A breathless review of Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida (or in an earlier incarnation Chats with the Dead)
Dead people don’t breathe. The heart stops beating. The brain ceases to function. The flesh decomposes. And yet, there is the perennial fascination all kinds of living people have, namely about life after death - surely one of the more stupid oxymora known to mankind.
While The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida are based on this conceit, one has to at least acknowledge Karunatilaka’s sardonic humour when he notes that, mostly, the afterlife is worse than the real thing. No matter, we all like a good story that reassures us that life doesn’t just come to an absolute end when death occurs, so the Booker Prize judges must have felt that the novel also ticks all the other boxes that are in literary fashion these days, as always: murder, mayhem, brutal politics, religion, gay sex … all set in an exotic place called Sri Lanka, as told by a fair-dinkum Sri-Lankan author. A Lankan reviewer, the eminent academic and publisher, S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole, has some problems with this:
The Booker Prize judges need to be careful, and not use the prize to cook and advance their own liberal agendas.
https://island.lk/the-seven-moons-of-maali-almeida-a-contrarian-review/
While this may sound overly ‘conservative’, Hoole has a point in noting that not all the upper-class inhabitants of Colombo – where most of the action takes place – take part in a sexual merry-go-round:
Karunatilaka would have us believe that in Colombo (which I think I know well) upper class women have casual sex with waiters in clubs and restaurants. And, also that there are no committed couples. Girls there are projected as allowing themselves to be fondled in malls. Karunatilaka does not seem to understand class in the choice of sexual partners, nor that women tend to avoid free sex in their search for stable marriage.
Equally Hoole has misgivings about the definition of sex and ‘homosexual’ content:
Karunatilaka sees no immediate acceptance of homosexuality in Sri Lanka, for he writes of the future of homosexuals being in having a girlfriend, sleeping with her and lying with the landlord’s son in the spare room. That does not say much for integrity in homosexual relationships. He writes of oral sex being common and even obtainable for money in Anuradhapura. I doubt that. He also says it is not sex because in sex one has to see the face of the partner. It sounds a repeat of President Bill Clinton’s claim that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky because there was no penetration.
Well, well, while personally I don’t worry about explicit depiction of sex, I do understand that there are quite liberal people who prefer such matters to be dealt with in a more oblique way, like in Ovid’s Amores.
Since other reviewers have somewhat effusively compared The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida to the magic realism by the likes of Bulgakov and Marquez (both of whom I like), I want to add my own ‘derogation’ (as used by Hoole above): like Dante’s Inferno, Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida has nothing to do with magic realism, for magic realism is after all in the realm of reality where people do ‘magic’ things (in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita the amusing devil and his entourage make an appearance in the real world). I am not quite sure if Karunatilaka goes as far as to suggest quite seriously that the living are influenced by the ghosts of the dead, in as much they can enter their dreams and thoughts and as such affect their actions, e.g. prompting the Drivermalli to let off his bomb. There is a kind of questionable ‘after-life’ spirituality in all of this, especially in the final chapter of entering the LIGHT, a kind of Nirvana where all memory and story-telling is obliterated (thankfully).
To highlight one of Hoole’s other misgivings is his assertion that of Karunatilaka’s historical incorrectness:
The line “the government forces, the eastern separatists, the southern anarchist and the northern peacekeepers are all prolific producers of corpses” might seem pithy and clever to those not familiar, but it certainly is not accurate of the peacekeepers who, as far as I know, have never shot back even when threatened by the Tigers or the Sinhalese.
I don’t know enough of this history to make a judgement, but I take it from Hoole that not all the players in this awful conflict were murderous hooligans. On the other hand, I don’t doubt Karunatilaka’s words when he notes that the Brits, Israelis and the CIA were all involved in the massacres by supplying arms and torture equipment.
Now, despite all these misgivings, I also agree with Hoole’s overall evaluation:
But overall, Karunatilaka’s is an excellent book. Pithy. Interesting. Humorous. But dirty, vulgar, politically incorrect and even offensive in parts.
The constant theme of questioning the meaning of life and death makes this novel a great contribution to exposing the perverse political machinations that make terrorists out of all that oppose a near-fascist government, what with death (sic) squads and dedicated torture facilities terrorising the terrorists. Corrupt government ministers collude with the most unsavoury elements of the army and police to snuff out any signs of left-wing insurrection, playing also on the insane sexual politics in these scenarios, reminiscent of the Nazis who killed homosexuals if they held left-wing beliefs but tolerated closeted homosexuals in their own ranks (if it suited them, they killed them too, like Röhm, but didn’t Hitler himself have homosexual tendencies?). Here, Maali is the good homosexual and Major Udugampola is the bad one. I do have some problems with this though: I do not subscribe to the simple equation that good and bad people have the same sex; in my estimation bad people, like Major Udugampola, equate sex with violence while good people equate sex with love. Rape is not sex, in my book.
If ‘love’ is also a central theme in The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida – as many a reviewer asserts – whether in the context of sex or friendship (or family bonds), I can only discern this menage-a-trois between Maali, DD and Jaki, where love is a complicated animal (note that animals have souls too), mainly one-directional, in that Maali loves both DD (with sex) and Jaki (withouy sex) but is reciprocated only in the vaguest terms. When DD’d father has Maali killed for seducing his son (a sort of Oscar Wilde theme) one certainly learns that parental love does not deserve its name, just as Maali has a complicated and loveless relationship with his parents (did his father die of a broken heart because of his wayward son? did he leave Maali’s mother as a bad husband?). Only a few of the ghosts behave in a loving way, like Dr Ranee, the great intellectual force for everything that is good. As such, I fear that love does not conquer anything or anyone in this novel, rather that murderous hatred and greed and jealousy rule the roost, amongst the living as much as amongst the ones without breath. Sadly, one has to agree with the quip that the bad people are much better organised than the good ones. The human condition as a depressing, never-ending horror story, with only small pockets of happiness strewn across the globe.
Shehan should be happy, now that he has established himself as a literary genius of sorts, travelling the world to give expensive talks at literary festivals, getting fat contracts for writing articles and stories for literary and not-so-literary magazines, writing copy for the likes of Coca-Cola, Audi and HSBC – if his rather corporate website is anything to go by. As a man of the world – educated in New Zealand no less – (happily married and two children) he can afford to live anywhere he likes, be it Colombo or San Francisco, play in a band (I don’t like The Police in particular) and generally have a good time. Having reflected in The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida on a period of time that is as miserable as it was/is in any war zone, he might avail himself instead as a photographer (like Maali), covering the Russia-Ukraine massacres, chatting to the dead by way of writing another best-seller. Life is what you make it while you’re alive: it means nothing or everything or something in between, as Shehan has demonstrated so well in his writing.
