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Magill’s Literary Annual 2001

Anil’s Ghost

by Robert Ross

First published: 2000

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 311 pp. $25.00

Type of work: Novel

Time of work: 1990’s

Locale: Sri Lanka

An episodic record of a woman’s return to her homeland, where a brutal civil war makes death and destruction an everyday occurrence

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost recounts Sri Lanka’s civil war that has raged for years and has claimed thousands of lives. The struggle has also left parts of the country in desolation. However, the novel is more metaphorical than realistic in its rendering of the events, more poetic than historical in its approach. The religious, political, and ethnic complexities that lie behind the killing and the destroying are vaguely defined. After all, Sri Lanka’s conflict counts as one among many in obscure parts of the world—the kind of news that gets a few lines on the inside page of an overseas newspaper.

Michael Ondaatje

ph_0111225091-Ondaatje.jpg

(© Quentin Ondaatje)

The island nation of Sri Lanka lies off the southern coast of India. Lush and exquisitely beautiful, the country possesses extensive natural resources, including rubber, minerals, and rich soil perfect for growing tea. In better days, its beaches attracted European tourists. Under the rule of the British Empire for nearly a century, the nation gained independence in the 1950’s and changed its name from Ceylon to the historical Sri Lanka. Civilization had flourished there for centuries before the British arrived, and scores of temples and archaeological sites dot the countryside. While the historical and geographical background is implicit in the novel, it never comes to the forefront.

No one side in the conflict receives favored treatment. All are guilty: the government officials attempting to put down the rebellion at whatever cost and the sundry rebel groups fighting for a variety of causes ranging from separate statehood to religious domination. Instead, Ondaatje focuses on the way an atmosphere of violence affects the characters’ lives.

Anil’s arrival on the island initiates the action. Raised in Sri Lanka and educated as a forensic anthropologist in England, then working all over the world for human rights organizations and in archaeological sites, Anil has not returned to her homeland since she left to attend the university in London. This visit, though, is hardly a sentimental journey into the past; instead, Anil has been assigned by a human rights organization connected with the United Nations to investigate suspected violations by the Sri Lankan government against its citizens.

Once settled in the capital city of Colombo, Anil meets the archaeologist Sarath, who has been assigned to assist her. Their relationship turns into a shaky one at times, considering that Anil is investigating the government for which Sarath works. The suspicions that arise between the two add to the narrative tension.

As they travel around the country, sometimes in adverse conditions, they discover numerous grave sites on government ground. They approach their assignment in a strictly scientific manner—that is, by focusing on a single skeleton they discover and allowing their findings on this specimen to represent a multitude of bodies. As scientists, they set out on their task methodically, without becoming emotionally involved. Ondaatje records their research meticulously, even though the details are gruesome at times. The narrative occasionally resembles a treatise on pathology.

The skeleton, which they name “Sailor,” evolves into one of the characters as the dead man’s background is revealed. An innocent bystander, a simple villager and laborer, he was killed in the ever-present violence, then turned into a piece of evidence. After all of Anil’s and Sarath’s work, their plans go awry when they attempt to present Sailor to the government officials. Sarath becomes a victim himself, and Anil flees the island.

The work with Sailor and the climactic moment at the government agency serve as the main narrative. Interspersed between these events are glimpses of the characters’ earlier lives. Both Anil and Sarath grew up in Colombo in professional homes and had enjoyed privileged childhoods. The time after independence had been peaceful, and vestiges of British colonialism still dominated the way the upper class lived. While Anil left early on and carried memories of only the good years, Sarath stayed and faced the transition from the old order into the era of chaos, becoming bitter and hardened, especially after his wife’s suicide.

Episodes from Anil’s years in London and the United States also appear, including a brief description of her failed marriage and her disastrous affair with a married man. Also, there is a suggestion of a lesbian relationship. Although Anil receives full development, she remains a detached, cold character. Her “ghost,” specified in the book’s title, must wear many guises: a survivor of failed relationships, a world citizen without roots, a witness to the destruction of her homeland, a professional specializing in death.

Another character who emerges along the way, even though he is peripheral to the central story, is Sarath’s brother, Gamini. A physician, he has immersed himself in the nation’s suffering by working to piece together the victims of the war. His only salvation comes from his long hours in surgery, amputating legs and arms, sewing up wounds, removing bullets, and so forth. Often he depends on drugs to alleviate his personal pain.

One condition that the three have in common is their estrangement from others. Like Anil, Sarath has failed in his marriage. So has Gamini, who actually was in love with Sarath’s wife. This aspect of the novel is most likely intended to show that the discord in civil life brings about a similar disruption in personal lives, but the intensity of the characters’ alienation from one another and from others verges at times on the melodramatic.

