Creatures, do you raise or fold? In this edition, a book note.
In Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, not even the dead have seen the end of war. Seven Moons is set in 1990, during Sri Lanka’s multi-pronged civil war. It stars a homosexual war photographer and compulsive gambler who wakes up dead, not knowing who killed him but knowing he’s got a box full of secret photographs that could expose the war criminals who still make deals in government offices.
Maali is a user, a liar, unfaithful and complicit and suicidally brave. If you have even the slightest desire for “a Graham Greene hero, but brown-skinned and able to see the demons,” I can basically guarantee you will love this book. It’s ambivalent about religion, mistrustful of God but also highly mistrustful of your little atheist questions; it’s against despair and violence, but it knows why that’s the hard side of the argument. Maali learns that some ghosts keep seeking justice even after death, while others urge their fellow specters to move into “The Light” and stop trying to settle scores. Stop putting your chips back on the table in the hope you can recoup your losses. A ghost dressed in a black garbage bag, which is always a kind of ghost I’ve got time for, argues, “The Light makes you forget. We should never forget.” But as that ghost gets better clothing, he starts to seem more sinister—isn’t it always the way?
Karunatilaka has a strong line in horror writing. The land of the dead is full of ghouls and demons. People who died by suicide congregate on a hotel roof and take turns jumping off the edge; the child soldiers jump together, still playful. The Mahakali, a sort of head demon who offers the power to “whisper” to the living in exchange for your soul, is a chilling creation: “In the flickering moonlight her skin seems made from snake.” These skin-crawling descriptions make it all the more powerful when Karunatikala writes, toward the end, “Do not be afraid of demons; it is the living we should fear. ...Always remember this when you encounter a wild animal or a stray spirit. They are not as dangerous as you.” The land of the dead is scary, but the worst places in the novel are a torture palace, and a hotel that hosts a casino and a fish market and a corpse-dump.
It’s taken me this far to tell you that Moons is a comedy. No, really! It’s got very funny dialogue where nobody ever replies directly to anything they’re asked (this is such an easy trick and I always fall for it). It’s got the pile-up of alliances and betrayals and plans and contrivances of a door-slamming farce, except that when a door slams in this book it is always very very bad news. I admit that I sometimes found it hard to keep track of who was on whose side, but in fairness, the characters also have this problem: As one cop asks, “Are we investigating this? Or covering this up?”
And also, it’s written in second person. When should you ever write in second person? Well, maybe when the main character is a sketchy ghost with memory loss. The constant you gives the narrative the feeling of a really bad hangover: What did I do? Who am I? Am I really like that?
The effect can be funny: On one page we’re told, “You are used to having people you don’t trust talk you into things you don’t want to do. Not this time.” Just reading that line, I knew Maali would get talked into doing the thing. It’s who you are! The second person can become self-lacerating: A particularly grisly scene starts off with,
Because, according to silly old you, the problem was that the folks in Colombo and London and Delhi didn’t know the full extent of the horror. And maybe clever young you could produce the photo that turned policymakers against the war. Do for Lanka’s civil war what naked napalm girl did for Vietnam.
And the gusts of disreputable memory can also be so tender as to be painful:
And, during that most furious and sweaty coupling, he got pissed off when you pulled a condom from your wallet and asked you if you had AIDS and you said no but you were going to get tested and he asked you if you had sex with anyone in the Vanni and you said no. Because a blow job isn’t sex and it isn’t sex if you don’t see the other person’s face and it doesn’t count if you were thinking about him during it.
There were times when Moon’s arguments and scenes felt repetitive. Each individual memory of infidelity or argument about complicity in evil was good, but having all of them there did diminish the power of the weakest versions. The novel is driving toward a couple of climaxes—and a beautiful, heartfelt denouement—but it’s driving in a fairly meandering path. That is a very small criticism, though.
icymi
Short movie notes on They Cloned Tyrone, Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, The 25th Hour, and Dark Days.
Now Playing
Martin Tielli, “I’ll Never Tear You Apart.” In the book it’s a leopard not a tiger, but this still seemed fitting.
Leopard on the road photographed by Bernard Dupont, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.