Maali’s voice is wise, weary and whip-smart, by turns self-reproaching and smug.

Do we follow the murdered lecturer trying to steer us to The Light, or the man clad in garbage bags that ‘flap like wings … making a gesture that you cannot read’ and promising justice for your killers Down There? Can we even trust Maali himself, with his partial memories and addiction to infidelity? This celestial tussle for Maali’s soul plays out alongside a chaotic dash for his photos. We, as readers, are as unsure of whom to believe as Maali is. Instead, a chorus of voices vie for his trust. The difficulty for Maali is that, despite the Dante-esque division of the world into three spheres, there’s no Virgil to guide him. After seven moons, the door to The Light – a sort of forgetful heaven – will be closed forever. He has only seven moons in which to discover how he died, contact his family and lead them to his tranche of secret photographs, which, he believes, have the power to transform Sri Lanka. He doesn’t know why he’s dead or who killed him. This is the In-Between, an overcrowded state of limbo, and everyone is shouting, bleeding and lost.ĭown There (the world of the living), Maali’s body has been butchered and dumped in the Beira Lake, whose putrid stench (like ‘a powerful deity has squatted over it, emptied its bowels … and forgotten to flush’) epitomises the rot of Sri Lanka itself. ‘You’ awake in a cross between an underfunded job centre and an A&E department after an explosion.

The novel is narrated by Maali in the second person. But while the two novels traverse similar historical terrain, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is far from a retreading. In Karunatilaka’s new novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, the titular narrator is a war photographer, gambler and ‘slut’ who also likes a drink, while Sri Lanka still likes to shed its own blood. In it, a cynical, drink-soaked narrator tries to track down a possibly dead cricketer in a Sri Lanka riven by civil war. S hehan Karunatilaka’s freewheeling debut, Chinaman, won a clutch of awards in 2010.

The seven moons of maali almeida