![]() Acts of love and loyalty can count beyond the grave. ![]() Still, the furious comedy in Mr Karunatilaka’s novel never courts despair. Maali’s posthumous pilgrimage shows him “how ugly this beautiful land is”. It has bite, brilliance and sparkle, though readers may sometimes wish for steady illumination rather than another pyrotechnic burst. It takes in the country’s manipulated ethnic strife and even the social geography of Maali’s quasi-Buddhist limbo. 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”. ![]() The quest that ensues is comic, macabre, angry and thumpingly alive. Whose death squad has left him among the “long slabs of meat” that “garbage men” will dump in fetid Beira lake? And will his killer negatives-images that expose the hidden state actors behind massacres-ever come to light? Maali has a week to settle his fate before the fusspot celestial bureaucracy forces him to choose between an afterlife as a long-term phantom or passage through “The Light” into rebirth and oblivion. Maali has combined war-zone photojournalism with fixing for the competing spies who buzz around the corpses on Sri Lanka’s jungle battlefields. ![]()
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