ANIL'S HAUNTING

Disclaimer: I didn’t read THE ENGLISH PATIENT, or see the movie. I heard they both were very good, maybe too good to be true, so I read ANIL’S GHOST. Thus this is my virginal take on one book of one man’s work.


“A writer. They have time to get into trouble…. ” Michael Ondaatje writes toward the end of ANIL’S GHOST. Really anyone has time to get into trouble, but it’s the writer who thinks of it. Ondaatje thinks of it more that most in my opinion of this book.

In school, they have you read these stories with the smallest possible details, which are only mentioned once and are irrelevant to the story as a whole, and then you’re tested on them to see if you were paying attention. It’s a little ah-ha, gotcha! that teachers use to snap your brain awake. Then you grow up thinking wow that’s clever, and clever is good, clever is power. You learn to write clever, not realizing that clever is not interesting. No one likes a clever prick.

Michael Ondaatje, MO we shall call him because I’m not sure how to say his last name, so MO does not write clever. He is interesting. Through fact and tone and philosophy he draws the reader in, makes you want to learn more. MO’s an educator without being a prick about it. He spends his time to set the scene, bring it about in the context of history, religion, politics, medicine, and art, which gives his writing a heavy tonal value. The characters seem to move through the work like notes in a chord. It’s a beautiful piece to listen to, to lie back in, and enjoy….

Aside from tone, red herring is the most prominent literary device of ANIL’S GHOST. In that way, it does come off like a schoolbook, with parts you will be tested on later, but which do not relate to the characters or plot. We learn at the beginning that Anil is a swimmer, or she was when she was young. We invest some depth into knowing this. I keep waiting for her to escape peril via swimming the swiftness set up in her youth, but MO never cashes in on the investment. Indeed the setting, Sri Lanka, the island, surrounded by water on all sides, yet there is no escape from it, not through Anil or the mystery skeleton who is her duty to investigate. She nicknames him “Sailor,” an epitaph of aquatic escape, yet it turns out that was not his occupation at all. He is tied to the ground, deep in the ground. All the characters are tied to the ground, through mining, or archaeology, or death. This is the central conflict of civil unrest for the country, because all citizens are tied to the ground, their allegiance to earth, their sense of place. While swimming is Anil’s history and brings her to her homeland, it is not where she is going. Okay, a fine introduction, but…and? Behind the back cover, it seems like an unrealistic detail because it is useless. It is like describing a table as indescribable. If the table is indescribable, then why mention it?

Despite Anil’s travel and work in other worlds, like the American Southwest, she feels her place is eating bean curd. She leaves a friend in Arizona, a friendship that seems to be the closest relationship of her life, yet she leaves this friend behind. The friend prematurely gets Alzheimer’s and is forgotten. Without closure, that string of narrative is abandoned. Why?

Perhaps it is a cultural difference. I am an American. I expect the female lead to sleep with the male lead, or at least sleep with another character they are both close to create a sexual element that plays into the external conflicts and experiences and endurances. I am granted atmosphere and isolation, spirituality and beauty, but never carnal knowledge, except between Anil and her brother. Her brother! The phrase comes in passing that she has to grant him a sexual favor. What? I had to read that again and out loud to make sure I read it correctly. It’s mentioned at the end of a paragraph without details and nothing more is said about it. Clearly this is a cultural difference, I thought, that an author can pass off sex between siblings as casual nature.

So we have this lovely tone, but how do I get from the spa of words into meaning that I can slap down on the streets in the face of my opponents? No, that is an unfair question. It is cheap and external. Anyone could ask it of any story and sound superior to the story. This is treating the story as specimen, not as a person.

Stories are people, in a metaphoric sense, of course, but otherwise we wouldn’t care about them so much. They live, they breathe, they work or are lazy, and they die. Methods of literary analysis, or story construction or deconstruction, are mechanical devices by which to measure the pulse, the respiration, and the blood-sugar levels of a story. What we have with MO’s story seems to be a hospital patient in a happy coma. The ending is organic in that the story remains a vegetable! We have life and health and pulse, but the brain capacity to make ends meet with the investment of clues is flat line.

I am not a proponent of happy endings. I am a proponent of natural endings. The end of this book seems to come as an unnatural demise to its details. This is partly the scandal that reintroduces Anil to her homeland, but what now? I have no sense of how she will carry on, or why or what, or if she will carry on at all.

ANIL’S GHOST is not the last MO book I will ever read. I am supporting the idea that because of its strong tonality, ANIL’S GHOST has symbols and allusions and illusions that haven’t caught up with me yet. I’m not willing to diagnose it brain dead until I can declare myself with full mental capacities functioning. I suspect ANIL’S GHOST needs time to sink in, needs time to haunt me. The tone resides easily in my head. It is so subtle that it easily entered and now will be difficult to dismiss. It is like cologne on a person you nearly almost just met, but you still think you can know him better.