Rating: 
Summary: First half draws you in,; second half is a disappointment
Review: Ondaatje spends the first half of the book building up the lead characters of Anil and Sareth, depicting the bloody background of Sri Lanka in the 80s and 90s, and introducing the mystery of the skeleton they call 'Sailor.'He has set the stage for a gripping finale. Then it's...huh? What happened? He fritters away 30 - 40 pages detailing the character of Sareth's doctor brother Gamini. An interesting portrait, yes, but in the end it adds absolutely zero to the plot he mapped out in the first 200 pages or so. By the time his Gamini fixation peters out, he's got 30 pages or so to tie up the whole mystery (of what you can remember). The revelation of Sailor's identity becomes almost an afterthought, a chapter on the President of Sri Lanka appears about 200 pages late, Sareth goes swings from cipher to villain to hero in the space of about 10 pages that read like "damn, I gotta finish this thing." Meanwhile, where's Anil? Hopefully, someone can fix this well-meaning mess in the movie version, much like Tony Minghella did with "The English Patient."
Rating:
Summary: OK as 'literature' but lacking as a novel
Review: "Anil's Ghost" is classified as a "literary novel," meaning it need not bother with trite details like plot development and pacing that many of us "popular" novelists spend a great deal of time suffering over. As such, it probably succeeds, though I'm not the best judge. The prose is well-crafted and there are passages of great lyricism and beaty, particularly when describing the natural wonders of Sri Lanka. Yet the style is curiously detached and a little unsettling, veering from lush descriptions of ancient Buddhist rites to banal exchanges over bowling in the American southwest. The book is definitely character-driven, though "driven" implies that things actually move along. "Character meandering" is more like it. The principals are Anil, the expatriate Sri Lankan who returns to her homeland and deliberately embroils herself in the horrendous and pointless three-way civil war turning what should be an island paradise into something from Dante's Inferno; Sareth, an eigmatic archaeologist with unspecified ties to the government; Sareth's brother Gamini, a hopped-up physician who keeps himself buzzed and busy to avoid becoming emotionally entangled in the horrors he sees every day; and Ananda, a villager with an artistic bent, driven to alcoholism and isolation by his wife's kidnapping and probable murder. Other characters with seemingly interesting stories pop up, inhabit a scene or two, then disappear without further comment. I get the sense Ondaatje wanted to create a compelling mystery on the level of, say, "Gorky Park" (with which "Anil's Ghost" shares a number of points), but kept getting pulled off into his character's personal backstories, which regularly intrude into the "plot" and take over long passages of prose. By the end, he's essentially lost interest in the central mystery of Sailor's identity and deals with it in a couple paragraphs so perfuntory, they appear almost as afterthoughts or footnotes. After this, the story simply peters out with no real conclusion or resolution. Was this deliberate? Is Ondaatje trying to tell us that the "mystery" on which he's hooked us into his story is really unimportant compared with the grand canvas of Sri Lankan conflict and his character's personal lives? The alternative is to believe Ondaatje is such a sloppy writer he would have flunked the most basic fiction writing course, and that is plainly not the case. But if deliberate, it means Ondaatje is toying with his reader, telling what is in effect a long and detailed shaggy dog story with no real punchline. This reader, for one, does not like being toyed with.
