The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Shehan Karunatilaka won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a fascinating work of magical realism that might as well be called Maali Almeida in the Bardo, as its protagonist is dead from the moment the book begins. Set in Sri Lanka in 1989, in the early years of what would be a 36-year civil war between the governing Sinhalese majority and Tamil rebels, the book follows the title character, a photographer who took many photos of victims of the war, through his seven days (moons) in purgatory as he tries to figure out who killed him and how.

Maali Almeida is dead, and finds himself in a bureaucratic afterlife where multiple entities try to coax him into different directions, one of which is “the Light” and promises some sort of salvation, while another might give him the chance to communicate with the living to try to direct them to solve the mystery of his death by retrieving an important set of incriminating photographs he’s hidden. One possible explanation is that his work for a shadowy non-governmental organization or his freelance work for the AP and other journalistic outlets covering atrocities committed by both sides during the war. Almeida photographed corpses, but also murders and murderers, and any number of people might have wanted him dead.

Almeida was also gay in a society that was not particularly hospitable to gay people, although in his tales of his life there were closeted gay men all over Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka). He lived with two friends, Jaki, who was supposed to be his girlfriend; and Dilan, known as DD, who was one of those closeted men and becomes Maali’s lover, although the photographer is serially unfaithful to him. DD’s father is the powerful businessman and politician Stanley, who would strongly prefer that his son not be gay and join his business rather than working for an environmental activist group, and who is emblematic of the byzantine connections across Sri Lankan society at the time, where even the “good” guys could be tied to one side of the civil war or the other.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a richly layered novel that explores themes beyond just that of the civil war, which ended in 2009 with the defeat of the main Tamil rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the death of their leader. Maali is a complicated protagonist, part hero and part anti-hero, a drunk, a philanderer, a degenerate gambler, an atheist, and more. He professed to just taking photographs as a job, although of course he took photographs as a hobby as well; he’s not explicitly political, but hoped to take pictures that could end wars and bloodshed. His multifaceted character opens up all kinds of thematic possibilities, from discrimination to morality to how we cope with our own mortality, and Karunatilaka explores all of these, some more successfully than others.

Of course, because of the photographs Maali took, the authorities become very keen to find this missing stash – more keen than they are to find out who killed him, even with pressure from his family, from Jaki and DD, even from Stanley at one point. This creates two parallel narratives and a real sense of time pressure, as Maali tries to direct his friends to get to the photographs so they can expose the atrocities of both sides, while the authorities are trying to get the photos for themselves, and there’s an inherent tension from the question of who’ll get to the photos first – or whether the authorities will get to Jaki and DD before anyone finds the cache. There’s also the clock of the seven moons, referring to seven days before which Maali must decide whether he’s going to move into the Light or follow one of the other shades offering a different experience in the afterlife.

Karunatilaka seems to be well-versed in the history of this sort of political satire with elements of magical realism, from The Master and Margarita to One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel isn’t at the level of those two masterpieces, but it’s an heir to their legacy, drawing heavily on the former’s sense of the absurd and fantastical, and on the latter’s sense of outrage, especially outrage at the lack of outrage. Both of those earlier novels targeted authoritarian regimes that would torture and disappear opponents, which is exactly what the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka did during the civil war. So much of this novel takes place in the afterworld – an especially ridiculous one, with bureaucrats, flunkies, and talking leopards – that it shields the reader from some of the worst horrors of the civil war, allowing Karunatilaka to push forward with a narrative that might otherwise have been unreadable.

I haven’t read any of the other longlisted novels for last year’s Booker Prize, although Percival Everett’s The Trees is on my to-read shelf right now. As Booker winners go, though, this is one of the better ones among the 40 I’ve read, and I hope it signals a return to the peak the prize had from 2008 to 2018, with just one dud in those eleven years and several of my all-time favorite novels winning during the span.

Next up: Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, losing to Damon Galgut’s The Promise.