slaughterboard's Full Review: Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost
Entering a world of intrigue and insecurity, a young woman, Anil, returns to her native land after years of renown and research in the United States and England. With a well-wound plot, Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost is a distanced, unemotional looks at government brutality and the people who fight against it.
Sent to Sri Lanka by an international organization to investigate government human rights violations, Anil discovers that no one is completely trustworthy. Not surprising, as Ondaatje forces the characters to float passively through the text via unremarkable descriptions, expectable similies and ho-hum suspense devices.
Frustration and bleakness fill the long passages that describe events in the lives of four people: Anil, the human rights investigator; Sarath, the archeologist she is forced to trust; Ananda, the disturbed man who reconstructs faces from sculls and Gamini, Sarath's younger brother, who was kidnapped to doctor up wounded freedom-fighters. Each character is working to figure out the past of a not-so-old skeleton found in an ancient burial site.
The central plot revolves around sculpting a life for the skeleton, but is interrupted by large blocks of details about the pasts of the four. Such passages are generally presented too late in the text to inspire a reader's interest or emotion-- often just confusing the plot.
With hidden (and perhaps unintentional) irony, the character struggle, argue, commit suicide and abuse drugs to achieve their end: uncovering the secrets of a life that was burnt and buried by the same government that is funding their research.
Not poorly written, vaguely interesting thanks to the archeology and easy to set down without forgetting the gist, Anil's Ghost isn't quite excellent, but it certainly is a book.
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