Rating: 
Summary: True characters
Review: Some reviewers have condemned the lightness of Anil's character, but Ondaatje captures to perfection the character of a Sri Lankan of privileged background and upbringing when living in a western country. The thinness and aimlessness is symptomatic and although seeming to enjoy and assimilate, her only two anchor points to this culture are Cullis and Leaf. Palipana reminds me of a man who on the day he retired stopped all the clocks in his house and completely withdrew from the society he had to work in and make a living. Characters of Sarath and Gamini are very real, of people who could have easily left but have decided to stay. He also very well captures the all pervasive fear that prevailed in the country at the time. It is a fear that is difficult to explain to someone who is not Sri Lankan and has not experienced it. For all its troubles, Sri Lanka has always been a democracy after independence, where people enjoy freedoms of a democracy during the day time and wait for secret visits in the night. It is like a semi-Mafia state where Al Capone has got elected and where most of the state security personnel act as enforcers. All this at the same time every one is going through the rituals of democracy, partly due to habit and partly to pacify foreign donors. Less obvious but brilliantly conceived is the metaphor for the meaninglessness of the Sri Lankan war - Sarath and Gamini's story. Two sons of the same mother intensely disliking each other and each others worlds, never really knowing what they disliked about each other, and only realising they have always loved each other at the end when there is no going back. The love for the same woman begins in a masked ball where identity of the woman is not known, this is how we begin to love a country or a place we are born in. In the end the woman is destroyed. The masked woman is Sri Lanka, different factions in the war are the brothers, whose love of the woman or the hatred of each other, although acutely aware of is never really fully understood by them. In the end the country is destroyed. I give it only four stars because of his past work I expected him to bring it all together in a brilliant way, it comes close but not enough.
Rating: 
Summary: Anil's Ghost
Review: This book had no heart and hardly a continuous thread to the plot. Skipping all over from Anil's past to the present action of the story, the reader works very hard to stay on track, but which track? The characters seem little more than cardboard cut outs who move through a hostile landscape. The author offers, early and often, the message that man's inhumanity to man is to be expected and that nothing can be done to change that. And as this story was about the author's own birthplace, his move from Sri Lanka to live in the west, underscores this message.
Rating:
Summary: Why isn't anything happening here?
Review: Like many "literary" novels, Anil's Ghost focuses on character to the near exclusion of plot. While the characters are certainly exotic and complex, I found myself wanting a little bit more than poetic vignettes of their personal histories. Forgive me, but I wanted them to DO something---I wanted something to HAPPEN to them. Admittedly I do not often read fiction of this ilk but is it so much to ask for a serious novel these days to have a plot? There's no need to turn the search for Sailor's identity into a Tami Hoag potboiler. But on the other hand, one wishes that there was something at stake here, some suspense. Or at the very least a narrative that reveals something about Sri Lanka as a people, as a predicament, rather than simply using pretty language to give the illusion of characterization.
Rating: 
Summary: The Killing Fields circa 1985
Review: This is a stark portrait of Sri Lanka from 1985 through the 90's, when the government vs. the insurgents vs. separatist gorillas filled the country with corpses. In prose that could be a documentary in black and white, we receive images of bleached bone, unidentified corpses, and hospitals overrun with casualties. Into this chaotic horror comes Anil Tissera, a forensic pathologist who has volunteered services to the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva. Paired with a local officail, Sarath Diyasena, Anil's quest is to name at least one anonymous body, thereby giving a face to the rest who have disappeared. She is relentless in her attempts to identify a particular skeleton, Sailor, one of four: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, as in the nursery rhyme. In a juxtaposition of Anil, Sarath and his brother, Gamini, we are acquainted with the more personal aspects of their lives, never quite sure how these characters will influence the plot. Finally, Anil becomes the beneficiary and the messenger, the result of tremendous sacrifice. One brother reaches across the past to anoint the other, the similarities that caused distance in life bring closure in death. Meticulously researched, the author clearly loves his country in all its implications.
Rating: 
Summary: A heroic achievement!
