A moon in this version of the afterlife is a day, because ‘the moon is always up there, even when you can’t see it’. There are echoes of Dante’s hell, too: Almeida spends a night in a tree: ‘Your tree gets crowded with suicides muttering.’ (In Dante, the suicides actually become trees.)Īlmeida, we are told, has a cache of photographs which will rock Sri Lanka –gruesome evidence of violence and corruption – and he has seven moons in which to contact his loved ones and lead them to it. Imagine an absolutely shambolic version of the afterlife depicted in A Matter of Life and Death. That’s the afterlife for you: a crowded, bureaucratic nightmare, where ghosts jostle each other, exhibiting the wounds that killed them and there are plenty of wounds and plenty of ghosts because of the violence tearing the country apart. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse.’

Would there be any cricket in it, perhaps? No: Karunatilaka swerves right away from that on the first page: ‘You left school with a hatred of teams and games and morons who valued them.’ (The book is told throughout in the second person.) The first words of the novel are: ‘You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks. The afterlife is a bureaucratic nightmare, where ghosts jostle each other exhibiting their fatal woundsĪt first I wondered if the novel was going to be a replay of Chinaman. Maali Almeida is a photographer, gay, a gambler, who likes a drink or two but his Nikon has a cracked lens and is filled with mud because his body was thrown into a lake after he’d been murdered. We are in 1990, and Sri Lanka is as dangerous a place is it was in Chinaman, and in reality. But I had problems with it, as you will see. In fact, there are parts of its design and telling that are very good indeed. My review ended with the words: ‘Karunatilaka is, I gather, writing another novel, but how it can be as good as this I can hardly imagine.’ We now have that novel, and I was right: it isn’t as good.

Set in the 1980s, it intertwined the stories of a vanished, forgotten cricketer who was able to bowl unplayable deliveries and the particularly brutal war that was ravaging Sri Lanka. Ten years ago Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, was published and I raved about it, as did many others.

The 7 moons of maali almeida