Admirers of his cracking debut, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010), have been wondering what became of Shehan Karunatilaka. That book, following the rise and mysterious vanishing of an improbably talented Sri Lankan bowler, was first self-published, but has since come to be firmly established as a classic of modern South Asian fiction.
Readers unmoved by the charms of cricket should not be fazed by the praise it received from Wisden (it was runner-up in its list of greatest cricket books ever written). The book was as much a study of Sri Lanka’s recent political history as of its cricket team, perennial underdogs whose influence on the modern game is easily as profound as that of the legendary West Indies led by Clive Lloyd.
This second book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, seems to have faced a similar struggle before seeing publication, and several publishers were doubtless left blushing at their misjudgment after learning of its inclusion on the Booker Prize longlist, let alone when it won the overall prize.
Few serious Sri Lankan novelists have been able to avoid making that war both their setting and their subject. Last year’s Booker shortlist included one such book, Anuk Arudpragasam’s admirable A Passage North. That book was an extended meditation (there is no unpretentious word for it) on the legacy of the Sri Lankan civil war. It had no quoted dialogue and, conspicuously, no jokes. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida has virtually nothing but jokes.
There are some especially good ones at the expense of both the Sinhalese nationalists and the Tamil Tigers, who have both chosen animals as emblems for their causes neither of which is native to Sri Lanka. “When did we have bloody lions here? Or tigers?” The Tamil cause is treated with respect, but the Tigers are rightly shown up for their obsession with rooting out Tamil moderates.
Where Arudpragasam’s prose was stately and patient, Karunatilaka’s is compulsively bawdy. The pages are full of untranslated Sinhalese curses and half-explained references to Sri Lankan political history. It contains a good deal of what might be called philosophy, but very much of the public-house variety.
As with other political satirists, setting the book in the 1980s is probably a deniable way of commenting on Sri Lanka in the 2020s. The civil war has since ended – though at what yet unreckoned cost? And what profit, when the economy is on (or by now past) the verge of collapse?
The sheer excess on every page makes it hard to take in the moments of quiet truthfulness. But the supernatural conceit, often a distraction, produces moments of real poignancy. We learn at one point of five Tiger child soldiers, “brought to Colombo for rehabilitation and interrogation. They found a black datura plant in the prison grounds and made tea for five. They love the afterlife (‘no one shouting orders at us’), and they jump off the ledge with the glee of toddlers.”
The Maali Almeida of the title is dead. Once a cynical, well-connected photojournalist with a voracious, illicit sex life and a well-concealed streak of idealism, he is now a ghost caught in the “In Between”. He can’t remember how it happened, but having spent his life chronicling the misdeeds of his country’s ruling class and hanging about in some very low places, there is no shortage of rogues with both motive and opportunity to do him in.
The afterlife turns out to be a sort of chronically understaffed dole queue, full of strict rules chaotically enforced. He has seven “moons” (nights) to haunt the world before he must proceed to something called “the Light”. Thrown back into the world to solve the mystery of his own murder, he is carried from place to place, character to character, by the laws that govern the movements of ghosts.
The Sri Lanka of the 1980s, when observed from within the middle-class bubble of its commercial capital, Colombo, is a beautiful place, full of expats who “gaze out from the balcony at coconut trees silhouetted against ocean and wax poetic on the beauty of Lanka”. Yet, Maali notes, “a horrible war was being fought a bus ride from here”.
( curtesy yahoo news)