Eight years after the sweeping eloquence of The English Patient won the Booker Prize and captured the imagination of filmmaker Anthony Minghella, Michael Ondaatje has published another lyrical tale of human dislocation and betrayal.

While undoubtedly one of the leading modern novelists, Ondaatje admits that writing doesn’t come easily to him. He is a perfectionist and the fruit of his craftsmanship is evident in the beauty of his prose.

Set in Ondaatje’s birthplace, Sri Lanka in the early 1990s, Anil’s Ghost is a story of human rights and human treachery.

“Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil had translated lines from Archilochus – In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy was.”

After a fifteen-year absence, 33-year-old Anil Tissera has returned to her homeland, Sri Lanka. Her absence has been spent studying and working in the UK and US. A doctor turned forensic anthropologist, she has been sent by the UN as part of a human rights investigation into war crimes.

Working with an archaeologist named Sarath, she discovers a relatively recent skeleton buried with pre-historic corpses. The skeleton, whom they name ‘Sailor’, was killed nearly half a dozen years before. This burial among the ancient dead in official government territory was his second.

Ondaatje does not hold anguish and perfidy at arms length. The personal sorrows and infidelities of his characters are as devastating as the national crimes.

Reading Ondaatje is like being guided by candlelight through a darkened room. Select details are illuminated for us, but the room’s entirety is largely a mystery until the novel’s conclusion. He develops his characters in a piecemeal, fractured fashion. We come to know them inch by inch.

Playing with our perceptions, Anil’s Ghost renders the reader a foreigner in an unknown land. Like Anil, we are unsure whom to trust and recoil at the matter-of-fact tolerance of human evil in the midst of war. His fluid, beautiful prose belies the tragedy of which it speaks.

“If people you knew disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was the scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it.”

Michael Ondaatje writes of human heartbreak with restraint and elegance. He reveals the depths of his homeland’s adversity with a scientist’s distance. His accounts of raw brutality are juxtaposed with lush descriptions of exotic beauty, capturing something of the inexplicable nature of the country’s dislocation.

With Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje affirms his position as one of the superlative novelists of our time.