SOURCE: Gorra, Michael. “Murder on the Island.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5065 (28 April 2000): 23.

In the following review, Gorra outlines the plot of Anil's Ghost, calling the work “Ondaatje's most conventional novel by far.”

For much of its length, Anil's Ghost offers a clean and compelling narrative line that suggests it may be Michael Ondaatje's most conventional novel by far—a book set not only in the Sri Lanka of his birth but also in the well-known land of the political novel, that imaginary nation mapped by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul and Robert Stone. It is a country that is usually hot and always troubled, a land in which the outsider through whose eyes we see it can never entirely trust anyone; and the inevitable departures from this pattern serve only to confirm it. Ondaatje's main character, for example, isn't precisely an outsider but someone returning...