The Double Afterlife of Maali Almeida
by Richard Simon
November 2023
How Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats with the Dead became Booker Prize winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
When Chinaman came out in 2010, I described it in a review as the first really credible contender for the title of Great Sri Lankan Novel. Sadly, there haven’t been any worthy entrants in the category since then—apart, perhaps, for Shehan Karunatilaka’s own second novel, originally published by Penguin India in early 2020 under the title Chats with the Dead and later re-published in the UK as The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I was at the Colombo launch of the first version and ended up buying three copies, one of which I excitedly added to the tall stack of to-be-read books on my bedside table, meaning to take it up as soon as I had finished whatever it was I was reading just then.
Several things happened to prevent this. The first, of course, was Covid-19. The lockdown certainly gave me plenty of time to read, but amid the prevailing gloom and paranoia I found it quite impossible to face a story about civil war, terrorism, murder and dismemberment narrated in the second person by a dead man. Nor did it help that the novel is set during a particularly ugly period in Lanka’s recent past, a period I lived through myself and still shudder to recall.
The second thing that prevented me was the book I was then writing, an ‘unauthorised biography’ of St Thomas’s College that delves deep into modern Lankan history. This daily engagement with the sorry catalogue of avoidable disasters that comprise the latter was, frankly, enough; I hadn’t the stomach to read about generic Lankan folly and malice in my off-duty hours as well.
While I havered, others with greater intestinal fortitude completed the challenge. From them, I learnt that the narrator and protagonist of Chats with the Dead is modelled loosely on my long departed, still-lamented friend Richard de Zoysa, who was murdered, evidently by a state-sponsored death squad, in 1990. This, I’m sorry to say, took away what little appetite for the book I still had left.
But then, of course, Chats with the Dead was picked up by an independent UK publisher, Sort of Books, much revised under editorial supervision and reissued in an eye-catching new cover under a new title. Next thing I knew it had won the 2022 Booker Prize. Alright, that’s it, son, I sighed to myself: you’ll have to read the bloody thing now. So I worked my copy of Chats out from the bottom of the bedside-table pile, where it had settled as other books were promoted over it in reading order, and made a start.
I began reading with pencil in hand, having some vague idea of reviewing the novel on my blog. About two dozen pages in, I gave up the scheme. This was not a book I could review without causing its author, who is by way of being a friend (another friend) of mine, some pain. Oh, there was much to praise in it: the framing conceit was original, the descriptive passages full of colourful detail and the action non-stop. But it was all a bit ramshackle and rough-cut and even I, experienced reader though I am, found the story difficult to follow. I thought at first that the slap-bang-tumble narrative was just Shehan’s way of conveying the confusion and anxiety felt by the newly-disembodied soul of Maali Almeida, but as I read on and Maali began to find his feet in the afterlife, it became clear that my sense of struggling to stay afloat amid a tsunami of distractions was due to inherent narrative problems rather than any fault of my own. Other difficulties also began to obtrude themselves: for example, the period and setting, which I remember, as I say, all too well, were unconvincingly evoked, and the characters didn’t fit into it.
For all that, I made it to the end of the book speedily enough, and found the conclusion satisfying in spite of all that had gone before. Yet as I closed the volume for what I expected to be the last time, I did so with a quiet sigh of relief and a sense of duty done.
Then, only a few days later at Liberty Plaza, I saw the colourful devil-mask cover of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida goggling down at me from a bookshop window. I’d read a few reviews of the novel in the foreign press by this time: all were full of praise and none of the reviewers mentioned the sort of problems I’d had with the earlier edition. Perhaps they’d been rewritten out. According to what I’d heard, Shehan’s editors had demanded that he make ‘extensive’ changes to his original text before reprinting it… As I pondered this, the crafty little yakka that bedevils all writers hopped up on to my shoulder and hissed at me that it might be worth reading this version too, just to see how much had changed. You’re an editor yourself, he reminded me; here’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see how the real pros operate. Call it a research opportunity.
