Finished reading: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka 📚

My wife was first to notice it was was not the type of book I usually read — which is to say fairly obscure 50-year-old works of non-fiction. This one is a brand novel that won the Booker prize last year, and I am not at all embarrassed to say that is was the prize that led me to it — M John Harrison of Light, and several other of my favorites being on the jury and deeming The Seven Moons… a worthy contender.

And you know what, it is! I absolutely see why Harrison, he of baroque prose and unintelligible place names on planets far, far away, chose the book, some parts of which are as inscrutable as the denser sections of Viriconium. Only, it’s not a fantasy world on another planet, it is 1980s Sri Lanka, and the things people do to each other are more horrifying than anything Harrison could have come up with for the mere fact of things like that actually having occurred, and the world not caring much, back then or now.

Ultimately, Karunatilaka pulled two great tricks, one tactical the other strategic. The tactical one was to write a novel in second-person singular that actually works. The strategic was to persuade the world that a fantasy murder mystery featuring ghosts, demons, ghouls, and a host of other supernatural and real-world monsters was not yet another piece of genre fiction. Feats worthy of a Booker prize, indeed.