Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

Anil's Ghost finds Anil Tissera, the female protagonist of Michael Ondaatje's first novel since The English Patient, coming back to her homeland of Sri Lanka in the late '90s for the first time in fifteen years. A forensic anthropologist, she has been sent by an international human rights organization to investigate war crimes in the country, which is torn by fighting between the government, Tamil separatists in the north and insurgents in the south of the island. She is joined by Sarath Diyasena, a local archeologist, and later Ananda Udugama, an artist-turned-miner, in the attempt to discover the identity of a skeleton-and perhaps victim of political violence-they call "Sailor."

Ondaatje arranges the novel in what might be called concentric circles-clusters of characters and atmospheres that reinforce its narrative structure. The first circle has Sarath and Ananda at its center, with Sarath's wife (who might or might not be dead), his brother (a doctor who deals with the killing in Sri Lanka) and his teacher (who has retreated to a deserted forest monastery) revolving around them. There is another circle focused solely on Ananda that deals with his work in the mine, his inability to deal with the horror of the killing and his work as a painter of Buddhas' eyes. Ultimately, every character and incident is related back to Anil.

But that does not mean that Anil's Ghost is just about one character. No longer able to speak Sinhala and unwilling to open up emotionally, Anil lives in a bubble of her own making. Ondaatje leaves no doubt that such a pose-which stands as a metaphor for the way human beings deal with horror and disaster-must crumble in the face of the events in his and her homeland. He takes no sides in the political struggle, only shines a blinding light on the misery it causes the population at large. Anil's Ghost is an insightful study in the psychology of its eponymous heroine, but more importantly-and most powerfully-it is an indictment of humanity as a whole for the crimes it commits against itself and allows to go unpunished.

-By Norbert Schürer