Mila de Villiers interviews Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida ★★★★
Shehan Karunatilaka
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“‘Have I got my speech?’”

This was the first thought which entered Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka’s mind after being announced winner of the 2022 Booker Prize for his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Set in 1989 during the Sri Lankan Civil War, Karunatilaka’s protagonist — the eponymous Maali Almeida — is described as a “war photographer, gambler and closet gay”. Are there any adjectives the author would like to add?

“That’s plenty of descriptors enough,” he laughs. “He’s also an atheist and a nihilist. And, as a gambler, he believes in odds. That was sort of the irony and absurdity of the opening scene because he’s an atheist who believes there is no cosmetic order to anything because he has seen humanity at its worst.”

The absurdity in speaking? The reader is introduced to an Almeida who has already shuffled off this mortal coil and is given a week (the “seven moons” in the title) to solve the mystery of his death. In these seven days he’s able to traverse time and space as he travels between corporeality and the afterlife.

As for seeing humanity at its worst? His transcosmic goal is to retrieve a box of photographs revealing the atrocities of war, with an end-goal to convince his friends to disperse them far and wide.

“He knows there can’t be anyone presiding over any system. He just believes it’s luck: luck that he was born in Colombo and it’s terrible luck that contemporaries were born in war zones. That identity plays out where he thinks he’s taking calculated risks in terms of his lifestyle, in terms of what he does.”

Luck and guilt stand in duality with writer and protagonist: “I was kind of drawing on my experience of not having truly experienced the trauma and feeling fortunate for it but also slightly guilty.

“I suppose the story is how he reconciles his worldview with his past and with what happened.”

Karunatilaka draws on the reconciliation of his past with the present as the novel is set when he was a teenager in the late 1980s. What memories does he attach to this period of civil unrest?

“I was insulated. I was a Colombo middle-class kid. I knew terrible things were happening on our streets and we had bombs going off and assassinations. But my family didn’t suffer like the people in the north and the east who were in that war zone.”

Though not directly affected, he concedes that he “saw the fear”.

As a teenager “you’re not that politically aware. And it was just normalised: ‘We live in a country where a bomb might go off here and there’.”

Over the years he has spoken to people who bore the brunt of violence, which made him decide to centre the novel on blame-laying: “It was just people arguing over which side was to blame for these civilians dying rather than the causes, which is what led to this catastrophe.”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida has been described as magical realism and political satire by reviewers — as Karunatilaka mentioned in his Booker speech — yet he hopes to see the book appear in the fantasy section.

“There was a political thriller where he’s got these incendiary photographs under his bed, which he wants to expose, but then also there is a ghost story,” he explains of the genre.

“So there’s issue of the afterlife and spirits. There’s also a fair bit of sort of ghostly philosophising and joke-telling.” (He cites Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series as books he enjoys reading because they combine humour with “talking about man’s absolute insignificance in the universe; the absolute meaningless of it all”.)

“That’s the tone I tried to emulate here, where you’re talking about grim passages in our history,” he says of incorporating humour with horror. “Just to keep myself entertained,” he smiles.

He credits the “Sri Lankan sensibility of crap jokes” as another method of staying sane inside insanity: “When we’re queuing or storming the palace we make memes about it.”

Karunatilaka describes Sri Lanka’s unrest as “chaotic” and says going to back to 1989 felt like writing “ancient history” in light of the country’s current situation, including the 2019 Easter bombings.

“We’ve been through so much since. But the fact is all the reviewers and interviewers are picking up that there are parallels between the current situation and that makes me sad.”

Here he compares Sri Lankan history to South Africa’s: “Not that South Africa is perfect but you were an example to the world of learning from and dealing with your past ... at least facing it head-on. And we haven’t done that.

“I’m sad this book is still mistaken for realism and for political satire. That’s why I said that it’s my hope that one day some kid will pick it up and go: ‘Really? This stuff happened in Sri Lanka? No, he must be making it up!’”

Reality blurs with genre as Karunatilaka relays it’s “a big fantasy” that “having lived through a 30-year war, having lived through all these catastrophes” remains an omnipresent actuality, and not a made-up myth.

A load-shedding interlude interrupts our Zoom conversation. (An irksome phenomenon Karunatilaka is familiar with yet “doesn’t mind so much” because it gives him the opportunity to step out of his writing room, talk to the kids and turn off devices. “Two hours is OK, but eight hours is what gets people angry on the streets.”) He also notes the relevant adage on the first page of Seven Moons after the title page: There are only two gods worth worshipping. Chance and electricity.

Back in the digisphere ...

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida has undergone three title changes, with it being published in its original form as Chats of the Dead on the Indian subcontinent in 2020. The reason behind the appellation alteration was to make the novel “more accessible to Western audiences”. To what extent does altering a book’s title devalue or detract from the story?

“It’s a complicated story with many moving parts and layers but it’s the same story. And I think Seven Moons is the better book, objectively.”

He found it “puzzling” that Chats with the Dead had a “great reception” in India but failed to find anyone in the UK or the US who were “fans of my first [novel]” and attributes the “complicated Sri Lankan situation”, the layer of Eastern mythology — “about demons and rebirths and so on” — to “alienating” Western audiences.

“You want to be published outside the subcontinent. You want to be widely read.”

Author and editor’s accessibility advice was to explain the Sri Lankan political situation “quickly” and to make the afterlife “less complicated”.

From solving the murder, to unearthing the photographs, to resolving relationships, Seven Moons kept on “getting better” and “moved smoother”.

“It is a bit confusing to have two books with different titles,” he says with a slight nod. “I think Seven Moons will now replace Chats with the Dead. So whoever has Chats with the Dead, that’ll be a great collector’s item,” he grins.

Our conversation reaches its denouement with a query about his coiffure: would he describe it as a “man bun, a top bun or a plain ol’ bun”?

“That’s the best question I’ve had all week!” Karunatilaka laughs. “I don’t know ... I’ve had long hair since the days of Pearl Jam and [Kurt] Cobain. I’m used to being unfashionable but when you keep the same look you come into fashion at least once a decade.

“I’m OK with ‘man bun’,” he says, before venturing “... Gentleman bun” as an alternative.

“I’ll leave the terminology to you! I’ve had this look since the early 1990s and maybe the world’s just catching up.”

Ascribing an en vogue hairdo to chance? Maali would be proud.

Click here to buy a copy of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.