Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > Chats with the Dead

The Beta Version of 2022 Booker Prize winner “Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” (which was published in the UK in August 2022 by Sort of Books – a small independent publisher founded by the co-founders of the Rough Guide Travel Series (husband and wife team – Mark Ellingham and Natania Jansz – a fellow Sri Lankan)

This version was originally published in India in February 2020 by Penguin India as “Chats with the Dead” (note a publication 6 months earlier would have made “Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” Booker ineligible were it counted as the same book).

And returning to my Beta-analogy, Natania, in particular, acted as the Beta-tester refining the book for more general release – finding and identifying a number of bugs and more particularly making a large number of suggestions for final improvements which in turn very much laid the foundations for its Booker success (as the author has acknowledged in a number of interviews).

Across a number of interviews the author has explained the difference between the two books – what is very clear is that while the initial motivation was to make the book more accessible for an International audience by clarifying some of the Buddhist mythology and Sri Lankan politics, the end results (aided by the process taking place over 2 years of lockdown) was much more around making the novel a more tightly edited, better paced book – for example by making the murder mystery a little more central and not lost among the equally important political thriller, afterlife satire/ghost story and love triangle.

My original aim with this book was to place Chats side by side with Seven Moons and systematically identify the differences between the two – but in practice it proved a little too time consuming, but a few observations:

- Consistent with what the author has said about the developing focus I could see only limited evidence of changes made to either political or mythological references. And parts of the book which a Seven Moons reader might think were added there for Western Readers – most specifically the Abbreviations section “letter to Andy” are taken straight from Chats

- Instead the largest changes are in moving around the order of sections (although with the sections largely unchanged). This seemed most noticeable in two places: First Moon where the initial session in the Afterlife in Seven Moons is much longer than in Chats (which shifts quickly to the Box Under The Bed and then returns); Fifth-Seventh Moons where the order seems moved around a lot between the days

- Chats has one early section I found that it seemed to me is completely missing from Seven Moons – where Kottu/Balal/Drivermaali feed the dead bodies to the panthers (this is only alluded to in Seven Moons). Later reading interviews I found this quote which confirmed my view “There’s a gruesome scene right at the beginning of Chats With the Dead, where bodies are being fed to cats and that is a scene straight out of nightmares, and we just thought, you know it’s going to turn off readers, and there’s enough violence anyway so maybe we should take it out.”

- Some slightly odd (possibly censorial?) changes to references: for example a comment “Coming back to life form this is as likely as Israelies leaving Palestine” was removed. Also the designation and name of the boxes of photos is altered – in particularly in Chats “Queens” refers to the pictures of men (and not the CNTR photos). And when Jaki (influenced in her dreams by Maali) realises the negatives are stored in two Kings and Queen linked albums the reference to “His Hand in Mine by Elvis and Hot Space by Queen” as “terrible albums by great artists” is instead “terrible albums couched in gatefold sleeves”

. Seven Moons rather oddly appears to have several BBC references removed. In Chats the BBC are mentioned in the Abbrevations alongside the UN as “a**eholes to work with” and further Sudworth works (at least notionally) for the BBC and not for AP. Another comment in Chats asks “Are they for the British Consultate. Or the BBC. Or MI6”

- The rather strange reference to “None of them knew that your Nikon used rolls of thirty-six and not thirty-two. Which meant you got to keep four photos from each reel, and cut out the negatives, and they never knew otherwise” in Seven Moons which Neil (a professional photographer points out in his review makes little or no sense) seems to have been added as it was missing in Chats

- And finally Maali’s imaginary gravestone has 1990 as his death date in Seven Moons and 1989 in Chats which is interesting to me as having written the first review of Seven Moons and then reading other reviews as they came in I noted with interest that no one seemed quite clear if the book was set in 1989 or 1990