Michael Ondaatje: A giant step towards Nobel podium
So much left buried at the end of a war, says, Nathaniel, the protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s latest work of fiction ‘Warlight’, based on the aftermath of the Nazi blitz over London during the Second World War.
The intriguing novel is about how Nathaniel unearths the hidden past of his mother, Rose, who worked as a spy during the war and her dubious association with some of her former colleagues, continuing even after the war. Unlike ‘The English Patient’ that covers a wider reach of the war affecting lives in continents, the Sri Lankan-born, two-time Booker-winning author describes his latest fiction as a ‘domestic situation’ in an interview with the Toronto Star.
The novel begins with the protagonist’s father moving to Singapore on a posting for Unilever’s and his mother allegedly following him but the accidental discovery of her streamer trunk in the basement puzzles the teenager. The reader’s immediate thoughts could be that it is a murder considering the type of company she keeps, but later he finds she has gone underground to settle some scores with European partisan sections involved in the war.
She put the kids, 14-year-old son Nathaniel and daughter Rachel (16), in charge of two men, known to the children as The Moth and The Darter, ‘who may be criminals’ according to their observations. Later it is revealed that Rose who worked with the two men on espionage work during her shadowy occupation during the war, are the most trusted men with whom she could leave her two teenage kids as she goes on her dangerous mission of vandetta.
Soon the house is ‘felt more like a night zoo,’ Nathaniel says as friends of the two men straight out of the Dickensian world fill the house at odd times, “moles and jackdaws and shambling beasts who happened to be chess players, a gardener, a possible greyhound thief, a slow-moving opera singer”. A woman ethnographer who speaks Aramaic and Esperanto too appears among the edgy, diverse group of odd men. Much of the action of the novel takes place in the dark or against dim light (street-lit windows) as houses are kept deliberately dark to trick the German bombers.
“The illegal world felt more magical and dangerous to me” observes Nathaniel as he helps the two men in their shadowy occupations, one of which is smuggling greyhounds in mussel boats across the Thames at night for illegal dog racing. The fragmented characters and their tales begin to bear coherence as Nathaniel’s mother resurfaces connecting him with the characters of her past while also discovering her days of shadowy past as he begins to work at the government archives office.
This is Ondaatje’s eighth work in 42 years of his career as a fiction writer. Sometimes it is agonizing to wait such a long time for a book but he does not disappoint and we know he is a writer who spends enormous time researching his source material.
In ‘The English Patient’ we became familiar with the desert life, bomb-defusing and sapping through Kip; in Anil’s Ghost he researched heavily into the hardline Sinhalese factions’ violence in Sri Lanka and the ancient rituals of painting of Buddha’s eyes on statues; in Devisadero it was about gambling, and he actually sailed in a steamer to write his last novel ‘The Cat’s Table’. He cites more than a dozen book as his references for ‘Warlight’ that includes a book titled ‘The Roof Climbers Guide to Trinity’, material on grey hound racing in Britain and even the nocturnal behaviour of the crickets.
Former US president Barak Obama has added ‘Warlight’ to his must-read five books for summer along with recently-departed Nobel laureate V.S. Naipal’s House for Mr. Biswas.
I believe that the magical novel is 74-year-old Ondaatje’s best fiction after Anil’s Ghost and a giant step in the direction of the Nobel podium. His only Canadian competitor in this case is Margaret Atwood who is four years older than him. – Somasiri Munasinghe