I know the little wheedling bastard shills for the publishing industry, but reader, I fell for it.
“The crafty little yakka that bedevils all writers hopped up on to my shoulder and hissed at me that it might be worth reading this version too.”
The difference was apparent from the very first page. The chaotic anteroom to the afterlife in which Maali finds himself at the beginning of the book was much easier to visualize, as was the action taking place therein. Much of the detail that Shehan had included earlier seemed to have disappeared too, though much of it (I realised as I read on) had only been moved, reappearing in later—often, much later—paragraphs and chapters. Where earlier these details had provoked confusion, they now filled out and clarified the picture being built up in the reader’s mind. Maali’s misadventures had become a whole lot easier to read.
That opening scene also had a short, important new section tagged on to it at the end. Subtitled ‘The Box under the Bed’, it foregrounded a central plot device which, in Chats, was introduced in a rather less obvious way. This was the first instance I noticed of how much more skilfully Seven Moons guides the reader along: the current of narrative is much less agitated and a great deal of irrelevant flotsam has been cleared out of the water. Some sections within chapters have been given helpful titles, which they earlier lacked: the actual ‘chats with the dead’, for instance, are dated with the year of each ghostly interlocutor’s demise, which makes their relevance to the plot and subtext much easier to decipher. Auctorial sleights of hand—misdirections, foreshadowings and red herrings that tended to be obscured by drifts of verbal sargassum in the first version—are carried off much more elegantly here.
Perhaps this needs to be explained a little better. When a reader opens a novel for the first time, she feels that she is setting forth on an adventure, a journey of discovery across parts hitherto unexplored. Much of the pleasure and excitement of reading fiction come from this sensation, and if the author has done their job well, it will be sustained until the very denouement. But, as a moment’s thought makes clear, reading a novel (to drag my slowly drowning metaphor out of the drink) is no journey through virgin wilderness; rather, it’s a gently coercive guided tour through a cunningly designed garden in which every feature, every shrub and tree, every flower-bed and fountain, has been put in place by hand and shaped until it conforms as nearly as possible to the gardener’s—that is, the author’s—design. All art is contrivance, and the trouble with Chats is that it is less than perfectly contrived. The editing and rewriting that produced Seven Moons have greatly improved the quality of artifice, making it both less visible to the ordinary reader and more admirable to the professional. This is the most important difference between the two fictional afterlives of Maali Almeida.
Much has been expunged in order to achieve it. Early on in the reading, I was impressed by how little had been cut. By the final quarter of the book, however, I was well used to seeing big scenes and even complete chapters disappear wholesale. An entire sub-plot, which seemed to be of critical importance in the earlier version, had vanished without a trace. It sounds drastic, I know, but such excisions are meant to improve the reader’s comprehension and enjoyment of the book, and by George that’s just what they do. Hemingway is said to have advised a tyro writer that the more ‘good stuff’ he left out, the better his novel would be; a comparison of Seven Moons with Chats more than bears out the value of this advice, and not just for tyro writers.
Notably, the most obvious victims of the cull are the supernumerary throngs of demons, dead souls and other spooks that infest Chats with the Dead. I imagine it gave Shehan a special pang to kill these undead darlings; ghosts and Sinhalese folk-demons were, as I have learnt, the one factor that remained constant through the many changes of plot, cast and setting that the novel underwent during the years he spent writing it. Yet I, for one, was not at all sorry to see these unlovely bit-part players canned; even among the shades there can be such a thing as too much local colour, the more so when the colours are those of bruised flesh, dried blood and putrid offal (there’s plenty of it still left, by the way, if you go for that kind of thing).
