The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

As usual Wiki – describes it very well as ‘ a 2022 novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka. It won the 2022 Booker Prize,..The novel is set in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and written in the second person. The central character, Maali Almeida, is a dead photographer who sets out to solve the mystery of his own death and is given one week (“seven moons”) during which he can travel between the afterlife and the real world.^[11] In this time, he hopes to retrieve a set of photographs, stored under a bed, and to persuade his friends to share them widely to expose the brutalities of the Sri Lankan Civil War.^[1]‘

On the positive side the book is quite funny at times. For example in the opening scene, despite being dead, Maali finds himself with all the other recently dead in a queue in some sort of office being told he has to go somewhere and do something. It’s a classic scene of bureaucracy, a dysfunctional South Asian version of bureaucracy. Also on the positive side you get a lot of information about Sri Lankan history, culture, language and politics. In theory this combination of humour, history and politics would’ve been enough to make the whole book worth reading, and of interest to me and others in the group. 

Unfortunately for me and several others in the group it was also very dark and violent. In someways this is the nature of material. It’s about the 1980s period of the Sri Lankan wars. That is dark material, but its treatment here was so dark it was too much for some of us. I think I got to about the end of the second of seven moons before I gave up. Those who finished the book did say that it got lighter after that so perhaps I would have been rewarded if I had continued. What made me actually stop was at some point in the second moon there’s a quote from The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  This is among my 2 or 3 least favourite books of all those we have ever done in bookgroup over 20 years. I felt including a quote from that was a pretty clear signal from the author that the rest of the book was going to carry on with the darkness and the violence. For me that was a good signal to stop.

However having re-read my review of The Road there are a couple of positive features of that book that could and do apply to The Seven Moons as well. For example, 

“the way it illustrated moral predicaments and choices in the absence of any society, rules, or over-riding authority….it was about the conflict between your values and self interest in an apallingly hopeless post-apocalyptic situation where its highly likely there is no future. the question it asked was – if there is no law and no future does that mean total selfishness… is the rational choice, or does it mean complete selflessness and surrender, such as suicide, is the rational choice? the man choose some kind of middle way… on the basis that he wanted to be the ‘good guys’ not the ‘bad guys’. this seems to assume there is some kind of future and therefore side steps the question of the book. if there truly was no future and no ‘good guys’ i’m not sure how much sense the mans approach really makes.”

Maali is in a similar position, both in his life and now that he’s dead. He is surrounded by forces much greater than himself so he is always caught between wanting to give up to some kind of hopelessness or nihilism, and wanting to do something. It seems both in life and death he can’t answer the question, he just swings between the two. In this sense both books ask the same question. Is there any point to struggling against the world when its unlikely anything you do is gonna make a difference? You could argue they also both offer the same answer; you need to struggle a bit, enough to feel sufficiently okay about yourself that you can carry on? 

The other interesting aspect of the book is that it’s written in the second person. Usually books are written in the first person, where the author says I did this and I did that; or the third person, where the author says John said this and Julie said that. In this case the author is saying you did this and you said that. Occasionally I think I may have come across books written in this style but in those cases it was the reader whom the author was addressing as you. In Seven Moons the author is addressing the main character, Maali, who is dead. So through the whole book the author is calling the ghost of Maali ‘you’. This means the author is telling the main character what he is doing as a ghost but in the process of reviewing all the things that he did in his life. So it’s very unusual in that sense. This is probably another reason why it won the Booker Prize along with all the darkness. The Booker Prize people seem to love darkness and violence.

We did have a bit of a discussion in the group about the second person aspect of it. About half the group assumed the author was actually Maali talking to himself, whilst that idea did not occur to the rest of us. I wondered who the author was and whether it would be revealed at some point in the story but no apparently, so those people who assumed it was Maali talking to himself may have been correct.

In terms of a recommendation I guess if you like The Road and books like it, such as many of the other Booker winners, then this one is probably going to be right up your street, but if you struggle with those kind of the books then give this one a miss.

 If you are in the second category but want to get some Sri Lankan history and politics I would recommend getting hold of something called Counting and Cracking. Its a wonderful play that was first performed in Sydney 2019. Many of us bookgroupers saw it at that time and we all loved it. It has been performed in a number of places in the UK since and is due to return to Sydney in June 2024.