The dead do tell tales: sometimes they are the only ones who can speak to the living about the costs of civil war, terror and corruption.
Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka has won the Man Booker Prize for his second novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. In it the ghost of a dead war photographer tells the tale of a mission to solve his own murder.
The judges unanimously gave the novel one of the most prestigious awards in literature, describing it as "an entirely serious philosophical romp that takes the reader to 'the world’s dark heart’”.
Man Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka Photo: Supplied / Dominic Sansoni
In some form, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida first had a life as Chats with the Dead, though Karunatilaka says outside of the Indian subcontinent it struggled - publishers found it confusing and difficult.
“It is about a difficult period in Sri Lankan political history, it’s quite convoluted when you look at the different factions,” he tells Kim Hill.
“Eastern folklore about demons and rebirth, I suppose those concepts are quite familiar to an Indian subcontinent audience, but I guess a Western audience found it hard to fathom.”
Originally slated for release in early 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit that date was pushed out.
Karunatilaka and his editor spent that time reworking the novel for an international audience and he says even if you knew nothing about Sri Lankan politics or Eastern mythology you should be able to follow along.
“It’s about a dead war photographer who has seven days to solve his murder but also there’s elements of a political thriller there, there’s the ghost story, that mythology, a love triangle to it and a fair bit of ghostly philosophizing and a few jokes as well,” he says.
“To make sure that you don’t have all the instruments playing at once we ended up giving it a fairly thorough rewrite.”
Reworked and renamed, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was released in August 2022.
“It came out during a strange time for Sri Lanka, and it’s been a hell of a ride since.”
It was an idea that had been brewing since 2009, Karunatilaka says, after the end of the 30-year war between the Tamil Tiger separatists and the Sri Lankan armed forces..
“We were grateful and thankful that the war ended but of course there were huge civilian casualties at the end of it...they settled on the number 40,000 [dead].
“Instead of really looking at the causes of these terrible decades, it just seemed [like] a blame game...and that’s where I thought what if we could just let a few of the dead speak. What would they have to say about what Sri Lanka did to them?”
Uncomfortable with writing about history as it’s unfolding, Karunatilaka set the novel in 1989 - a “torrid time because there were wars on three fronts”.
“It’s not that long ago but I think for Sri Lankans it seems like ancient history because we’ve had so many catastrophes.”
He says even the 2019 Easter attacks are beginning to fade from memory, with the “chaos of 2022” fresh in mind.
“It just seems like these catastrophic events, and we don’t seem to examine them or learn from them, and we just move on to the next one.
“That’s a privilege as well, some people can afford to say it’s in the past but there are a lot of people who still have the scars and cannot forget. Forgetting things hasn’t seemed to work for us.”
The 'chaos of 2022'
In July this year, after months of anti-government protests in the wake of an economic crisis, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was toppled. Karunatilaka says he was watching from a safe distance.
“I’m not an activist, I’m very much a pacifist who sits and watches from safe distances and writes things about it. I was quite fearful because the frustration was so widespread, and this was during the petrol crisis...
“You’re watching live on television; you have this huge horde of people and they're all facing up to heavily armed guards so I was fearful that this could be a massacre. There were a few moments where bullets were fired, and we were fearful that this would become a tragedy to eclipse the ‘80s but then on live TV we see them reach the presidents house and into the office and suddenly we’re watching images of people belly flopping into pools and sitting on the president's couch watching the president's telly.
“That’s when we all got onto the streets. It was something.”
Karunatilaka says protests in Sri Lanka are usually associated with radicals, student radicals or sympathisers with various political groups.
“But this was across the board – you had grandmas and kids and working-class people who were struggling...it wasn’t an angry place, it was a country that’s been divided, it was unified for that moment.
“Of course, in the aftermath there were various incidents that happened and now even that narrative is being rewritten, that the struggle...was something sinister and so on, that’s why history keeps on revolving in front of our eyes in Sri Lanka.
“I think the struggle is very much on because Sri Lanka, even though it has stabilized there’s a long road ahead of us before we get back to where we were just a slightly underachieving developing nation rather than a bankrupt one.”
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida will be available widely in New Zealand in December.