Killing off the dead has, however, produced an unexpected side-effect: the novel has become less specific in its ethnic character. Even so, Seven Moons is—as, given its authorship, it should be—a distinctly Sinhalese book. This is not at all a question of who the good guys and the bad guys are; among the many villains of the novel are, in fact, a trio of murderous Sinhalese ethnic supremacists, two living, one dead. Still less is it a charge of bias levelled against the author, whose revulsion against all nativist ideology, obscurantism and violence is amply reflected in his books. It is, rather, a question of inherent perspective, a product of the fact that no-one can really help seeing things from the angle determined by their own social and cultural position in the world. Even so, a little more research into the modern history of Lanka might have resulted in a slightly different novel and, dare I say it, a more penetrating one.
Certainly, it would have been a book with fewer historical bloopers in it. Most of them are trivial, but they are especially easy for readers of my generation to spot, and the launch of a new edition should have been taken as an opportunity to remove them. I wonder whether the UK publishers employed a local fact-checker – and if so, who that person was. I should like to have a quiet word with them.
I don’t want to give the impression that Seven Moons is a completely different book from Chats. The plot (well, most of it), the characters and nearly all the actual text are held in common between the two. But it would be equally incorrect to claim that they are the same book. The two versions don’t tell the same story in slightly different words; they tell slightly different stories in much the same words. Of the two, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is by far the better novel. The agony through which poor Shehan was put by his editor, Natania Jansz—clearly he had to do all the revising himself—has already proven its worth in the shape of a Booker Prize. You can’t say fairer than that, can you?
It would be impossible to list all the changes that have been made—to use an appropriate metaphor, their name is Legion—but I will mention a few insertions that seem, amusingly, to have been added to render the book more attractive to a ‘global’ readership. One of these comes in the key ear-check scene, when ‘Yahweh and Zeus’ are substituted for ‘Allah, Vishnu and Karma’. Elsewhere, devilled pork—a classic Lankan bar snack or ‘bite’ —is transmogrified into devilled prawns and a ‘Semitic’ nose becomes, bizarrely, ‘Hawaiian’. A British journalist’s taste for ‘village prostitutes’ becomes a partiality for ‘village maidens’. Mild Orientalisms sprinkle the text; there are none at all in Chats with the Dead. Less trivially, I was sorry to see a reference to Dollar Farm, the scene of an infamous massacre perpetrated by the Tamil Tigers, dropped; I suppose the publishers were afraid of a lawsuit from Dollar Farm Products, a massive American agribusiness firm with multibillion-dollar annual revenues.
“Reading a novel is no journey through virgin wilderness; rather, it’s a gently coercive guided tour through a cunningly designed garden in which every feature, every shrub and tree, every flower-bed and fountain, has been put in place by hand and shaped until it conforms as nearly as possible to the gardener’s—that is, the author’s—design.”
So what did I think of Seven Moons, I hear you ask? It’s a fair question, but I don’t know whether I can answer it fairly. I finished Chats, which is now effectively an early draft of Seven Moons, before taking on its successor. My first impressions of the plot, setting and characters were formed, therefore, by meeting them in relatively unpolished, arguably unfinished form. When I re-encountered them in Seven Moons, they hung together better and were more smartly turned out, but they could not produce for me the surprise, the invigorating fizz, of a first impression. The fault, if there is one, is mine. I should have read v.2.0 first.
It turned out, though, that the thing I had worried most about—being uncomfortably reminded of Richard de Zoysa—was never a problem, because Maali doesn’t resemble Zoysa (as his mother used to call him) in the least. Richard was, to put it bluntly, a creature of his times; he lived and died immersed in them, yoked to them if you like. It is what gave him power and relevance as an individual for as long as he lived, and it is what makes him the icon he has become in death. Maali Almeida, by contrast, is a figure of a type that did not exist in the Lanka of the Eighties; he is the product of a later generation, the one to which his creator belongs. In action, attitude and philosophy, Maali is recognisably a Gen X-er.
