The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka. Review

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It’s testament to Karunatilaka’s roaring talent that he got this book into print. Our publishing industry has been severely reduced in intellectual scope of late. Just witness endless derivations of books with titles beginning “The Girl”. 
That’s not to condemn these works – though clearly not all are towering achievements – nor is it to demerit books aimed at women: more books for, about and by women, please. It’s to highlight a trend which illustrates publishing’s timidity and repetitiveness.
So, salute to Sort Of Books, the indie publishers who championed Seven Moons. 
In a world of dumbed-down “elevator pitches” and novelists more keen on Netflix deals than dissecting society’s soul, it’s plain why Seven Moons struggled to get an overseas imprint.
Here’s the story in a nutshell (if that’s possible): the rascally Sri Lankan war photographer, Maali Almeida, wakes up in the afterlife. He’s been murdered by one of the death squads turning his homeland into a charnel house.

Karunatilaka has a fine sense of modern pop culture, rendering his afterlife as something akin to the movie Beetlejuice, where the bored dead wait patiently with numbered tickets for ghostly civil servants to direct them through eternity.
Maali has “seven moons” to solve the mystery of who killed him.

Shehan Karunatilaka receives his Booker Prize from Queen Camilla (Image: free)

On his journey he’s aided by a spectral Marxist guerilla, an assassinated academic, and a clairvoyant-turned-conman. In order to play detective, he must find a way to communicate with those he was closest to in life: the man who was his secret lover, and the woman he pretended to be in a relationship with to hide that he’s gay. 
Karunatilaka’s afterlife is a realm of monsters, where demons protect politicians who run murder gangs, and ancient spirits consume the souls of the unwary dead. 
It’s a fantastical blend of hard-boiled detective noir, and soaring magical realism: psychedelic Salman Rushdie.
If that sounds the definition of zany, well, it is. What Karunatilaka has done is take absurdity’s scalpel to the notion of war, peeling back its skin so we can see its futility, its sheer bloody folly. There’s much here which speaks to the spirit of works like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

What’s so rare about Seven Moons is that it isn’t just a marvellous, deeply unusual and gripping novel; nor that it does what the best of novels always do: navigate the human soul, hold a mirror up to human failings, celebrate the best of humanity and damn the worst.

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It’s also almost a textbook to understanding the Sri Lankan Civil War. I thought I was pretty well versed in the horror visited on the island, which ran broadly from 1983 to 2009. But I was wrong. 
To learn a little intellectual humility through a novel’s pages isn’t a first for me, by any stretch of the imagination, but it becomes rarer and rarer these days as literature becomes increasingly soft in its centre through mass commodification, and the pull of a globally homogenised culture that has essentially turned art into grey goop: a pan-planetary pabulum.

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As a child who grew up during the Northern Ireland “Troubles” I was acutely aware of other similar ethno-nationalist conflicts going on around the world at the same time. Beirut seemed to mirror Belfast somehow; Sri Lanka echoed Ulster.
But, my God, I knew so little. Over and over again, I found myself researching the back story of some event, or real life character, which Karunatilaka mentioned in passing. 
To my shame, I’d heard of Black July – the communal violence which effectively began the Sri Lankan conflict – but I’d no idea just how monstrous it all was: the children who were killed; the victims who were burned to death; the mass lynchings; the pogroms; the vertiginous descent into industrial barbarity which gripped the island and took it to hell. 
How fitting then that our anti-hero and his story exist in a sort of semi-hell where the corpses of the disappeared haunt the capital, Colombo.
Sometimes you can almost smell the blood – feel the heat of the mocking anger – come steaming off the page. Scenes where “garbage men” – hired thugs who dispose of bodies killed by murder gangs – chuck mutilated lumps of what was once human beings into city lakes are truly overpowering.
For Maali Almeida to solve the mystery of who killed him, he must somehow become a journalist once more, and bring the unspeakable truth about the war, contained in pictures he took during his time on Earth, to public attention. But Maali hid those pictures before he died. 
So how does a ghost find a way to tell the living where the negatives are, so the truth – and murder – will out? 
Those pictures reveal the essential heart of human conflict: the pitiless cruelty of all sides once the killing starts. In Sri Lanka, the government is as barbaric as the terrorists; Tamil as cruel as Sinhalese; soldier as brutal as suicide bomber. Nobody is innocent; nobody remains untainted by conflict.
Throw yourself into the arms of this book, relish its wild phantasmagorical ride. To me, one of the last century’s greatest novels was Mikhail Bulgakov’s satire on Stalinism, The Master and Margarita. Seven Moons can stand proudly beside it in the ranks of literature which deploys horror and comedy to sear moral truth into the reader’s soul. It’s the most worthy Booker winner for many 
years.
 

You can read Neil Mackay’s interview with Shehan Karunatilaka in tomorrow’s Big Read in the Herald on Sunday