A ghoulish afterlife: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka, reviewed

Ten years ago Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, was published and I raved about it, as did many others. Set in the 1980s, it intertwined the stories of a vanished, forgotten cricketer who was able to bowl unplayable deliveries and the particularly brutal war that was ravaging Sri Lanka. My review ended with the words: ‘Karunatilaka is, I gather, writing another novel, but how it can be as good as this I can hardly imagine.’ We now have that novel, and I was right: it isn’t as good. Which is not to say it’s bad. In fact, there are parts of its design and telling that are very good indeed. But I had problems with it, as you will see.

We are in 1990, and Sri Lanka is as dangerous a place is it was in Chinaman, and in reality. Maali Almeida is a photographer, gay, a gambler, who likes a drink or two; but his Nikon has a cracked lens and is filled with mud because his body was thrown into a lake after he’d been murdered. This is his afterlife.

At first I wondered if the novel was going to be a replay of Chinaman. Would there be any cricket in it, perhaps? No: Karunatilaka swerves right away from that on the first page: ‘You left school with a hatred of teams and games and morons who valued them.’ (The book is told throughout in the second person.) The first words of the novel are: ‘You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse.’

That’s the afterlife for you: a crowded, bureaucratic nightmare, where ghosts jostle each other, exhibiting the wounds that killed them; and there are plenty of wounds and plenty of ghosts because of the violence tearing the country apart.