Michael Ondaatje's, "Anil’s Ghost"

Returning to his Sri Lankan roots, Michael Ondaatje explores the fate of the Sri Lankan public caught in the crossfire between the Fascist government’s oppression and the retaliation by the revolutionary guerillas. Mass killings, kidnappings and disappearances seem rampant, yet nobody seems willing to acknowledge the victim or the enemy. Anil, appointed by an international peace force, is in Sri Lanka on a fact-finding mission. Returning to a country that has grown wildly different from her memories of it as a teenager, Anil is forced to face her precariousness as a woman, a visiting expatriate, a foreigner with international clout and an object of unanimous contempt. Her supposed ally is Sarath, an archaeologist she teams with despite suspicions of his alliances. Those expecting the grand romance set against the war, as in the author's previous work, "The English Patient," will be disappointed by the relentless accounts of suffering, torture and doom in this book.

At one point in the story there’s an abandoned bungalow away from the war-torn city with several disparate characters in it, but there end all similarities to "The English Patient." Yet, the poetic Ondaatje touches are unmistakably there: the ease with which he traverses the intimate and the universal, his profound knowledge of the human psyche, and the personal mythology he invests in characters as they rummage through the rubble excavating their own existence in a place as pointless and hopeless as Sri Lanka in the 80s and 90s. Ondaatje’s purpose here isn’t to assign political blame by singling out anybody, he mourns ravaged souls and lost love as much as the loss of life. Though the pacing is uneven and the narration occasionally episodic, I found "Anil’s Ghost," a tremendously satisfying spiritual and aesthetic treat.