The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

You know why the battle of good vs evil is so one-sided, Malin? Because evil is better organized, better equipped and better paid. It is not monsters or yakas or demons we should fear. Organized collectors of evil doers who think they are performing the work of the righteous. That is what should make us shudder.

--The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka

This the post-mortem narrative of Maali Almeida from author Shehan Karunatilaka is grim, gruesome, gory, gloomy, brutally funny and sublimely written. Maali is dead: to begin with, to echo one of literature's famous first lines, and learns straightaway that he will have seven moons to decide his eternal fate. He can go to the light, he can go to the dark, or he can linger forever in the In-Between, a sort of endless purgatory, the realm of lost ghosts, sadistic ghouls and hungry demons. We don't remember entering the world, although we suspect that it wasn't easy. But it is more difficult yet to leave the world for we are tied by a thousand-and-one strings of multitudinous natures--love, regret, anger, worry, revenge, lust, unforgiveness, and so on ad infinitum. Maali is dead, and yet he has undone things to do, scores to settle, wrongs to set right, loves to honor, though he has always known deep down that neither the world nor his own Sri Lanken part of the world can ever be set right. Not in this world, as it were. In Maali Almeida we have a protagonist that is both cynic and optimist, thick-skinned observer and fellow sufferer, villain and hero. The usual sort of messy life that most of us lead. The novel is dense with Sri Lankan politics and warring factions, which can be daunting for those unfamiliar with Sri Lanka (which will be most of us), but one fairly easily falls in step with the basic conflicts and the familiar patterns of corruption and betrayal. I was not sure at first whether I was going to be able to persist through this relentlessly violent narrative, but I was soon captive to the uniqueness, to the compelling virtuosity of this writer's voice. Part Dante's Inferno, part Dickens' A Christmas Carol and part Beetlejuice--Marvelous!