Review: This is a dark, disturbing, and brilliant novel. Most people, myself included, know Ondaatje through his novel, The English Patient, and also the movie. This is a complete different book, a completely different setting and type of character, which may disappoint the reader who comes with an expectation. It may also disappoint those who are expecting a lot of action, intrigue, and suspense. You must put away those expectations and approach this book fresh, maybe even as a meditation on the mystery of human existence, like the artifacer in the book who paints eyes on the Buddah. Western readers should also dispense with their notions of who the main characters are, how they think, how they act. The characters appear at first glance hidden in monotone, but with a subtlety that only Ondaatje can weave together they are slowly and also painfully revealed. Ondaatje, who is himself a Sri Lankan ex-patriot knows very well had to provoke the dichotomy of such a life in his main character, Anil Tissera. Anil will always live in that middle ground or no man's land between her native homeland and the American/European life that she has so thoroughly and successfully embraced at least outwardly. Yet it is the inward Anil that she has been hiding from herself that is going to be explored here. As a well-respected forensic pathologist, she examines dead bodies for a living and is eventually drawn to working for human rights organizations in the war zones of Central America. Ironically, among these horrors, she is most alive and most herself. Yet it is only when her work takes her to her native Sri Lanka, now in the midst of it own civil war, and which she has been away from for years, that she begins to confront her own past demons. Along the way, we are introduced to a middle class Sri Lankan family, with its own complex and disturbing relationships. These comprise her new colleague, Sarath, an anthropologist, and his brother, Gamini, a medical doctor, as well as holy men, bandits, criminals, and ordinary folk. She notes that in the end of most Western novels the westerner walks away into the sunset or gets on a plane, but the people who live in the place of horror cannot escape. I am paraphrasing here. So we never see Anil get on that plane, although we know that she does. Sarath, of course is the one who stays, who is the real hero, and the one who pays the ultimate price, as will his brother, most probably also. I am very glad that I read this novel, although it required patience and fortitude because of its depth as well as the graphic horror. The reader is never left off the hook as Ondaatje brilliantly and chillingly recounts the atrocities of a war where the enemy and the victim is not always seen or known. It is as though he also felt a debt as a writer and a Sri Lankan to let the world know and it is commendable.
Rating:
Summary: Ellen's Review
Review: I truly enjoyed reading Anil's Ghost and was suprised at some of the negative feedback people had about the experience of reading the book. Some other readers have called the book boring and couln't even finish, but I had a very different experience. I appreciated the slow, careful time Ondaatje took to develop his characters and to tell his story. The lack of "fast paced" plot made me notice and enjoy the revealing details of the book and the rich words used to describe Shri Lanka. I thought Anil was a fascinating character, though there were times in the book where I wanted more of her, especiallly on a more emotional level. The book is dealing with many kinds of intensities and it can be difficult to process. The intensity of the political situation in Shri Lanka is intertwined with the complexities of various relationships. I started reading this book expecting it to be like The English Patient. This was quite an error and I was pleasently surprised. Don't read Anil's Ghost if you are interested in a book with a quick revealing plot and defined characters. The plot slowly reveals itself to create a book that is intriguing, powerful and well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: what a muddle
Review: I did finish the book... I am not a coward. However, having finished it, I had to ask myself what, at bottom, it was all about. My conclusion: here it was again, the old elaborate, poststructural striptease. Ondaatje may be Sri Lankan in origin, but he has clearly bought into the by now hoary Parisian cliche that there is no ultimate truth, no way of getting at the ultimate non-truth, but a lot of teasing and withholding to be done in the process. I could not escape the thought, that in this process, Ondaatje enjoyed impressing us with his vast knowledge of all kinds of non-related topics, which furnished the veils for his striptease. If you must read it borrow it from a library.
Rating:
Summary: Late Levon's Lugubrious Critique
Review: I must admit, upon first read I was rather underwhelmed and even disappointed with the work. It was not until I had long finished the book that I fully appreciated its value and the objective Odaatje sought to accomplish. This book should not be approached with expectations of plot, as I learned first hand. The author utilizes the turmoil in Sri Lanka to lure readers with contextual insinuations of action. Once won over, the readers are subject to a long and murky journey, whose purpose is masked under the guize of unearthing a government conspiracy. It is precisely this conspiracy that diverts the readers' attention away from the journey, the more important and valuable aspect of the novel. Ambivalent Readers who complain the book is too slow fall victim to this, as they wait impatiently for the "goal" of the story to be achieved. I feel that this is the main cause of negative feedback from readers as the story itself is wonderful. So, if your hoping for action, look elsewhere. If it's a good story that you seek, Anil's Ghost will not disappoint.
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