Anil’s Ghost

Anil’s Ghost is about war and the consequences of war. This isn’t the first novel Michael Ondaatje has written on the subject – World War II was the setting for another of his books, The English Patient – but this time the setting is Sri Lanka, the country of his birth.”

The war in Sri Lanka was perhaps the most devastating kind – civil war, where neighbour kills neighbour, destroying trust and leaving terror as well as grief in its wake. People disappeared. Bodies were found burned beyond recognition. Who were they? Who killed them? For what reason? How can you find the killer and bring him to justice when you don’t even know who the victim is?

From news papers and on TV and radio we heard about that war, but what we heard was mostly numbers. Numbers killed, numbers missing. Statistics. But Michael Ondaatje is a novelist, and it is the novelist’s job to make those numbers real, to make them mean something to us through the characters he creates. He tells us not about a dead child but about ‘a dead three-year-old with the clothes her parents had dressed her in.’ He shows us the person and in that way, he makes us care.

Anil is a young woman, a forensic anthropologist, born in Sri Lanka but educated in the west, who is sent back to Sri Lanka by the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva to study some of the unearthed bodies. Her job is to try first, to identify them and then to work out how and where they died, in the hope of bringing their killers to justice. She is searching for the truth, and the search for truth is at the heart of the story.

The truth can come at a terrible cost though, making you wonder how those searching for it keep themselves from despair. But such is Ondaatje’s skill as a storyteller that the answer to that question can also be found within the pages of this magnificent novel: the searchers – and the reader – are saved from despair by the courage and humanity of those they meet along the way.

— Mary Lawson

Mary Lawson was born and brought up in a small farming community in Ontario. After graduating from McGill University in 1968 she went to England for a holiday and stayed. She married an Englishman, has two grown-up sons and lives in Kingston-upon-Thames in the UK.

Her first novel, Crow Lake, was published in 2002. It was a New York Times Bestseller; a Globe and Mail Number 1 Bestseller, staying on the Canadian bestseller list for 75 weeks; a New York Times, Washington Post and Globe and Mail Book of the Year; serialized for the BBC Book at Bedtime; won the Amazon Canada Prize; and the Society of Author’s McKitterick Prize. It has been published in 25 countries.

Road Ends, her most recent novel, has just been published to critical acclaim and has also made the Globe and Mail bestseller list.

Michael Ondaatje’s work includes fiction, poetry, non-fiction, autobiography and film. Two of his 13 books of poetry have won the Governor General’s Award, as have three of his novels, including Anil’s Ghost. The English Patient, published in 1992, also won the Booker Prize and the Canada Australia Prize. It was adapted as a film and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Three of his works, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Divisadero, have been adapted for the stage and he has also produced three films. Michael has long been the poetry editor of Coach House Books in Toronto and he co-edits the literary journal Brick.

Ondaatje is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje now lives in Toronto with his wife, novelist Linda Spalding.