The End
The fact that the book may be well written doesn't, in my view, justify it being crap, and not really providing much to work with for Crime Fiction. Anyway, the ending is, as someone said, representing disaster and renewal, but it also contributes to the ambivalence of the text. I mean, the fact that the Budda was destroyed represents the continuing crimes in Sri Lanka, but Ananda himself finally feels "the sweet touch of the world" (That's the last line) at the end, so he has come to some sort of personal understanding - like the other characters - even amongst all this violence. The whole book is ambivalent, here's what I wrote in the trials:
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Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost is essentially an exploration of the effect of the Sri Lankan civil war on the people of that country, but it explores this through the forensic investigations of its protagonist, Anil Tirissa. Primarily, the investigation concerns the search for an identity of the body dubbed “Sailor” by Anil and her government partner Sarath, but it also chronicles each of the protagonist’s searches for their own identities. Sarath has “evolved into a privacy he had perhaps never emerged from”, he always “tried to lose touch with the world around him” and the fact that Anil is continually unsure of his allegiances reflects his own confusion; he has conflicting loyalties – Anil asserts toward the end of the novel “you like to remain cloudy, don’t you Sarath, even to yourself”. Anil herself had a “lost childhood” and her name is a subplot in the novel: “Anil’s name – the one she’d bought from her brother at the age of thirteen – had another stage to go through before it settled…she was taut and furious within the family…the problem resided in her name.” Gamini, Sarath’s brother, is scared of intimacy; he experiences only “the intimacy of walking across a road with a cup of tea for someone”, he was referred to by his family as “the mouse”. This loss of identity is compared with Leaf’s loss of memory with Alzheimer’s, which in turn becomes synonymous with life: “[Leaf] was starting to lose her memory, fighting for her life.” But by the end of the novel, the characters have come to conclusions about themselves, so it can be said that here, good triumphs. Ananda, lost in his grief for his missing wife for most of novel, finally feels “the sweet touch of the world” to close out the story. Sarath asserts himself dramatically, sacrificing his life so that Anil can escape with her research. In some of the final moments of Anil’s presence in Sri Lanka, she gives a speech which concludes: “‘I think you murdered hundreds of us.’ Hundreds of us. Sarath thought to himself. Fifteen years away and she is finally us.” It is only at Sarath’s death that Gamini realises that he has kept himself apart; he finally recognises who he is. So the search for identity in the novel is successful, so in a way good does triumph over evil.
To Ondaatje, the primary source of evil in Sri Lanka is the government, and what it is able to hide is the truth. This means that the novel concerns itself too with the search for absolute truth, for what truth really is. Palipana says to Anil early in the novel: “there was nothing to believe in with certainty. [Prehistoric kings] didn’t know what truth was. We have never had truth.” She responds simply, ““The truth shall set you free.” I believe that.” This becomes an essential tenet of the novel. “Sarath believed in truth as a principle”, he couldn’t see how it existed in reality in Sri Lanka, so “he would have given his life for the truth if truth were of any use” in the situation he was in. In the end, he does give his life for the truth to get out, for Anil to be able to reveal the true identity of the body ‘Sailor’. In escaping Sri Lanka with his body, with the evidence that “some government forces have possibly murdered innocent people”, Anil escapes with the truth. And after all, “one village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims”, so a broader victory for truth is represented in this. But this is a much less clear-cut victory for the forces of good – President Katagula and Sarath have both been murdered in the name of truth, and the novel has foreshadowed what might happen after Anil leaves: “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.” The real crime in the story is that the number of people go on, and this is left unresolved also, so Anil’s Ghost is much more ambivalent than either The Big Sleep or Chinatown [SUPPLEMENTARY TEXT] about the triumph of good over evil, even if there are reassuring aspects to its conclusion.
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