A few weeks ago I bemoaned a sudden inability to read beyond the first ten pages of a book.

Regardless of genre my attention withered and faded to an insouciance that rendered even the most fantastical of characters crashing bores.

I did not care if they had lost their magic staff, that a new wizard was in danger of usurping the old, nor for the dramas availing Charles Arrowby.

Quite why Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, proved to be a literary savior remains a mystery, though the beauty of the novel became evident from the outset.

Set in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s, the tale follows the endeavours of Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to investigate a scourge of murder campaigns, to reveal the truth behind the suspicious death of an unknown man.

As the island broils in civil war questions of trust, identity and family allay Anil and those around her.

So far, so thriller-esque.

But Anil’s Ghost is much more than a thriller: Ondaatje captures the beauty of Sri Lanka in a manner perfected only by those writing about their homeland and with a barely concealed critique of the tragedy unleashed when political factions come to military blows:

‘The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was ‘eighty-eight and ‘eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing. You had, and still have, three camps of enemies – one in the north, two in the south – using weapons, propaganda, fear, sophisticated posters, censorship. Importing state-of-the-art weapons from the West, or manufacturing homemade weapons. A couple of years ago people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burnt beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing the blame. And no one can tell who the victims are.’ [p. 17]

An effective device within the book is the author’s ability to spring the atrocity of war upon the reader: momentarily one will be in a luscious green valley observing the daily routine of an anonymous young school worker, the next the area becomes devoid of children’s voices and a gruesome testament to the unfathomable violence that humankind wreaks in times of conflict.

While the terror unleashed on the Sri Lankan population can be attributed to the tussle between the militants and government, it is the inability of external powers to acknowledge the conflict and assume action to resolve it that irks irks deeper:

‘American movies, English books – remember how they all end?’ Gamini asked that night. ‘The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’ [p. 286]

The saddest part is that ten years on the story has changed very little.

Within the last 24 hours the country has hit the headlines once more as the separatist Tamil Tigers urge Britain and France to support a cease-fire with the government.

According to Human Rights Watch, since January almost 2,000 Sri Lankan civilians have been killed in the fighting, 5, 000 wounded, and almost 154,000 have been displaced.

Anil’s Ghost is that rare concoction: it is by no means a historical account, and yet it imparts an insight into the conflict, customs, and yes, history of the island and its inhabitants.

When Anil leaves the novel spins into three separate stories – all linked to the novel – with shockingly tragic, gruesome, and aspirational culminations.

What the novel lacks in complexity, it rewards in stark and sudden representations and turns – it is fast, yet lingering.

A book of contradictions, then.

But a beautiful and elucidating book, nonetheless.

Anil’s Ghost is published by Picador, 307 pages, 2000.  ISBN: 0-330-48077-4