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Ondaatje specializes in glory. He is drawn to those moments when the world puts on its finery, when reality billows out to match the gaudy banners of the imagination. Like Shakespeare's late plays, his novels are filled with stunning visions, bravura set pieces, extraordinary coincidences. His universe is one in which a bridge worker reaches up and catches a falling nun ("In the Skin of a Lion"), a doomed lover soars in a plane carrying his beloved's dead body (the Booker Award-winning "The English Patient"), a chicken grabs the entrails of a cursing, gut-shot gunman ("The Collected Works of Billy the Kid") and an artist paints the eyes on a statue of a god ("Anil's Ghost").

Anil's Ghost By Michael Ondaatje Knopf, 320 pages Fiction Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

With their exotic locales and high-octane plots, their heart-stopping prose arias, their soaring, fatal love affairs, their relentless sublimity, Ondaatje's novels resemble operas. In the hands of a lesser writer, they could sag into the wish-fulfilling bathos of melodrama, but two things save him from this fate. First, there's his virtuoso prose, at once passionate and meticulous, that lets him simply write his way out of any corner he has painted himself into. Second, there's his deep grounding in history and place. He has the poet's ability, abetted by exhaustive research, to render things with visceral clarity. Some of the great scenes in Ondaatje's work are lucid, economical descriptions of men at work -- a thief seeing everything as he enters a darkened room, a daredevil bridge builder counting each second that passes as he swings through the air, a bomb-disposal expert singing words from a pop song to keep his mind clear as he sits in freezing water defusing a bomb. Like narrative searchlights, these scenes illuminate, for a moment, the architecture of the world -- and make us fall in love with it.

"Anil's Ghost," Ondaatje's fifth novel (fourth if you count "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid," which Ondaatje's own publishers seem uncertain how to classify, as a poem), is the most restrained and plot-driven of his books. This description is relative, of course: Even a subdued Ondaatje is more of a shape shifter and trickster than 99 percent of his peers. The polyphonic elements -- the use of multiple stories of equal or almost equal weight -- that are an Ondaatje trademark are still here, as are the majestic set passages, but for the first time in his career a single story forms the skeleton of the book.

And that story unfolds in a much more conventional, suspense-driven form than the plots in Ondaatje's other works, which are loose and baggy monsters riddled by poetry and intoxicated by flashbacks, dreamlike tales that fade out more than end. In perhaps the most disconcerting development of all, "Anil's Ghost" even has a surprise ending.

The novel tells the story of Anil Tissera, a 33-year-old forensic anthropologist, who returns for the first time in 15 years to her native Sri Lanka after living in America. Anil, a veteran of the killing fields of Guatemala, Congo and other places -- her work consists of scientifically analyzing human remains to determine where and how death occurred -- has come back to do fieldwork and file a report for an international human rights group about the political violence that has ravaged the island for years.

The group's investigation is on a short leash, since the government, as well as insurgent groups, is known to be involved in the violence. Anil is assigned to work with an archaeologist named Sarath Diyasena, a man in his late 40s whose wife committed suicide some years before. In the course of their investigation, she discovers that a skeleton found in a government-controlled dig site is not hundreds of years old, like the others, but no more than six years old -- clearly the remains of someone killed by the government. Anil thinks, "Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest."

Next page | A mysterious skeleton speaks for thousands of victims