Book Review - The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

The 1980s were a particularly dark chapter in Sri Lanka’s history. Acts of violence committed by the Tamil insurgency, the Marxist-Leninist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the Sri Lankan government’s Special Task Force (an elite paramilitary police unit) were rife. Being picked up by armed men in a white van was usually a death sentence. 

Like his debut novel, Chinaman, winner of the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize, Shehan Karunatilaka’s sophomore effort, winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, is set in the author’s home country during this turbulent decade. 

Maali Almeida, the son of a Burgher-Tamil mother and a Sinhalese father, is a war photographer and a gambler, outspoken, queer and a self-proclaimed “slut”. In a bold opening, Maali wakes up dead. At first he thinks he’s taken one of his friend’s “silly pills” but swiftly realises that he’s been murdered. 

He’s unsure who bumped him off because he has been employed by all sides in recent years — there are several people who might want to silence him. As Maali boasts, he’s taken “photos that will bring down governments. Photos that could stop wars.” Thousands are being abducted: “‘disappeared’ was a passive verb, something the government or JVP anarchists or Tiger separatists or Indian Peacekeepers could do to you depending on which province you were in and who you looked like.” 

Various factions compete for Maali’s attention in the afterlife. He is told he has seven moons (seven nights) to find out who killed him and to lead the friends he left behind to a hidden cache of photographs that could “topple the government”. Once he reaches The Light, he will forget everything. 

Maali learns that his skull is in the Beira Lake while his dismembered body is stored in a refrigerator with others’ body parts. The afterlife is a nightmarish world of ghouls and demons but so is Down There, the country he left behind, beset by corrupt leaders, death squads, suicide bombers and greedy arms dealers. He is used to living by his wits but in this strange new world he has to wait for a wind to transport him to past haunts. Maali finds himself frequently drawn to the Hotel Leo that houses the Pegasus Casino; the last place he was seen alive. The afterlife is a nightmarish world of ghouls and demons but so is the country he left behind, beset by corrupt leaders, death squads, suicide bombers and greedy arms dealers 

His two flatmates are equally determined to discover who murdered their friend. Jaki, 25, is a fellow gambler employed by the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation: “She spoke with the squeak of a child but with the authority of a tyrant.” Her cousin, DD, “a lawyer who plays rugby and dates bimbettes”, is Maali’s lover. DD’s father is MP for Kalkuda and a lone Tamil cabinet minister. 

Narrated in the second person, Karunatilaka’s story covers many of the country’s atrocities with an intensity only occasionally alleviated by gallows humour. “I’m a trained butcher,” declares one thug. “But this work pays better than the chicken farms.” The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is an ambitious novel, epic in scope (mixing tropes from thrillers, crime fiction and magic realism) and a powerful evocation of Sri Lanka’s brutal past.

Orignally published by the Financial Times