I don’t believe that human nature changes from generation to generation. On the contrary, I am convinced that it is changeless and will remain so unless we evolve into another species. But the physical and political world changes continually about us, influencing contemporary hopes, fears and beliefs – the Zeitgeist, if you will—and shaping us as it does so. Human nature is always the same, but humanity is Protean. Lankans in the 1980s were under enormous stress: we were acutely aware, day in, day out, of the fragility of our lives. People, vehicles and buildings blew up before our eyes; we walked or drove past charred corpses lying on tyres, bodies crumpled in pools of blood, one-legged landmine victims faltering along on crutches. There were guns everywhere, wielded by the military, the police, the Tigers, the JVP, thuggish political ‘security’ operatives and rich kids at nightclubs. We defied JVP hartals to go to work, knowing full well that the mandated penalty for this was a bullet. Our streets were obstacle-courses of checkpoints, zig-zag chicanes, speed bumps and potholes; military bases and government buildings became improvised fortresses, skulking behind battlements of oil-drums, sandbags and razor wire. There was no freedom of speech; Emergency regulations and personal threats of violence kept most of us silent until the bheeshanaya finally ended in the early Nineties. Every so often, someone we knew would disappear or be forced to leave the country in a hurry.
Under such conditions, my generation—real-life contemporaries of the fictional Maali Almeida—dared not indulge in the luxury of detachment. We were, perforce, fully engaged with the realities of war, politics and business, desperately leveraging whatever scraps of influence, acumen and culture we had to keep us alive and sane. It was no era for old men (or women); with a few key exceptions, even politicians, generals and terrorist leaders were mostly in their thirties and forties (Velupillai Prabhakaran, in 1990, was thirty-six). From driven, risk-addicted Colombo yuppies to the desperate youths with blighted futures who slaughtered one another by the thousand in the wars and dirty wars that racked our country, we all had skin in the game. There could be none of the fastidious dissociation from the world of serious affairs that prevails among Maali and his circle of elite friends in Seven Moons—and which does, in fact, seem to prevail among many of the author’s generation in real life. No doubt it’s the fault of their predecessors, the Boomers, for selfishly clinging to the tiller for so long…
When the main characters of Seven Moons come face to face with the workings of the world, it is as children do; everything is run by their elders, to whom they must apply in order to get anything done. Even Maali, who maintains connexions to the world of grown-up affairs in order to pursue his profession (best described as that of atrocity photographer), doesn’t quite understand how it all works. Richard de Zoysa, I hasten to assure you, understood how everything worked, who, moreover, was working it, and why. Maali is a tourist in this world, an untethered, breezily cynical opportunist; Richard, on the contrary, was full of idealism, hope and yearning, and when he committed himself to anything (or anyone), he dedicated himself body and soul—at least until something (or someone) else came along to capture his devotion. However closely their curriculum vitae may resemble each other’s, the characters of the invented man and the real one could not be less alike.
But let this be clear: the fact that Maali and his friends are anachronisms, resembling figures from an era later than the one they’re supposed to be part of, is not in any sense a literary failing. Authors write for their own generation first and foremost, and they express, inevitably, the mind of their generation. This is true even if they write historical novels, though readers rarely notice the implausibilities that result from it. Such anachronisms are, I think, unavoidable in any case: Wolf Hall may well be the most closely-researched historical novel ever, yet for all the pains Hilary Mantel took over its characters and setting, there is something ineluctably twenty-first century about her Thomas Cromwell. I don’t think it is possible to avoid this, especially in our era, when events as recent as twenty years past are thoroughly mangled by the folklore-mills of the media industry and the internet. But if, as Shehan Karunatilaka has done, you take the risk of writing a historical novel set in a period that still lies within the memory of some of your readers, you’d better expect to hear from codgers who will insist that no, the story didn’t go quite the way you tell it…
Kudos, then, to my friend (and erstwhile bandmate) for attempting such a risky enterprise. In my somewhat biased opinion, he has carried it off admirably. The world, which has awarded him one of its most coveted literary prizes, seems to think so too. As for the cavils of those who actually lived through those times, there are too few of us left alive and compos mentis to matter. The Zeitgeist is different nowadays. People live different lives. They read differently, too. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, like the late Richard de Zoysa, is eminently a product of its time—just as it should be.
