By Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, this was originally published in India in 2020 under the title Chats With the Dead. A revised version came out in 2022, and went on to win the Booker Prize that same year.

This is a straight-up FABULOUS book. And it's also a classic example of a story that's even better to listen to than to read. My audio-version was absolutely brilliantly narrated by Shivantha Wijesinha. He gives a totally stunning performance, with a huge array of accents and voices at his command.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a real genre-bender. It's a very suspenseful detective-story-cum-thriller, in which our protagonist (who is dead) tries to figure out why he was killed, and what he can do to thwart the baddies, save his life's work, and protect those he loves -- all in the space of seven moons (that's days-and-nights not months).

Given the nature of the plot, therefore, it's also a ghost story, veering often into the realms of horror-cum-fantasy.

It's also quintessentially political, firing lightning-bolt indictments at the many, many, many different groups who have harrowed Sri Lanka over the years. Sometimes the atrocities it recounts make it hard to listen to. But Karunatilaka knows exactly how to dose his awful reality. He gives us enough to shake us out of our complacent comfort, and make sure we're absolutely aware of the brutality that was being perpetrated by all sides. But in order to stop us turning away in utter horror, he doesn't give us too much -- and he leavens what he gives us with drollery and quirkiness.

Which brings me to the last element in the genre mix: Humour.

Because, extraordinarily, this book -- full of horror though it is -- is also incredibly funny. How is this possible? I have no idea. It just works brilliantly.

Various reviews (eg Bhattacharya and Lezard) note the influence of magical realism (a melding of the naturalistic and the fantastic -- the kind of thing you get with Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Haruki Murakami). Which is interesting, because normally I'm totally allergic to that approach, whereas in this case I just swam right along in the flow. I wonder why... Because it's so brilliantly, seamlessly done? Or because I've lived in Southeast Asia so long that the ghost world doesn't even seem that fantastic, but rather just another aspect of reality...?


Colombo, 2010

I'll note a few more of the details, but I'll try not to give away the ending, as part of the pleasure is definitely the thriller element.

Our central figure is Malinda Albert Kabalana Almeida (1955-90). He's a professional photographer, and also works as a fixer for foreign journalists covering the ongoing conflict in Sri Lanka. He's the son of a Sinhalese father and a Burgher-Tamil mother, with both of whom he has issues. He's an enthusiastic gambler, which has led him into trouble in the past. He's also gay, and although he never goes short of fleeting opportunities to hook up, the whole business is not exactly easy to manage in 1980s Sri Lanka, especially when social prejudice is exacerbated by the looming shadow of Aids. Maali, despite -- or because of -- his flaws, is a genial, likeable narrator. He has no illusions about himself; he makes no excuses.

But he is, as noted, dead... An interesting feature of the book is that the key narrative is written in the second person. It opens, for example, like this: "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." The "you" is Maali himself.

I've read various explanations for this ("immersing and connecting the reader more closely to Maali's experiences"; and emphasizing the constant unseen dialogue between the dead and the living: "As 'you' are spoken to by Maali’s spirit, his thoughts become yours"), but for me, the primary impact of this technique is that it melds detachment with connection. Maali is observing, trying to figure out what is going on. It's not the self-aware confidence of "I", and it's not the separate distance of "he". It's the "you" that is both familiar and -- at the same time -- terribly, disconcertingly unfamiliar.

When we first meet Maali, he has just reached the In Between. This is a kind of transitional processing centre for souls, and it has all the chaotic qualities familiar to us from bureaucracies everywhere: "The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate." The In Between is staffed by white-clad Helpers. The woman interviewing Maali, for example, is a university lecturer, "slain by Tamil extremists for the crime of being a Tamil moderate".

The dead are pale and blurry, with unusually coloured eyes. Still sporting their fatal injuries, they're bemused and querulous. The world of the living is Down There, but the newly dead are potentially on the way to The Light (defined as "Whatever You Need It To Be"). Maali, as noted, has seven days to sort things out, or he will face getting stuck for ever in the In Between, in the company of endless-loop suicides and recruiters for revenge squads, as well as ghouls, pretas (hungry ghosts), yakas (demons), and -- most terrifying of the lot -- the all-consuming Mahakali. "You have one response," Maali tells himself, "for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts."


It's all in the way you see...

Maali has to learn to navigate the In Between. At one point we listen to the conversation he has in a mara tree with Sena, a young Marxist radical murdered by the government, whose binbag-cloaked figure "floats on wind..., sits on a shadow and plants words in your head; its voice is a serpent clearing its throat"):

Sena climbs to a vacant branch and you follow. "Why are we sitting here?" you ask.
"Mara trees catch winds. Like radios catch frequencies. So do bo trees, banyan trees and probably any other big tree that blows winds."
"I thought the wind blows the trees."
"Your grandfather thought the world was flat. Do you want to be a ghost or a ghoul?"
"What’s the difference?"
"A ghost blows with the wind. A ghoul directs the wind."

Karunatilaka very cleverly exploits the fact that we know no more than Maali about the nature of the In Between. Should we trust these white-clad Helpers, who are trying to guide people to The Light? "Every soul is allowed seven moons to... recall past lives. And then, to forget. They want you to forget. Because, when you forget, nothing changes." Is this good, or is this ominous? We don't know. Should we trust Sena, who is hell-bent on building a vengeful army of the dead to mete out the justice that eluded them Down There?

While this uncertainty contributes to the suspense, it also offers lots of opportunities for humour. Winds, as Sena told us, are "like public transport for dead people". Enlarging on that idea is this shiveringly funny description of Sri Lanka's capital: "The dawn has broken and the buses have filled with office slaves and schoolkids training to become them. Each vehicle has a creature like you hanging off it. You look down the line of traffic and see a ghoul on every car roof."

