Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje; Picador India; pages 311, Rs.195 (paperback).
SRI LANKA, in the West, is a forgotten land, a smudge off the coast of India whose tropical promise is tainted by half-remembered hints of violent conflagration. In Britain, its old colonial ruler, little is known of its present or recent past; details o f its ethnic conflict go unreported in the press; one politician recently confused it with Sierra Leone. A small country of strategic insignificance, the island nation seems locked by wilful neglect into pain without end, into tragedy that, with every pa ssing year, burrows deeper into a civilisation once famous for its humanistic impulses.
It is important, then, that Michael Ondaatje, a prize-winning poet and novelist of international repute, has chosen Sri Lanka as the setting for his latest work of fiction. In Anil's Ghost, Ondaatje applies to the land of his birth the literary sk ills that rendered his best-known novel, The English Patient, a transforming experience for many readers. Once again, there is the willingness to take on great themes - truth, fear, trust, human capacity for love and renewal - and to explore them with an intelligent, probing eye. There is the same sense of engagement with characters, the salute to the integrity of the human being caught up in crisis, confronting weakness or failure. And there is, in the telling of the story, a musicality of langu age that carries the reader deeper into human mysteries, establishing resonances that tap into our individual experience to trigger emotional reactions of unexpected intensity.
The device Ondaatje employs to hold the structure together is a detective story. The action takes place across an unspecified few weeks in the period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, when the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection in the sout h places additional pressure on a Sri Lankan state already at war against Tamil separatism in the north. The response is terror, systematic and unrelenting: death squads, official and unofficial, set to grisly work; thousands disappear; massacre follows massacre; bodies, broken and brutalised, float down rivers or are retrieved from makeshift graves.
Into this "political time and historical moment" Ondaatje sets his fictional players. Under pressure from Western trading partners, the Sri Lankan government has agreed to a plan to pair local officials with outside consultants to investigate the mayhem. Anil Tissera, a forensic expert of Sri Lankan origin but (like Ondaatje himself) long resident in the West, is sent to Colombo by a Geneva-based human rights organisation. Here she finds herself paired with Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist whose capaci ty for independent enquiry seems compromised by his status as a senior government employee. As if by chance, Sarath shows Anil bones from a recent archaeological dig in a government-protected sacred monastic site. Among the bones Anil finds one she belie ves to belong to our own times; her suspicions are confirmed when she and Sarath visit the site and find, at the back of a cave, a partially burned skeleton obviously not of the sixth century. The two scientists call the skeleton 'Sailor' for his positio n in the old naming rhyme 'Tinker, tailor...' and spirit him back to their laboratory in Colombo.
For Anil, now in possession of a body recovered from an area to which the government has exclusive access, establishing Sailor's identity becomes a matter of transcendent importance. In this land of fear, haunted by the nameless dead, Sailor seems to rep resent all the lost voices. 'To give him a name,' she believes, 'would name the rest'. But there can be no question of a straightforward forensic investigation. Anil, tempered to a degree by her work in the killing fields of Guatemala and the Congo, stil l harbours the expectation that information can be clarified and acted upon, that mysteries are amenable to pursuit along clearly marked roads. In Sri Lanka, where fear rules, where truth 'bounces between gossip and vengeance', where information comes co ded and replete with subtexts, she must learn a new language of engagement and subterfuge. She must also, if she is to survive, test the limits of trust.
The search for Sailor's identity provides the novel with a strong narrative direction and a base that enables the author to range far beyond the tracking of clues and the reconstruction of forensic procedures. In the manner of the English patient, anonym ous, unknown and to all intents dead within his swathe of bandages, Sailor comes to exercise a catalytic impact on those about him, provoking them to probe and confront painful aspects of their lives.