The character who comes across as the most sympathetic is the native artist Ananda. Significantly, he is a victim, not an onlooker like the others. Hired by Anil and Sarath to re-create a face for Sailor the skeleton, Ananda goes about his task in an almost religious manner. Finally, he creates not a face for Sailor but his lost wife’s face. He was once a respected artist who specialized in painting eyes on idols—not a job to be taken lightly, the narrative explains in detail. After his wife’s murder at the hands of either the rebels or the government, Ananda took to drink and gave up his art to work in a mine. In the epilogue to the novel, he appears to be redeemed as he once again performs the magic of painting a reconstructed Buddha’s eyes.

In Ananda’s fall and possible redemption may lie the novel’s reassurance that this latest upheaval, too, will pass in the ancient land of Sri Lanka, which through the centuries has witnessed both human folly and spiritual enlightenment, both destruction and creativity—and survived. That reclamation will come not through the likes of Anil and Sarath and Gamini, with their devotion to the abstract demands of science, but through the spirituality of a man who can paint eyes on a god.

As Gamini points out, the rest of the world cares little about what happens in Sri Lanka. The United Nations can send in experts such as Anil, who will depart and make her report, then move on to another troubled site. The others, though, must stay and cope in the country they love and do not want to leave. Gamini imagines the familiar script:

“American movies, English books—remember how they all end?” Gamini asked that night. “The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.”

To an extent this passage describes Ondaatje himself. Having grown up in Sri Lanka, he left in 1962 and settled in Canada. Like Anil, he returned to his homeland recently for the first time in years, then took the plane out and wrote a book. Although Ondaatje had published extensive poetry and fiction before his novel The English Patient (1992) received the Booker Prize, he was little known outside Canada. Then in 1997 when the film version of The English Patient was named the best picture of the year, his reputation flourished. So Anil’s Ghost has enjoyed an enthusiastic international reception, which it well deserves.

In particular, Ondaatje is a fine stylist. The chiseled language serves in this novel to heighten the horror it portrays. In Ondaatje’s hands the description of the exhumation and examination of a decayed body turns almost poetic. The narrative is also marked by an admirable economy, as shown in this passage:

There had been continual emergency from 1983 onwards, racial attacks and political killings. The terrorism of the separatist guerrilla groups, who were fighting for a homeland in the north. The insurrection of the insurgents in the south, against the government. The counterterrorism of the special forces against both of them. The disposal of bodies by fire. The disposal of bodies in rivers or the sea. The hiding and then reburial of corpses. . . . “The reason for war was war.”

Anil’s Ghost is in all respects a highly original work that defies easy categorization. It could have turned into a story about Anil seeking her roots, finding them, then deciding to stay on in Sri Lanka to work for her beloved homeland. The narrative avoids such a cliché. The novel might also have been loaded with endless details on the causes of Sri Lanka’s civil strife, which are facts better left to the historians. It could have turned into a diatribe on the evils of British colonialism and the long-standing political ramifications stemming from foreign domination and exploitation of the onetime colonies. However, this postcolonial theme has been pretty well exhausted by writers from the old British Commonwealth.

Near the end of the novel Anil realizes that she will not be staying much longer and, in fact, wants to leave:

There was blood everywhere. A casual sense of massacre. She remembered what a woman at the Nadesan Centre had said to her. “I got out of the Civil Rights Movement partly because I couldn t remember which massacre took place when and where. . . .”

Anil’s Ghost, then, transcends Sri Lanka. The novel could as well be set in the Balkans, in parts of Africa, in Indonesia, in any of those innumerable places where an ordered society has given over to disorder, places where there is blood everywhere.

Sources for Further Study

1 

Booklist 96 (March 15, 2000): 1294.

2 

The Christian Science Monitor 92 (May 4, 2000): 17.

3 

Library Journal 125 (May 15, 2000): 126.

4 

New Criterion 18 (May, 2000): 63.

5 

New Statesman 129 (May 8, 2000): 55.

6 

The New York Times Book Review 105 (May 14, 2000): 7.

7 

The New Yorker 76 (May 151, 2000): 91.

8 

Publishers Weekly 247 (March 20, 2000): 70.

9 

The Times Literary Supplement, April 28, 2000, p. 23.

10 

Vanity Fair, May, 2000, p. 238.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Ross, Robert. "Anil’s Ghost." Magill’s Literary Annual 2001, edited by John D. Wilson & Steven G. Kellman, Salem Press, 2001. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MLA2001_10100200201409.
APA 7th
Ross, R. (2001). Anil’s Ghost. In J. D. Wilson & S. G. Kellman (Eds.), Magill’s Literary Annual 2001. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Ross, Robert. "Anil’s Ghost." Edited by John D. Wilson & Steven G. Kellman. Magill’s Literary Annual 2001. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2001. Accessed April 05, 2026. online.salempress.com.