The remarkable thing about this violence-soaked novel narrated by a dead man is how full of life it is. Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida comes a decade after his rollicking debut Chinaman, which combined the love of cricket with the horror of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Set at the tail end of the 80s, his second novel again plumbs national violence and atrocity, teasing out its roots in colonial history. It’s also an offbeat love story, both romantic and platonic, and a whodunnit written in the urgent, intimate second person.
As the novel opens, Maali Almeida, a charming, dilettantish photographer with a weakness for gambling and beautiful boys, wakes up dead. He finds himself in an afterlife that’s just as threatening and confusing as the living world, a busy and chaotic realm drawing on Sri Lankan myth and folklore as well as Dante’s Inferno.
Death energises the laid-back Maali: his quest over the course of one week or “seven moons” is to find out how he died by haunting those on Earth, but also to guide his boyfriend and best friend Jaki to the photographs he’s surreptitiously taken while working as a fixer for various factions – images revealing the true horror of atrocities committed and the level of foreign and government involvement. He’d hoped – “silly old you” – that his pictures could “do for Lanka’s civil war what naked napalm girl did for Vietnam”.
Karunatilaka wrote his national catastrophe as a ghost story, he has said, because “it seemed that only the dead could offer plausible explanations of the Sri Lankan tragedy, as the living clearly did not have a clue”. This tone of exasperated absurdism, reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, reigns throughout, especially in the “cheatsheet” Maali puts together for a foreign journalist: there are the Tamil Tigers, ready to slaughter Tamil civilians to achieve a separate state; Marxist revolutionaries who murder the working class; the government, abducting and torturing citizens; Indian peacekeepers “willing to burn villages to fulfil their mission”. “Don’t try and look for the good guys ’cause there ain’t none.”
As with Heller, there’s a tremendous comic energy to Karunatilaka’s bitter satire, and an effortless vigour to his characterisation, the riotous cast encompassing demons, ghouls, torturers, politicians and lovers. But though Maali is hard-bitten, he’s never cynical, especially as his new perspective on earthly events reveals his real priorities; you could even say death is the making of him. This is a novel that combines cosmic vision with down-to-earth humour and hard-won heart.
To explore all the titles on the Booker prize 2022 shortlist visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