At the centre of the book is a triage of relationships: between Anil, Sarath, her archaeologist colleague, and Sarath's brother, Gamini, a Colombo-based doctor confronting daily the obscenity of war. For Anil, a woman in her thirties who left Sri Lanka f or the West at the age of 18, the return to distantly remembered homeland is replete with challenge: she senses herself out of step with the thought processes of those about her, with the very idiom of life. Determined, intelligent and in a state of brit tle emotionality (she has just ended a longstanding relationship with a married man), Anil uses her work as a diversion from inner turmoil, as a dimension in which she can express her state of being:
God, she loved a lab. The stools always had a slight rake so you sat in a lean. There would always be that earnest tilt forward...She could walk around the table watching a body from the corner of her eye, then sit on the stool and time would be forg otten. No hunger or thirst or desire for a friend or lover's company. Just an awareness of someone in the distance hammering a floor, banging through ancient concrete with a mallet as if to reach the truth (page 66).
Anil, essentially an outsider whose role is to question, destabilise and pursue the truth along the clear tracks of her experience, must work alongside Sarath, a man of instinctive privacy and ambiguity. For Sarath, too, work provides an arena of total a pplication, of temporary release from the pain of personal tragedy. But in the conditions of contemporary Sri Lanka, archaeology has ceased to be what it might be in other contexts: the singleminded pursuit of the truth, sharpened and refined by scientif ic advance. How will Sarath, "a gifted and natural finder of things", a protective bear of a man whose dream is to write a book about a long erased city of the south, respond to the quest for Sailor in a land where telling the truth invites deadly danger ?
Part of the answer is provided by Gamini, the younger brother whose complex, problematic relationship with his sibling emerges in the course of the novel. As with Anil and Sarath, work is for Gamini both an affirmation and an obsession; there is a superh uman edge to his labours in his Colombo hospital base, a frenetic quality to his drug-sustained round-the-clock patching and healing. But while escape from private misery forms part of the impetus, Gamini is fired too by his knowledge of Sri Lanka's past , the time when 'this was a civilised country':
We had "halls for the sick" four centuries before Christ... There were dispensaries, maternity hospitals. By the twelfth century, physicians were being dispersed all over the country to be responsible for far-flung villages... There are recorded deta ils of brain operations in the ancient texts. Ayurvedic hospitals were set up that still exist - I'll take you there and show them to you sometime. Just a short train journey. We were always good with illness and death. We could howl with the best. Now w e carry the wounded with no anaesthetic up the stairs because the elevators don't work (page 193).
The theme of debased and degraded culture, of a people cut off from past traditions of caring, from ancient civilisational roots, runs through the book. In the course of their investigation, Anil and Sarath travel to the remnants of a forest monastery ne ar Anuradhapura to confer with Sarath's old teacher, Palipana, now blind and living with his orphaned niece amid the ruins. Once regarded as a leading epigraphist and translator of Pali scripts, Palipana now stands forgotten, his work clouded by charges of forgery. Through him Anil and Sarath make contact with the character who, in a powerful symbolic sense, can re-endow Sailor with life and meaning, who can disinter from the rubble of contemporary Sri Lanka something that approximates hope.
It is difficult in the course of a short review to convey the richness of texture achieved in this novel. Ondaatje makes use of a sequence of intercutting italicised passages to reach out to other perspectives, to draw other voices into the narrative. In one such episode, described with cinematic clarity, a young woman walks out into her morning routine to confront the unfolding horror of the night's work, the human remains offset by the tranquillity of the rustic landscape. Another intercut is an extra ct from a list of names of young men, together with the date and place of their disappearance. No comment is attached; none is required.
This is not a political novel in the conventionally understood sense. Ondaatje throughout avoids reference to the real-life players in Sri Lanka's ongoing fratricide (although his fictional President meets a familiar enough nemesis). His emphasis is on t he fallout of war: the murky, random nature of the killing, the unknown executioners, the costs imposed on a society no longer able to function openly, debarred from self-scrutiny and pursuit of truth. To that extent, the book ranges far beyond Sri Lanka 's palm-fringed shores. But it would also seem to tap into a personal odyssey. For Ondaatje, long disconnected from the land of his birth, Anil's Ghost may be part of the process of coming home.
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