If one has read the "English Patient" one will probably remember a man lying on his bed. He was dying, and one could feel him dying while one was reading. He was reliving the past, dealing with the ghosts of his past, remembering her, the woman he loved and had to leave behind. This man was the English Patient but he could have been anybody. They did not know who he was, who he really was, and he could not tell them because he did not know himself. A haunted novel about desertions and deserting. A story about love and passion set at the end of the Second World War. Now more than eight years later there is a new novel by Michael Ondaatje, "Anil's Ghost". A novel many people have waited a long time for. In the "English Patient" the main character was deeply burnt. In "Anil's Ghost" the wounds run deeper, all the way down to the bone.

Sri Lanka. Ondaatje was born here and he wrote a wonderful collection of short stories or should one say memories about his family on this island. Now he returns to the island to tell a story set in the middle of a civil war, a story about the insanity of that war and the people who live through it. Anil has been away from the island for 15 years. The story begins when she lands at Katunayake Airport. Stepping out of the plane and being welcomed by the blazing heat, she has come home to a country where she was born but which she cannot call home anymore. She has forgotten the subtleties of the Sinhalese language and she hardly has relatives left alive. Anil is on a mission as a forensic anthropologist.

Complaints of international organisations about alleged organised campaigns of murder and massacre on the island leads the government of Sri Lanka to decide to allow an investigation. Anil Tissera is chosen as the forensic specialist and she has to team up with an archaeologist, Sarath Diyasena, in Colombo. "It was to be a seven-week project. Nobody at the Centre of Human Rights was very hopeful about it." And Ondaatje does not give you much hope either. The country is torn apart by different movements, the insurgents, the government and the separatists who all fight a very ugly war. Anil and Sarath go to the Bandarawela region, where in the caves of a government-protected archaeological site they find three pre-historic skeletons. They carry on digging to find another skeleton but this man died only a few years ago. Soon they discover that this man had been murdered but not there, not where they have found the skeleton. It is Anil's mission to find out who this man was, who killed him and why the body had been moved.

Michael Ondaatje is a poet. "The Dainty Monsters" was published in 1967 and since then he has produced ten other works of poetry. It is only natural that his novels almost read like poems. His novels demand to be read slowly and carefully. Still it is hard to keep one's mind with this new novel. Anil is not a character one will fall in love with. She is not like Hana, the one who takes care of the English Patient. Anil seems cold and detached. For a long time this novel will give one the feeling that one is in an air-conditioned laboratory, surrounded by dead bodies, horrible wounds - the smell of scrub lotion, of decay. Still the heat is everywhere.

They name the four skeletons Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Sailor. Sailor is the only one still with a skull. Who was this Sailor? And what role does Sarath play? Is he working for the government? These are questions Anil desperately needs answers to. The investigation is only one of the stories in this book but it keeps the novel together. Often the investigation fades into the background. Ondaatje writes about visiting the epigraphist Palipana, Sarath's teacher - a man who was always right about everything, one of the leading men in uncovering and understanding many sacred sites in Sri Lanka.

He now lives in the forest, literally surrounded by the past, doing research on some runes near the old rock fortress of Sigiriya. Anil discovers he is blind. "He spread his fingers over every discovered rune. He traced each letter on the Stone book at Polonnaruwa, a boulder carved into a rectangle four feet high, thirty feet long, the first book of the country, laid in his bare arms and the side of his face against this plinth that collected the heat of the day." These are what make Ondaatje's writing special.

They ask Palipana to examine Sailor's skull and he advises them to go and find Ananda Udugama. Ananda is a painter of the eyes of the Buddha and he might be able to recreate Sailor's face from the skull. On the road back to Colombo they find a truck driver crucified to the ground. They take him with them back to the hospital where Anil meets Sarath's brother Gamini who works in the Emergency Department. Another flashback. Gamini's past. The love he felt for Sarath's wife. His own unsuccessful marriage. His life in the hospital. The bodies. "Anil's Ghost" is full of flashbacks. Anil's past. Her love for a man named Cullis. Her friend Leaf who disappears for a year and then suddenly phones her. A murder in the train. The massacre of more than forty students and their teacher's in a village somewhere.

They take Ananda to a family estate in Ekneligoda where he will work. Halfway through the novel this is where Ondaatje finds his "old" touch again. One has left the cold laboratories, the detached writing - Ondaatje knows how to move on. From that moment the novel starts making sense. It takes one on a journey and one will not be able to put the book down anymore. Pieces start to fall into place and Anil's reasons become clearer. The novel is like entering a dream and a nightmare at the same time. Watching a Koli bird, looking at the flowers of the Moonamal and then the men come and one knows one will die.

While Ananda is finishing the reconstruction of the face, Anil has time to think and she lets her mind wander. Sarath returns from a visit to Colombo and they realise something when they look at the reconstructed face: "It was not a reconstruction of Sailor's face they were looking at." This novel is in a way the reconstruction of the face of war, but with a lot of sidesteps. It is not so much about politics but more about individuals who all have a role in the war. In one of the last chapters Gamini confesses that he could never leave the island. The love for the place. "American movies, English books - remember how they all end? The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him.[…] He's going home. So, the war to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. […]" Anil will disappear from the final pages of this novel. Taking her ghost with her.

Going home. In the end only the painter of the eyes of the Buddha is left. Buddha's eyes will look at one in a certain way, just like the look Ananda painted on Sailor's reconstructed face, these eyes communicate a peacefulness one would want for any victim. Anil's Ghost will keep on haunting her. One could call it unfinished business perhaps. This novel will haunt and move, but it will also disappoint. One will be disappointed about many things; but not Ondaatje; he will not disappoint.