Bookraft

As a poet one may not agree with another's poetic styling and texturings of moments in time; but one can appreciate how effortlessly Michael Ondaatje in Anil's Ghost uses almost poetic collage pieces of spare dialog, keenly sewn observations and almost silent soliloquys to assemble and piece together a near civil war story of sometimes wanton violence and disappeared bodies into a tapestry tale - a tapestry that even we as readers want to emerge , we have to see that puzzle and its pieces and even more so its puzzlers literally live to see the light of day.

It is no surprise then that the opening shards and shawls of Anil's Ghost begin in the upper middle of the story as we readers too will get to piece together the parts and heart of the tale. We are set in a dark cave, a cave of excised religious artifacts whose gaps are now stuffed with suspected skeletons of sectarian violence. Both the cave and bodies are equally defaced and bleeding as Anil of Sri Lanka and of the West assumes her new mission - to piece together using her training in Forensic Anthropology the story of what has happened maybe to this one and therefore by implication the hundreds of other victims of ongoing violence between Tamil and Sinhalese and their government.

The UN and the government have agreed to an investigation. But we suspect that to examine the dead, to see if a story can be built of what happened when and where and perhaps by whom and why is fraught with great danger. Yet the veneer of tea and colonial accomplishment and at least the forms of democracy are observed tellingly by Ondaatje through his characters. Like Iraq, Anil's and Ondaatje's Sri Lanka brings an ever new and unpleasant surface to that evanescence known as democracy.

Now Ondaatje is no stranger to war as his The English Patient has proven equally riveting - but here the menace and danger of the investigation undertaken by Anil and Sri Lankan guide and follow anthropologist Sarath Diaysena becomes so compellling I a poet could not believe myself racing along headlong to discover how the tale and the pieces I was seeing how Anil and company would .. would even live to to be able to put them together.

I have not done such a shamelessly scurrying reading since Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities. Now in the case of Dickens I had possibly the excuse of excess - excess of characters, excess of plot twists, excess flowering of language and emotion, excess in pieces of the plot to put together ... Here in Sri Lankan caves of depravity things are spare, keenly observed, each scene stands alone - yet has tendrils and extensions that one thinks fits neatly right over there doesn't it ? And that plus moments of exquisite beauty in its poetry make Anil's Ghost something to behold.