“Like public transport for dead people, sir. There are more spirits than stingrays in those shallows.” But you can’t fly to Paris or the Maldives. You can travel wherever your body has been.” Karunatilaka invests in the mechanics of the spirit world, as well as in the bureaucracy of it, and Maali asks And it is to them that he turns – insofar as a disembodied spirit can turn. Within this world, Maali has bright points in his personal life: his best friend Jaki and his lover DD with both of whom his relationship is difficult. Everyone is proud and greedy and no one can resolve things without money changing hands or fists being raised. Don’t try and look for the good guys ’cause there ain’t none.

He helpfully enumerates the various factions – the LTTE, JVP, UNP, STF as well as international involvement from agencies, the media and the UN. Almeida’s quest, however, is only a part of Karunatilaka’s narrative as he explores that vice and corruption.Īnd the Sri Lanka he depicts is deeply mired in vice and violence, tribal and sectarian atrocities and hatreds, governmental corruption and complicity. There is a delicious comedy on some of the squabbles between the dead that pepper the novel.īut there is a serious undertone: Almeida discovers that he has seven moons – seven nights – before his chance to enter “the light” expires and he chooses to use those seven nights to investigate his own death, discover his killer and use the explosive photographs that he had secreted under his bed to expose the corruption and violence that the country’s regime is committing.

This, however, is no hallucination but genuinely the after life inhabited by ghosts and lost spirits, bureaucracy and paperwork: “The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate.” In this opening scene we see a bravura example of Karunatilaka’s strengths in this novel – his sense of absurdity and his control of dialogue. It looks like a car park with no cars, or a market space with nothing to sell.

The air is foggy, though no one appears to be exhaling smoke or carbon dioxide. Maali Almeida, our protagonist in this novel, is introduced to us having died before the novel began: he thinks he has awoken into a strange drug induced hallucinatory dream as a long sequence of counters and queues and arguments with officials ensuesīehind you, a queue weaves around pillars and snakes along the walls.

Review the seven moons of maali almeida