Extremely thorough and well-written. Such much darkness and death on this little island. Tourists don't seem to have a clue that they are looking at a fairly recent battlefield and mass gravesite. Wow. I gave it three stars because it was relentless in its horrors and I couldn't stomach some of it. I needed more breaks in the text, I guess. ( )

Being an Australian my interactions with Sri Lanka have been through cricket, Sinhalese university friends, hearing about the Civil War and what Arthur C. Clarke may have been doing with young boys. Thanks to Elephant Complex, I now know far, far more about the country, its history and its customs and far, far more than I really needed to know about one of the most vicious cil wars imaginable and what many western men were doing with young boys.

Gimlette can write lyrically and evocatively and I often stopped reading to admire a turn of phrase. His connections to the great and the good of Sri Lankan society gave him access to many places barred to the hoi polloi so we get guided tours of Civil War era torture chambers and the like. In all, a fascinating, if not deeply unsettling read, even if Gimlette's distaste of cricket was baffling. ( )

A hart-searing tale of the violence in the history of what seems an idyllic Indian Ocean island paradise. Apart from a stylistic predilection to see malevolence in ordinary bushes and grasses, the author covers a huge swath of the island's past, and a good chunk of the more recent struggle with ethnic violence and the LTTE, through conversations, travels around the country, and old accounts. ( )

The first half of this book is a reasonably traditional travel book; the author wanders pacific, cosmopolitan Colombo and its environs, describing people, places, and history. His nose for a good anecdote is telling, and he's a fine writer. As for his history, though, I felt a touch of Baron Munchausen setting in; his grasp is probably firm enough going back about two centuries, but whenever he started in on gigantic ancient cities, now backwaters if they survive at all, which were bigger and better-known than Rome, I felt as though I was watching a cable TV documentary on Atlantis, particularly since none of these supposed metropoles are sited anywhere near a coast, let alone a harbor, or a river, which are the places that ancients invariably located their cities.

After the first half of the book's whimsies, he settles into a grim tour of the war zones of the generation-long Tamil Eelam insurgency and attendant civil war, uncovering atrocity after atrocity. Some will find this gruesome and difficult to take; I mostly found it a slow read, and ultimately this sluggishness is what makes this book, however well-written, less than a masterpiece. It's simply too long by half, and its vocabulary demands too daunting (has this man never heard of a thing called a 'glossary'?) His banquet of delightful anecdotes becomes a little less delightful during one's third week of reading than it was during the first week. It's not easy to isolate sections of the book which could be excised, but I fear that for me, the memory of the author's logorrhea will linger for at least as long as his fine prose stylings. ( )

I first heard of John Gimlette when he spoke at the Galle Literary Festival here in Sri Lanka. I have travelled widely myself and picked up the occasional travel book. But this was a real treasure for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, and my favourite aspect of the book was that he brought to life much of the dry dull history I learned in school many years ago. And there were so many interesting facts and anecdotes that none of us had read about! And put across with such humour too...
What impressed me was that he tackled both ancient and recent history, including the ethnic war. There are many who believe he as an outsider had no right to write of what he knew nothing about, but I disagree. He handled sensitive issues without much open bias. Neither party were completely blameless in the whole sordid affair.
He also highlighted many social issues such as prostitution that is the ugly truth that many ignore.
I read the paperback edition, and it was quite a massive tome - I lugged it up and down for days before finally getting to the end of it. But not once did I wish to abandon it halfway. ( )