All Those Lost Voices

...Anil, for example, has no patience for such analysis...

...Yet despite the lush language, despite the abundance of fascinating research, despite the comfortable epigrams delivered throughout like gifts wrapped up in small packages, despite the presentation of superior, idealistic figures engaged in noble deeds and thinking lofty thoughts, one wonders whether anything is breathing here...

...We are, and 1 was...

...Anil's "ghost," then, is not only this victim but all victims of atrocities, the named and nameless, the disappeared and discovered, and also the shades of sorrow and loss from her own past...

...It is, rather, the remains of someone recently killed and then reburied in this government-protected zone...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara, "The Jewish War" All the signature features of a Michael Ondaatje novel can be found in Anil's Ghost: the resonant prose formulations, the visually arresting descriptions, the information ranging from exotic geography and history to details about some of the more recondite occupations or crafts...

...Palipana, an epigraphist...

...WHEN A writer is as skillful and seductive as Ondaatje, the question of what all of this amounts to becomes particularly vexing...

...He is a man so obviously wounded emotionally, and so "efficient in his privacy," that she is uncertain about whose side he is on until the very end of her mission...

...Anil, the only major character who is a woman (though with a man's name that, we are told, she purchased from her brother as a teenager), is the least interesting of all and the one with the least remarkable past...

...Observing mothers in a hospital ward resting their heads against the cribs in which their sick children lay, Gamini "believed only in the mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so the children wouldbe confident and safe during the night...

...She has been selected by the United Nations to investigate human rights abuses along with Sarath, a government-appointed archaeologist...

...They are all members of an exclusive club into which we, as readers, because of Ondaatje's beguiling powers, would like to be admitted...

...With every major character frozen in the past, and with a rather uninspired mystery to move the narrative forward, the novel's existence in the present is essentially little more than an enchantingly rendered evocation of a troubled remote place, unfamiliar landscapes, unusual occupations and rites, and high-minded truisms...

...Thus, in a story heavily dependent on a Sri Lanka ravaged by civil war, with the Tamil guerrillas struggling for independence against the government on one front and insurgents fighting the entrenched powers on another, there is surprisingly little interest in politics...

...formed by history," as the old teacher and epigraphist, Palipana, puts it...

...His brother, Gamini, as he toils on the wards to save the lives of the latest victims, wonders, "Who sent a 13-year-old to fight, and for what furious cause...

...Early in the novel...

...To give him a name would name the rest...

...Like every major character in the book, Anil holds fast to her ghosts because they define her...

...And all of them seem to reflect the author's views...

...Every political opinion is supported by its own army," she says, dismissing the subject...

...they remain static, isolated within their own pasts in a state of incurable self-stupefaction...

...We, too, find ourselves nodding our heads in agreement with them...

...Identifying the one she has come upon is the mystery that pulls the novel and its characters together...

...For an old leader...

...It is what gives the image life...

...She is stuck reliving in her head a rather ordinary love affair with a married man, and fondly recalling bonding with her North American pathologist colleagues on bowling alley outings...

...For recreation and diversion, it's a gorgeous fantasy place to hang out, but very little more...

...Palipana has retreated to a forest monastery, the "Grove of Ascetics," after having been ostracized by the scholarly community for basing his interpretations of ancient rock graffiti on nonexistent texts...

...For some pale flag...

...it affords real pleasures, since Ondaatje's talent is formidable...

...This representative of all those lost voices...

...Gamini and Sarath, at variance on many issues, are nevertheless in complete accord on what seems to them— and, we suspect, to the author—the ultimate truth, the only one that really matters—namely, the truth of maternal love...

...each is irresistibly melancholy, wounded by past tragedy and lost love...

...Earlier, Palipana had explained: "It is always the last thing done...

...These soft, mushy people are undeniably appealing...

...This is no small thing, of course...

...Moreover, the individual characters never develop in the course of the book, and never really connect with each other in any significant way...

...Because no matter how much effort Anil puts into the quest, the identity of the skeleton, when it is finally discovered through painstaking investigation lovingly detailed by the author, really doesn't matter much compared with the overriding fact—which is basically a given all along—that he was a victim of torture...

...The gifted, sexy, wounded "good" characters are essentially variations of one another...

...Present, too, is an élite group of solitary, romantic, enviably attractive heroes come together for a noble mission...

...for the reader, the best bet is to simply dig in, without asking too many questions about nutritional value...

...As for Sarath, "he would, he knew, also give his life for the rock carving from another century of the woman bending over her child...

...Ananda is convinced, "The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation...

...How could we not in the context that Ondaatje presents them and still consider ourselves to be worthy people...

...Maybe the problem is the sameness of all the right-thinking, sympathetic people, allowing little room for nuance, movement, ambiguity, contradiction, conflict, growth or change—in other words, for life...

...This new work by the author of The English Patient is set in his native Sri Lanka during the political upheavals of the late 1980s and early '90s...

...Its protagonist is Anil Tissera, a young doctor who returns to the country she left at age 18 after an absenceof 15 years...

...Palipana in his forest refuge thinks, "Farther away were the wars of terror, the gunmen in love with the sound of their shells, where the main purpose of war had become war...

...Ananda has become alcoholic and suicidal following the disappearance in 1989 of his wife in a nightmarish government roundup of presumed insurgents...

...The central truism in her work was that you could not find a suspect until you found the victim...

...Helping her, besides Sarath, are Ananda, an artist who reconstructs heads...

...They agree, for instance, that details of political ideology are meaningless in the face of the slaughter...

...The mystery at the heart of the novel, for one thing, is hardpressed to sustain the story and eventually fizzles out...

...Anil discovers that a skeleton found in the restricted archaeological site of the Bandarawela caves is not prehistoric...

...Like a fuse.'" In Anil's Ghost, Ondaatje has created an elaborate image but has never quite managed to locate the fuse...

...Each is gifted enough to contribute to the enterprise in a uniquely interesting way...

...Indeed, these familiar Ondaatje ingredients combine into a very tempting dish...

...Sarath recalls the important archaeological discoveries he made "during the worst political times, alongside a thousand dirty little acts of race and politics, gang madness and financial gain...

...At the end of the novel, Ondaatje offers a meticulous account of how Ananda the artist performs the fascinating ritual of Netra Mangala—painting the eyes onto a statue of the Buddha...

...Some people let their ghosts die, some don't," she says to Sarath...

...Using her skills as a "forensic pathologist," Anil seeks to determine the name, history and cause of death of the person who was now a skeleton, in order to pin down concrete proof of human rights violations...

...and, in his way, Gamini, the archeologist's brother, a doctor who tends the injured and identifies the murdered...

...And there is the background of human folly, political breakdown, grotesque cruelty, relentless danger, erotic possibility, and ever-threatening death...

...Meanwhile, the brothers, Sarath and Gamini, are caught up in a sibling rivalry that culminates in their intersecting erief over the suicide of Sarath's wife, whom both men loved...

...Who was he...