without a more coherent story line and better character development, I'm not sure who could enjoy this.

I did make my way through the whole thing, but I found it slow, murky, depressing, ambiguous, and ultimately unsatisfying. The protagonist, forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera, is particularly puzzling in my mind: I read more than 300 pages dominated by her thoughts and fears and interactions and yet I still have no idea who she is.

Yes, the writing here is delecate and elegant. But one could say the same thing about most of Mr. Ondaatje's work. My suggestion is to pick another of his books, one that comes with a compelling story as well as the wonderful writing.