I bought this book because it was by the author of The
English Patient, a complex and beautifully told tale that involved
me not just in the lives of the characters, but also with a sense of place
and history -- present and past, truth and falsehood were interwoven in
interesting ways. While that book was set in Italy near the end of World
War II, it took me back to North Africa in the 1930s and also in the days
of Herodotus, involving me not just in a story, but in the whole fabric
of history, setting the characters in a scene with remarkable depth, so
what they said and did echoed again and again.
The text on the dustjacket of Anil's
Ghost led me to expect a suspense thriller in an exotic setting, something
along the lines of Smilla's
Sense of Snow, where in the unravelling of the mystery you get a feel
for life in Denmark and Greenland. And early in this story a key plot element,
the reconstruction of a face from a skull, reminded me of Gorky Park.
But Anil's Ghost is not a plot-based page-turner, where you simply want
to find out what happened next and next. Here the plot is simply the thread
that holds the jewels together. The jewels are:
Anil herself, a Sri Lankan expatriate returning to her homeland on a UN
Human Rights mission and falling in love with the country despite outrage
at the horrors of brutal guerrilla warfare and government-sanctioned terrorism.
Sarath, an archaeologist who can from the slightest clues reconstruct a
vibrant picture of the past and hence who sees the present situation as
just one of many layers, who understands the pragmatic nuances and moral
complexities of the modern world in its historical context, understands
what can and cannot be done, understands the ambiguous nature of "truth"
and the difficult game of survival in modern-day Sri Lanka, who knows how
to maintain a sense of his own moral decency tempered by a keen sense of
practical reality.
Gamini, Sarath's brother, a dedicated doctor, who had been in love with
his brother's wife, had had an affair with her until her suicide, and now
thinks of little else but his unending work, mainly patching up victims
of the political terror.
Ananda, a drunken miner who once had been an artist with the skill and
genius needed to paint the eyes of statues of Buddha, a ritual performed
when a new statue was dedicated and, in a sense, brought to life; a man
whose life had become meaningless when his wife was senselessly slaughtered
in the terror, but who still retained the ability to reconstruct a life-like
face from a skull, and who when would-be thieves, not terrorists, explode
a Buddha statue, can still direct a large team of workers to reconstruct
it from the smallest of fragments.
Yes, there is a murder, but it is just one of many, more important as an
example of the neverending terror and the complex political situation in
which it is ridiculous to expect any kind of justice even if the details
of the truth could be determined and proven with any confidence. But this
is the story -- both cynically realistic and optimistically spiritual --
of an island country with a rich and unique culture that has been blasted
to bits by political conflict. It is a story that puts the local political
situation into an international context -- just one more instance of massive
government and rebel engineered "disappearances," as in Argentina and elsewhere
in Latin America. But at the same time, the author shows the possibility
of redemption through inspired reconstruction and love of what has been
lost.
The final chapter doesn't deal with "solving" the crime or bringing
the perpetrators to justice. It doesn't deal at all with Anil and the crime
she became obsessed with. Rather, it tells of Ananda's reconstruction of
one huge old Buddha and his painting the eyes and hence giving life to
another new one built on the same field. "These were fields where Buddhism
and its values met the harsh political events of the twentieth century."
It ends not with truth, but with beauty, seen through the eyes of Ananda
as high above the fields he paints the Buddha's eyes. "And now with human
sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him. He could
witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wind, or a
hundred-mile storm coming down off the mountains near Gonagola and skirting
to the plains. He could feel each current of wind, every lattice-like green
shadow created by cloud." This is a book well-worth reading more than once.
Book
collections on CD and DVD. A library for the price of a book.