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I will only add to the informative reviews of others that to me, sometimes to its advantage and sometimes to its detriment, this novel walks a razor's edge between fiction and sociology.

One strength of the novel, in addition to its many moments of beautiful writing, is the way it weaves archeology, forensic anthropology, and cultural anthropology into a narrative of complementary epistemologies while at the same time unfurling a mystery through the trajectories of its diverse cast of characters. Each form of knowledge is embodied by a well-developed character and each character in the novel also personifies limitations and biases of their discipline while at the same time all are necessary to complete the picture for the reader. These forms of knowledge also serve as a filter, a heuristic, and a coping mechanism for the characters and the reader through which to explain the inexplicable: the atrocities of the Sri Lankan civil war. As a contribution to the form of the novel, this is brilliantly done and puts the novel in the tradition of Wilkie Collins' Moonstone, a Victorian novel that first used multiple narrators to build a detective story. Despite the mystery of Soldier's identity that drives the story (and that mirrors Anil's own and not-always-conscious quest for self-identity), Anil's Ghost is never quite a detective story or a multi-narrator novel, however, as the center of narrative gravity never completely leaves Anil's perspective.

The novel's greatest weakness to me as fiction was also something I found valuable as a travel guide and for it's appeal to my intellectual curiosity: many extensive discursions (yes, that's a word!) that seek to explain details about the culture or disciplines, for example about forensics. Ondaatje clearly had a field day (no archeology pun intended ;) ) with all the textbooks and sources he cites in a meaty appendix of source texts and materials.

I had just returned from Sri Lanka when I finished this and found reading the second half after my journey much more engaging the first half prior to traveling. There is a classicism to the prose and dialogue that may provide another coping filter to the underlying atrocity but I found the lack of a single contraction in anyone's dialogue, for example, off-putting, drawing my attention to the writer's distance and intellectual craftsmanship when I sought greater absorption in the narrative, characters, and exquisite descriptions of setting. Having met so many wonderful Sri Lankans on my trip, only one person I met spoke in extended discursive paragraphs as many of the characters do here (and that person's paragraphs were not nearly as composed and writerly as these).

Improbable recollections of exhaustively catalogued details from the protagonist's forensic textbooks and lapses into exposition for exposition's sake (i.e., to inform the reader) and many moments of unrealistic writerly dialogue only barely mar an otherwise engrossing narrative. While I found them intrusive, the many discursions provide good fodder for travelers and others seeking to know more about Sri Lankan history and the play of disciplines contributes to this novel's intricate and formally apt approach to truth-telling through novel form. (4, maybe 3.5)