Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Random House Audio
Rating: WARTY!
This is read by actor Alan Cumming, who does a really decent job, but despite his best efforts, even he could not turn a pig's ear into a silk purse.
The story concerns Anil, a Sri Lankan woman who, having been living in England for most of her life, returns to her homeland to help unearth and identify bodies from the quite recent civil war there. Anil isn't her birth name. She bought the name from her brother with some cigarettes, and a bunch of other stuff including an unspecified sexual favor! Now she returns as an adult with academic qualifications, to dig up bodies, and we have to wonder what metaphorical bodies might be dug up too, as the sounds, smells, and sights of her surroundings begin to compete with her childhood memories for the reality trophy. Anil was interesting, but despite this novel's title, the story seems to be about anyone and everyone but her.
Poking around, perhaps where they would be better advised not to, Anil and her associate uncover bones, one set of which looks like its owner was murdered and mutilated (or perhaps tortured) and then dug up from their original grave and reburied in a government-supervised area. This is not so much a smoking gun as a smoking skeleton and Anil realizes how important it is. But who can she trust with what she learns?
I started out liking this, but during disk two it became bogged down in so much irrelevant descriptive prose that I started to gag. Ondaatje gives even Maestro Stephen King a run for his money for his astounding ability to run off at the mouth with endless, pointless, fruitless, clueless ancestral histories of minor characters. I went on to give disk three a shot (this is a very small disk set!) and decided that in order to give it the fair shot it richly deserved, I'd really need a large bore shotgun.
We all know for a fact that book blurbs lie deliberately and outrageously to defraud us into buying the palpable pulp and pablum they're so proficiently purveying, but despite that, I still hold out the hope that buried within those professionally generated stretchers might be a nugget of truth somewhere, and that the story might have something of that truth held deeply within it, but I failed to find so much as a glint of it here. Instead of pursuing the story of "Sailor", the skeleton they found, and which the blurb assures us would be pursued, the story degenerated into a series of rambling digressions which was in danger of putting me to sleep - not a state one wants to be in when one is driving. I was hoping this would do well, given the interesting and exotic beginning, and the fascinating character Anil was becoming.
I finally realized that it's called Anil's ghost because there isn't the ghost of a chance that we'll see anything substantial of her. It was a likable story and I'd have been immensely happier if it had gone where it lied it would go, or failing that, at least go somewhere interesting, so I could burnish it with the sheen (or is it the Estevez?) of my famed Appellation Contrôlée de Digne award.
Instead, it gets a major WARTY.
