"Anil's Ghost" by Michael Ondaatje

It is currently colder than it has any right to be in this part of the world, and I want nothing more than to put my feet somewhere warm (ideally, Costa Rica; but as that is not possible at the moment, maybe on my husband?) and curl up with a good book. But I am prevented from this simple pleasure by the knowledge that I am behind on blog posts, and reading yet another book will only serve to get me farther behind. Plus . . . I can read (during the daytime) without electricity, but blogging is another story, and in weather like this, electricity is not a sure thing. So blogging it is.

I felt like I ought to have been impressed by Anil's Ghost. Ondaatje is a celebrated author (thought admittedly more for The English Patient and Warlight than for this novel) and it says right there on the back of this book that it is "a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks" of Ondaatje's writing. So I know that this book (and its author, and the subject matter) are all worthy of inspiring admiration, and I ought to have been impressed. 

But I wasn't.  

That's not to say that I feel especially critical about this book, or that I had a strongly negative reading experience, or that you shouldn't read it. But it does mean that I did not sink into this book. I did not luxuriate in it. It was not one of those books that reminded me of why I love to read.

I think I felt a little bit lost as I read. One issue was my own ignorance. I had absolutely no context for this book, having no awareness of the civil war that was fought in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009, and this was not the type of book to provide much context or to add much to my knowledge. There is pleasure in reading a book that is subtly written, where details are hinted at rather than spelled out, when there is guesswork and interpretation involved, but this is only truly pleasurable when the reader feels able to fit some puzzle pieces together. Instead, I felt as if I was reading a dark book in the darkness, and I merely stumbled my way through it.

I suppose I should try to give a brief summary of the book. Anil Tissera is a forensic anthropologist of Sri Lankan heritage. She is sent back to her home country by an international human rights group to investigate government-linked murders. It is not a plot-heavy book, but despite this, there are plenty of horrors described (highway crucifixion is one that sticks in my mind). And I spent most of the book assuming that Anil was doomed (why else would the book be called Anil's Ghost?) but she survived, which left me trying to determine the identity of Anil's ghost. Is it her coworker Sarath who ensures she is able to get out of the country safely? Is it Sailor, the skeleton on which she focuses much of her work? Is it Ananda's wife Sirissa? Is she haunted by Sri Lanka itself?