Another Ondaatje book

I’m becoming a Michael Ondaatje fan. Anil’s Ghost is not as heartwrenching as The English Patient, but the prose is lyrical. It’s about a Sri Lankan forensic anthropologist who returns to her homeland after years in America in order to help identify victims of a civil war. She is assigned to work with an archaeologist, Sarath, who is distant and evasive, even as she grows more curious about him. The two of them are excavating an ancient burial site and discover a more recent skeleton among the old ones and begin to unravel the mystery of who this dead man might have been. In the process they become involved with Sarath’s brother, a doctor who works on sewing back together victims of the violence, and Ananda, a drunk who once was an artificer, the ritual painter of eyes on statues of Buddha, but now is broken by his wife’s disappearance. They recruit him to help reconstruct the face of the skeleton.


The characters are bound loosely together, each suffering some personal loss or alienation. But they begin to take interest in each other as they delve more deeply into the case of the skeleton, although he is one among thousands.  Unfamiliar with the politics of Sri Lanka, I puzzled over why they risked their own lives researching this death. But perhaps in hunting for his identity and cause of death, they hope to right in some way the losses they’ve suffered. They never do breach each other’s inner thoughts, each remains reserved, although Anil seems to fall slightly in love with all three men, or at least to care for them. Maybe their isolation is insurmountable because the political conflicts are still going on around them, or perhaps they still are nursing wounds that have incapacitated their ability to love. The resolution suggests the characters have made some connections despite their reservedness.


Although the search for the identity of the skeleton very slowly drives the plot, it is the gradual fleshing out of the characters, the revealing of scars left by war and by their relationships, that keeps the reader fascinated. Especially interesting were the juxtapositions: of the two brothers; of the exotic beauty of Sri Lanka with the brutality of the warfare – mass executions, beheadings, torture; of Anil’s experiences in America with those in Sri Lanka; of what is buried in the ancient historical sites and with what is buried in the contemporary hearts of these characters.


Some excerpts:

“And she realizes there is an emotional seriousness in this distant man. She needs to step backwards out of the maze they have innocently entered. He is content to be near her, the beauty of this ear and earring, then a comparison with the other side of her head, the way the moon is over them and also in water, the way the water holds the night lilies and their reflection. The false and true alternatives surround them.”

***

“Patterns of death always surrounded him [Sarath]. In his work he felt he was somehow the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea. So the removal of a wise sixth-century head, the dropping off of arms and hands of rock as a result of the fatigue of centuries, existed alongside human fate. He would hold statues two thousand years old in his arms. Or place his hand against old, warm rock that had been cut into a human shape. He found comfort in seeing his dark flesh against it. This was his pleasure. Not conversation or the education of others or power, but simply to place his hadn against a gal vihara, a living stone whose temperature was dependent on the hour, whose look of porousness would change depending on rain or a quick twilight.”

***

“But this was a pieta between brothers. And all Gamini knew in his slowed, scrambled state was that this would be the end or it could be the beginning of a permanent conversation with Sarath. If he did not talk to him in this moment, admit himself, his brother would disappear from his life, So he was too, at this moment, within the contract of a pieta.”

***

I wanted to copy out the beautiful last paragraph, but I suppose that might cheat someone of the pleasure of discovering it.

Ambiguity about Ondaatje

Sigh. I just finished Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Spent Saturday recovering from the flu while reading in bed. Didn’t want the dream to end. Beautiful, beautiful, but sad, sad. There’s a part of me that thinks I shouldn’t like this book after the movie, also beautiful, but bitter, left a bad taste in my mouth. In the movie, WWII nurse Hana runs off with Indian bomb defuser Kip on a motorcycle after shooting the burn victim, the apparently English patient, a man whom she loved, full of morphine, so that he’ll die. The book ends differently – should I tell? – after the dropping of the atomic bomb destroys Kip’s belief in what he is doing and breaks up the coterie in the abandoned villa.

Aside from the act of euthanasia at the end of the movie, I wouldn’t recommend the movie because it’s nearly soft-core porn. Yet here I am unable to take my nose out of this book with naked people kissing on the cover because it is so beautifully written. I felt like I had to hide it from my preteens. Can I excuse my love of this book by citing the difference between reading something and seeing it? A visual image imprints itself differently on the brain - it stays with you longer than one you read and affects your emotions more strongly. Based on this, I let my kids read The Lord of the Rings before letting them see it. Similarly, I felt more moved after seeing the devastation here after Katrina – or in Haiti- than after reading about it. So I read about the intimacies described in this book without feeling as voyeuristic as when watching the movie, but the circumspect, poetic way Ondaatje writes also differentiates the book from the openness of the camera.


Is there something redemptive in the meeting of the four damaged persons at the Villa San Girolamo that comes across in the book but not in the film? I like to think the redemption has to do with Mr. Cairns comments in the comments section below about recovering the body. But it seems what these victims of the war are suffering is the opposite of Gnosticism. They have to recover a sense of the body’s connection to the soul, not because the soul is more perfect, but because they’ve lost their souls. Whether they are seeking the identity of the patient, their own identities after being dismembered, or an ability to reconnect with human beings after turning themselves into statues to survive the devastation of the war, it appears they need to connect physically, not just with their minds, but with their hands and bodies, in order to heal: “Here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defense but to look for the truth in others.”

Could you say that, even though the story weaves around tales of love and death, adultery and betrayal, the characters treat each other with a certain chastity – Caravaggio never fully reaches out to Hana, Hana barely touches the patient, Kip never really gives himself to Hana, but preserves a distance, never really looking into her eyes? I can’t make up my mind whether the book has a resolution or not. And the beauty of the place stands in such stark contrast to the horrors of the war and the doomed love affairs.

Yesterday we went to New Orleans and visited the World War II museum, and again came face to face with the horrors of war. How did the men who survived Normandy, or the War in the Pacific, come home and rebuild their lives after such devastation? It was a hard museum to visit, especially when you knew that downstairs was an old man, a volunteer helping fill out membership applications, who had lived these stories and now watched people meandering through the exhibits, looking at photos without knowing that dead soldier in the picture.