You may have seen reports of, or even observed first hand, the Twitter argument between M.I.A and CNN broadcaster Anderson Cooper last month. M.I.A urged Cooper to watch the documentary Sri Lanka's Killing Fields: 'War Crimes Unpunished' after he (mistakenly) called her a 'Lady Tamil Tiger' in 2009. Although the two apparently made up, the incident did highlight the tensions and raw emotions which understandably surround the situation in Sri Lanka.
Like all the most affecting stories, Anil's Ghost is about everything. Listing the themes doesn't do it justice and it would be the same list of themes as for any great novel you'd care to name. Ondaatje looks at love, loss, death and healing through the lens of the Sri Lankan conflict. His consideration of how we construct truth is amplified in this context; the context of thousands of people searching for some kind of justification for what they've gone through.
The beginning of the book is very subtle in the way that it draws you in with an almost dispassionate front - a news bulletin look, if you like - from an outsider's perspective. He positions us as one of the incarnations of Anil's ghost. She's been away from the country of her birth for years and we follow her back there, sharing her memories and not entirely understanding the situation. Slowly the picture gains resolution, zooming in to 'street view' and the emotional (and gory, physical) details of the individual human level.
What emerges are stories of suffering and resilience, of acceptance of and withdrawal from reality. Although the characterisation is sharp and cleverly done, none of the characters seem whole somehow. You get the feeling that this is exactly Ondaatje's point. Each of them, Anil included, can be understood only through their loss; they are defined by what is missing and have to learn to live with the paradoxical presence of their loss.
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