The dead, we are told, can go wherever their name is spoken, or wherever their body has been:

"But you can't fly to Paris or the Maldives. Unless your corpse is taken there."
"Why the Maldives?"
"Ghosts mistake that place for paradise. There are more spirits than stingrays in those shallows."

Whimsical, funny, deliciously scary...



But as the two stories unfold in parallel -- Maali's discovery of the afterlife and his recollections of his actual life -- there's also a very powerful undercurrent of blood and brutality. As a photographer, Maali witnessed (and secretly recorded) events that would for ever scar him. As a ghost, he can speak with countless other victims; he can see into the foul places where people's lives come to early, blood-soaked, and painful ends.

Karunatilaka said in an interview: "1989 was the darkest year in my memory, where there was an ethnic war, a Marxist uprising, a foreign military presence and state counter-terror squads. It was a time of assassinations, disappearances, bombs and corpses. But by the end of the 1990s, most of the antagonists were dead, so I felt safer writing about these ghosts, rather than those closer to the present." (Sumit Ganguly, by the way, has a useful summary of the conflict, and of the factors that brought it to its not uncontroversial close, and Gayatri Devi is helpful in pointing out the novel's references to historical events and personalities that would elude those of us less familiar with Sri Lankan history.)

Karunatilaka absolves no-one. At one point Maali tells us about the cribsheet he once provided for a young American journalist. It boils down to this: All the groups fighting for causes are willing to kill their own to achieve them. "Don't try and look for the good guys," Maali tells his protege, "'cause there ain't none."

Partly because of this murky scenario, Maali is not in a hurry to get to The Light. Not only does he want to understand what happened to him, but he also wants to ensure that his boxes of unpublished photographs reach the public domain. Exposing certain truths, he thinks -- including the secret machinations of powerful people -- will help to end conflict, and bring peace and justice. But when his efforts in this direction threaten the safety of best friend Jaki and clandestine lover DD, he switches his energies to efforts to help them.



Suffice it to say that nothing turns out quite as he expects...

In fact, you come to think that the thing we most need to get our heads around is that a lot of what we do and worry about in our daily lives really doesn't matter. Really. Doesn't. Matter...

The distinction between good and evil is still significant. The out-and-out evil that all sides have perpetrated in their various attempts to exploit Sri Lanka has to be called out, and recognized for what it is. But even here, the more distance you gain from the world of the living, the more everything pales. The army of ghosts and ghouls trying to punish evildoers often ends up killing the innocent in the process; Maali's hopes for his photo exhibition come to nothing.

By the end, though, he realizes that what really matters is friendship, love, and beauty, and he lets go of his ambition in a desire for quiet and peace. His images of violence are suppressed or ignored, but he tells us: "The photos that remain… show sunsets and sunrises, hills of tea and crystal beaches, pangolins and peacocks, elephants with their young… This island is a beautiful place, despite being filled with fools and savages. And if these photos of yours are the only ones that outlive you, maybe that’s an ace you can keep." Bhattacharya eloquently comments: "This sort of homage to beauty in the face of savagery, this tribute to the immutable workings of nature amid the senseless cruelty unleashed by human beings, makes The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida sing the joy of life, and of being alive, in defiance of the howls of death."

Lawton, too, cherishes the "hope at the book's core". It is possible to read the novel, he says, "as a slow unfurling of a kind of faith in the enchantedness of the world and the possibility of redemption. For while ending up in the afterlife comes as something of a shock to a wise-cracking atheist like Maali..., over the course of the novel he relinquishes his characteristic evasiveness and selfishness and performs a sacrificial act of love, seeking to save in death 'the friend you let down the most' in life."



There's one more issue that merits discussion, which is Maali's sexual orientation. On the one hand, as the author admits, his portrayal is open to accusations that he's promoting the stereotype of the "promiscuous gay"; on the other, he has been accused of creating such a protagonist "to pander to literary critics in the West".

His answer to the first point is to foreground his research among members of the gay community (both contemporaries, and those able to recall the scene in the late 1980s). They -- we're told -- attest to the reality of promiscuity "among gay men in Sri Lanka and elsewhere". (I'm not sure this helps us much. That a stereotype might contain elements of truth does not usually make it OK to perpetuate it. But there is a plot motive here, too, remember. Maali's sexual behaviour was just one more element of his life that made him vulnerable to enemies of different kinds.)

With regard to the second criticism, Karunatilaka replies that he never intended to write "a queer novel". His initial inspiration for Maali was a Sri Lankan man called Richard de Zoysa. A newsreader, actor, poet and activist, his abduction and murder in 1990 sent shock waves around the Colombo community: "Several activists and journalists from Sri Lanka had been murdered before that but the outrage that this particular killing led to was unprecedented and quite widespread. People began to think that if Richard could be killed, the powers that be could come after anyone. After his body was found, different theories were floating around regarding who planned and executed his death, and also whether he was affiliated to the militant organisation Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or not. As I developed the character, many details changed. Richard was neither a war photographer nor a gambler but Maali fits both these descriptions. What Maali does have in common with Richard is the fact that he too is a closeted gay man... I really just went with my instinct with Maali Almeida."

I've read some great Sri Lankan writing before this. Shyam Selvadurai's The Hungry Ghosts; Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost; Anuk Arudpragasam's The Story of a Brief Marriage... But The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is totally sui generis. There are many worlds in here. And it pulls off that most difficult of balancing acts -- judiciously managing its blend of tragedy and comedy -- with unparalleled aplomb.