`Someone nudges a stone away and there's a story'

A young woman returns home to the Sri Lanka she had left 15 years earlier. Then, she was 18 and locally famous for her swimming. Now it is very different; she is a medical doctor, US-trained, specialising in forensic anthropology and carrying the emotional baggage of experience and lost opportunity. Her country is in turmoil and her return is not that of nostalgic homecomer but a potentially threatening professional - the representative of an international human rights organisation. Michael Ondaatje's new novel attempts that most difficult of feats, sustaining a narrative through situation rather than by character and he succeeds by subtle understatement and inspired flashes of ambiguity.

From the outset it seems Sarath, the man Anil is to work with, will hold most of the keys to this calm, melancholy book. Sarath is an archaeologist and it appears the official intention may be to distinguish the dead, attributing the recently murdered to the more distant past. Archaeology is far less politically embarrassing to a regime than pathology. Awkward skeletons are to be pushed further back in the past. "Forensic work during a political crisis was notorious, she knew, for its three-dimensional chess moves and back room deals . . ."

Obviously from the moment she arrives Anil is on guard. "Was the partner assigned to her neutral in this war? Was he just an archaeologist who loved his work? Most of what Sarath wished to know was in some way linked to the earth. She suspected he found the social world around him irrelevant. His desire, he had told her, was to write a book some day about a city in the south of the island that no longer existed."

Initially shrouded in an element of romance, Sarath, who may have known Anil's dead father, is a widower - though there are some doubts. The strange relationship which develops between the two is one of the many strengths of this strange novel. Although the Toronto-based Ondaatje has become internationally famous through the success of the film version of his 1992 Booker co-winner, The English Patient, his literary reputation has long been established by works such as the long verse sequence The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Running in the Family. His stature was further consolidated by an outstanding novel, In the Skin of a Lion (1987), which not only showcases Ondaatje the storyteller and myth maker, it demonstrates his wonderfully flowing technique. History and myth have always appealed to him as have cinematic, fragmentary and narrative collages playing with time and memory, even, at times, fact.

Anil's Ghost is unusual for him in that while it evokes the past which has shaped his characters there is an immediacy about the narrative, a weary candour. It is about a war, yet Ondaatje's polemical lament is direct and controlled. Although the physical beauty of the island landscape is evident, the language is more vivid than lyric, the images are more practical. A character is struck by the shape a woman eye doctor imposes on her surroundings: "Gamini loved the sight of her ward as everyone on the fifteen-bed room turned towards the door when she walked in, all with the same white patch taped over their dark faces, the same badge of belonging to her." Anil's Ghost is far less impressionistic than The English Patient. Here is an urgent story told with restraint amid ongoing drama and it is all the more powerful for that.

For Anil, time is best expressed through two contrasting relationships she has had: one with a married man which has left her disconnected and angry, the other with a woman doctor who introduced her to American culture. The characterisation of Anil is interesting - throughout the book she appears to be re-placing herself within the context of the country she calls home.

THERE is a defiance about her, she is intelligent, capable, restless, dissatisfied and reassuringly non-heroic. Ondaatje has set out to create neither a Joan of Arc, nor a Barbie. Instead Anil is as believable, sympathetic and as ambiguous as is the entire work with its aura of concern, helplessness and regret. "We are full of anarchy," observes Anil to Sarath, in one of the longest speeches in the book. "We take our clothes off because we shouldn't take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries.

"In Sri Lanka one is surrounded by family order, most people know every meeting you have during the day, there is nothing anonymous. But if I meet a Sri Lankan elsewhere in the world and we have a free afternoon, it doesn't necessarily happen, but each of us knows all hell could break loose. What is that quality in us? Do you think? That makes us cause our own rain and smoke?"

What could have been an adventure about one feisty woman's battle against corruption is skilfully developed into the story of yet another country in which fear, lies and secrecy have stepped in to present a distorted version of history. As in In The Skin of the Lion, which is set in the Toronto of the 1920s and 1930s and explores the lives of the men who built the bridges and tunnels, Anil's Ghost also looks at various processes. Ondaatje has always been interested in how things are done, whether it is the digging of a tunnel or the recreating of a dead man's face. Anil investigates the battle between bone and flesh; another character, Ananda, an artist, sets about replacing a destroyed Buddha and giving it eyes in order to survey the landscape.

It is true that all the main characters in the book have lost people - indeed, it could be argued they have lost themselves - and they have certainly lost the ability to trust. The relationship between Sarath and his wayward brother, Giamini the doctor, their distance and remote intimacy, appears to encapsulate Sri Lanka's dilemma. Anil's Ghost is a metaphor for many things, particularly for human loss weighed against the endurance of nature. But always there is story. True to the spiritual heart of Ondaatje's visionary fiction, which invariably offers a Christ figure, is Sarath - the enigmatic, deliberately ambiguous wise man - who reads the present through the past. "I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there's a story. " Ondaatje has told one of those stories. Anil's Ghost, with its many layers of pain and truth, its honesty and ambiguity, looks set to be a strong Booker contender.

Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist.