Abstract
The Habit of Detour Many book reviews and later articles of literary criticism have accused Ondaatje of circumventing the historical realities of the traumas of the Sri Lankan civil war of which he writes in Anil's Ghost. In an earlier issue of Studies in the Novel, Margaret Scanlan opens an article on Anil's Ghost by questioning whether "[b]y omitting so much of what we expect from a political novel in the way of public events and historical detail, Ondaatje might risk aestheticizing terror, repeating the modernist gesture of turning away from atrocity to timeless form" (emphasis added).