Bookivorous

Anil Tissera is a young pathologist who becomes involved in the investigation of a murder, apparently at the hands of Government forces during the recent strife in Sri Lanka. Ondaatje takes this promising premise and mires the plot in a series of back stories which add nothing to the reader's understanding and squash interest as effectively as a swat applied to a bug. it's a crying shame to see prose as beautiful as this squandered on a meandering narrative which eventually becomes no more than a series of unrelated incidents. At the end I was no longer interested in Anil, who comes across as a wrongheaded whiner, or even the victim, who remains a cipher.