Tim Adams
ANIL’S GHOST by Michael Ondaatje (Bloomsbury)
It has been seven years since Michael Ondaatje published The English Patient. Prior to that book, prior to the Booker Prize and to Ralph Fiennes and the seven Oscars, Ondaatje had written two other novels, as well as a critically successful memoir and 10 volumes of poetry, including his stunning Collected Works of Billy the Kid. He was a writer widely, and perhaps primarily, admired by other writers for the way in which he could find hard-edged lyricism in the most startling of places, for the formal risks he took with his prose.
In search of a way of marketing him, publishers and critics often bracketed Ondaatje with the pre-fatwa Salman Rushdie or with Anita Desai or Shiva Naipaul, a “commonwealth” author, in the patronising term of the time, an explorer of the post- colonial realities he inhabited as a fact of his upbringing in Sri Lanka. But The English Patient changed all of that; The English Patient has made Ondaatje a name that does not require any categorisation. And it has also left him with the best kind of problem: what a studiously “poetic” novelist should do with a guaranteed six- figure print run.
What he has done, it appears, is to spend those seven years in something of a wilful spirit of retrenchment. He has returned to his native Sri Lanka, first to write a volume of poetry, Handwriting, which coolly adventured in some of the island’s legends, and now to write a novel which deals with the more extreme realities of the time long after his leaving: the worst of the three-way civil war that took hold in the mid-Eighties and the early Nineties. Both projects seem an effort to unearth and re-examine some of the legacy of his birth, but in this case it is a literal exhumation: Anil’s Ghost is told primarily through the eyes of a forensic pathologist.
Ondaatje has always been a writer who looks for ways beneath the skin of the subjects of his novels. In The English Patient, he explored the question of how to begin to feel when the skin has been burnt away; here he peels back yet another layer and sifts through the bones of his incendiary native island. Anil, through whom most of the story is told, arrives in Colombo after an absence of 15 years spent first in the calm lecture halls of Guy’s Hospital in London and latterly in Oklahoma.
She has invented for herself a series of protections – not least the man’s name she “bought” long ago from her brother for 100 rupees and an unnamed sexual favour – to guard against the cruelties to which her profession exposes her. In any case, she believes she has been away long enough “to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze”. She comes home as a one-woman envoy of the United Nations with the brief to expose some of the truth of the island’s untold murders by studying what corpses she can find.
In the West, Ondaatje writes, Anil “had come to expect clearly marked roads to the source of most mysteries”. But here there is no signposting. Anil is often in the dark in this book; she pokes about by the light of flickering matches in ancient caves; she works in the holds of abandoned ships and in the ballrooms of derelict mansions. As she becomes ever more wary of the gaze of the authorities, the moon takes on the shape of a laboratory light and under its dim glow she tries to make one corpse in particular, a man she suspects has been murdered by the government, offer up its secrets.
Anil is aided in her work by a local archaeologist, Sarath. Sarath gives Ondaatje licence to wander through Sri Lanka’s mythic past and excavate parallels with its present carnage. Thus ancient stone Bodhisattvas with missing limbs spread around the world’s museums conjure the bloody reality of landmine victims; the tortured bodies of disappeared political activists lie hidden in sacred burial grounds. “Archaeologists can read a bucket of soil like a good historical novel,” says Anil of Sarath; but a soil narrative comes as a series of fragments. Ondaatje’s novel mimics this reading of history, and as his tale progresses it also becomes more diffuse.
At its margins are the ghosts of characters whose histories are related in hushed italics. Murders occur like whispers: monks are shot as they sleep; men are quietly strangled as trains pass through tunnels. Like The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost is in part a novel about numbness in the face of these horrors of war, and the strategies by which the mind retains its humanity: a concentration on fine detail, a love of ancient words, the possibilities of love.
As she digs for truth, Anil turns up lives like her own that are pregnant with unspoken sadnesses, in particular the inscrutable loneliness of Sarath and the curious Ananda, arrack drinker, painter of the eyes of the Buddha and modeller of human skulls.
The danger of delineating numbness is that it can spread. Ondaatje has never been lost for an elegant phrase, but here some of his more lugubrious imagery chloroforms his narrative. At one point, taping up the charred corpse, Sarath suggests a trip to the local temple as the sun goes down. Anil, writes Ondaatje, “didn’t like the abrupt switch to something aesthetic”. Her disquiet could equally apply, on occasion, to the author’s own methods. Metaphors sometimes seem to be sunning themselves on rocks in this book; patients have a tendency to lie etherised on tables while the author gets on with describing the evening spreading out against the sky.
At times – and who wouldn’t want to write another English Patient ? – it seems like Michael Ondaatje has set out to write a Michael Ondaatje novel, and as a result there is a self-consciousness in the lyricism that was absent from the author’s earlier work. There is too much poetry in this book and in some distinct ways there is also not quite enough.