Michael Ondaatje continues to intrigue. While his new novel, Warlight, lacks the charm of The Cat’s Table, published in 2011, or the lyricism of earlier work such as The English Patient (1992) and Anil’s Ghost (2000), it has a singular appeal.
Ondaatje’s plot is secular and its protagonists and their situations even more so. In this odd, terse tale, the prize-winning writer lingers in the murky world of wartime secret intelligence and its postwar aftermath. It is a multi-layered story and although Ondaatje tells it with his trademark aplomb, the novel can, at times, seem too scattered to hold together.
Ondaatje’s narrator, however, captures reader attention with the book’s first sentence: “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” The children in question are 14-year-ld Nathaniel Williams and his sister, Rachel, almost sixteen. Their parents, elusive figures whose later disappearance may (or may not) be permanent, had told the teenagers they would be gone for a year, a business promotion for their father, and would be living in Singapore. Nathaniel and Rachel were to remain in London to continue their schooling.
But as the plot unfolds, Nathaniel and Rachel continue their off-kilter “education” along bizarre lines not foreseen by their fugitive parents. Their appointed guardian will be the family’s third floor lodger, a man they had labelled The Moth, “a humble man, large but moth-like in his shy movements,” a man Rachel suspects of involvement in criminal activity.
Nathaniel, the narrator, thinks back: “The arrangement appeared strange, but life still was haphazard and confusing during that period after the war; so what had been suggested did not feel unusual.” He adds, in a mocking tone, “I suppose there had once been an attempt to make us a tightly knit family.”
But The Moth is not always the lone adult in the family’s home. Added to the mix is his associate, The Darter, a former welterweight boxer, a mysterious figure “dedicated to quickness,” self contained, opaque, but fascinating to Nathaniel and Rachel. As are the assorted hangers-on who begin to populate their parents’ premises.
Nathaniel hopes his mother, if she surfaces, won’t hear of the strangers crowding the house. “They did not in any way resemble a normal family, not even a beached Swiss Family Robinson. The house felt more like a night zoo, with moles and jackdaws and shambling beasts who happened to be chess players, a gardener, a possible greyhound thief, a slow-moving opera singer.”
It is against this backdrop of eccentric acquaintances, of uprootedness, of unaccustomed freedom, that Ondaatje spins a story which is both clever and, at the same time, somewhat contrived. As Nathaniel and Rachel begin to drift from their former closeness, as their “education” continues in surprising ways on what Ondaatje calls the “borderless terrain” between adolescence and adulthood, the novel tracks their diverging paths.
Unsupervised and swept up in unfamiliar liberties, the siblings pay little heed to attendance at classes. While Rachel indulges her interest in theatre, Nathaniel joins The Darter in his illegal smuggling of greyhound racing dogs from France into England. “I became fully caught up in his plans,” Nathaniel remembers, “accompanying him as often as I could on his barge, the flood tides carrying us into or out of London on those night journeys I sometimes still yearn for.”
In the beginning, both Nathaniel and Rachel felt drawn to a clandestine world which seemed, especially to Nathaniel, more magical than dangerous as they “floated in the silence of those waterways, Rachel memorizing her exits and entrances for Julius Caesar, Nathaniel a witness to the silent exchange of illicit goods.
From his vantage point 12 years after the war’s end, Nathaniel sets out to piece together the puzzles surrounding his interrupted adolescence. His search through government archives takes him closer to his mother’s checkered past, to her acceptance of “a world of secretiveness, where there is a different power, where there is no generosity,” to traces of The Moth and The Darter, figures which remain in his own “ravine of childhood.”
The war light of the book’s title, artfully woven into Ondaatje’s unusual story, refers to the dim orange light needed to guide undercover espionage and other activity in the last years of the war. Nathaniel’s ferreting through once sealed archives helps nudge him toward a belated accommodation with war, memory and broken family ties. His search is a coming-to-terms, hard won, with the ghosts of the past.
Warlight is vintage Ondaatje; cool, detached and wonderful polished. The book’s plot is intriguing, but its characters, among them Nathaniel’s mother, less than engaging. Most readers, though, will savour the prolific writer’s story-telling skills in a novel which, although not his best, follows a fine tradition.
Nancy Schiefer is a London freelance writer