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Working with Sailor's skull, this artist, Ananda, re-creates the man's face. Meanwhile, Anil and Sarath's forensic expertise -- Anil analyzes the pupae of insects that have eaten the corpse -- allows them to establish where Sailor was killed and his likely occupation. Having learned the man's identity, Anil and Sarath must figure out how to make their findings public without getting themselves killed and their evidence destroyed. As the plot moves toward its powerful climax, Ondaatje paints an obsessively dreamlike portrait of a land devastated by horror and of three people -- Anil, Sarath and Sarath's doctor brother, Gamini -- whose struggles to overcome the tragedies and losses in their own lives mirror those of their native land.

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.

Ondaatje's moral concerns are more central here than in his earlier works, and his politics more nuanced -- certainly more than in "The English Patient," where the Indian sapper Kip's outrage at the bombing of Hiroshima leads him to violently reject Western civilization and storm away from his white friends. Such dabblings in heavy-handed Third World solidarity are gone, replaced by a darker, deeper emotional bedrock: the hard-bitten, half-desperate solidarity of men and women who have been pushed to the breaking point by the dreadful things they have seen but who nevertheless refuse to stop fighting. The doctor Gamini, a driven, heroic speed addict who is perhaps the book's most clearly etched character, seems to speak for Ondaatje:

He had heard grown men scream for their mothers as they were dying. "Wait for me!" "I know you are here!" This was when he stopped believing in man's rule on earth. He turned away from every person who stood up for a war. Or the principle of one's land, or pride of ownership, or even personal rights. All of those motives ended up somehow in the arms of careless power. One was no better and no worse than the enemy. He believed only in the mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so the children would be confident and safe during the night.

The gravity of Ondaatje's subject in "Anil's Ghost" is undoubtedly connected to the book's rhetorical restraint, its psychological gloom and the heightened importance of its plot. Dealing with a contemporary nightmare, Ondaatje lets the story lead. The result is a central plot arc that's more morally clear-cut (the final twist has an almost Dickensian feeling) and, in purely what-happens-next narrative terms, more satisfying than those in his previous books. (The story of Almasy and Katherine in "The English Patient" is one of enormous romantic pathos, with a tragic beginning, middle and end, but it's only one of three or four stories in the book -- and so the overall feeling one is left with is of messy Shakespearean richness, not finely honed closure.)

But the strength of the story in "Anil's Ghost" also creates some dissonances. In an attempt to make all the elements of his novel come together at the same time, Ondaatje meters out what he tells us about his characters, so that the plot crisis and psychological revelations hit at the same time. This gives the climax a superficial sense of dramatic unity, but at a cost.

Ondaatje's approach to his characters has always been audacious. He writes simultaneously through their eyes and from an omniscient perspective, making the men and women in his books feel godlike, doubled, incandescent. Ondaatje's voice is so strong, he is so exuberantly heedless of the conventions of psychological realism, that he tramples the boundary between writer and character. His characters do not always seem to have a life separate from the one that seethes in his extravagant imagination; they move through their own lives as if through destinies.

It's very tricky to write a novel that is both story-driven and character-driven: Ondaatje tries to do this in "Anil's Ghost," but the expectations aroused by his strong, conventional plot undercut the more elliptical way he reveals character. The circling, fragmented, deferred way the characters' stories are revealed -- a technique that works beautifully in the death-obsessed, memory-haunted world of "The English Patient" -- seems inexplicable, even contrived here. It's hard for us to know or care as much about them as we need to when we don't have all the information until so late.

Anil, for example, starts out as a much more distanced, externally observed character than we're accustomed to in Ondaatje's work. For much of the book, her personality is pretty much a clear glass; what she does is more important than who she is. Unlike such amorphously expanding characters as Hana in "The English Patient" or Patrick in "In the Skin of a Lion," whose consciousnesses are lyrically explored and amplified by an all-knowing narrator, Anil for much of the book remains a pretty straightforward and limited character: a tough cookie who loves her job, with an embarrassing marriage and a passionate, failed love affair with a married man behind her, who has little connection with her homeland. Gradually, more and more is revealed about both Anil and, to a lesser extent, Sarath, until in the book's homestretch their secrets are revealed.

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