Shehan Karunatilaka returns with another thrilling satire

Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe unhappy country produces illustrious writers but disordered politics. Many Sri Lankan authors flourish abroad, yet Shehan Karunatilaka has stayed to watch the serial calamities unfold. In 2010 his prize-winning debut, “Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew”, used the search for a vanished cricketing icon as a vehicle for its scorchingly satirical journey. “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”, his second novel, returns to late 1989.

A bloody four-way struggle—between brutal government forces, Tamil separatists, Marxist-chauvinist guerrillas and Indian “peacekeepers”—has proved that “the chances of violence ending violence are one in nothing.” Peace of a sort arrived in 2009, although the country’s current meltdown suggests that this novel’s tropical dystopia has not dated. “Follow any turd upstream and it leads to a member of parliament,” snarls the photographer from his disembodied position of authority.

The quest that ensues is comic, macabre, angry and thumpingly alive. Maali’s sardonic, scurrilous monologue fills in his back story as a gambling-addicted lensman who loves the son of a Tamil politician; he hopes that his photo exposés will “do for Lanka’s civil war what naked napalm girl did for Vietnam”. It takes in the country’s manipulated ethnic strife and even the social geography of Maali’s quasi-Buddhist limbo.

Maali’s posthumous pilgrimage shows him “how ugly this beautiful land is”. Still, the furious comedy in Mr Karunatilaka’s novel never courts despair. Acts of love and loyalty can count beyond the grave. The dead militants who pursue revenge, not karma, because “the world will not correct itself” don’t get the final word. That goes, more or less, to the sage spirit of a leopard who asks “why humans destroy when they can create”. Neither ghosts nor writers have the answer to that yet.

Reminds of of Pratchett, ' War is short periods of boredom followed by really long periods of being dead'

lol Minneapolis vibes

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