WRITING WITHOUT A ROAD MAP
In an exclusive interview, Michael Ondaatje reveals, sometimes reluctantly, the story behind his latest novel, Warlight
Quick: Name the first Canadian writers that come to mind. Michael Ondaatje is usually among the top three, along with Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. All have put this country’s writing on the international map. But Ondaatje seems to get around the most, geographically. Born in Sri Lanka, he spent part of his teenage years in London and now lives mostly in Toronto. He’s won many awards including the Booker Prize for The English Patient, set in Italy, and the Giller Prize, among others, for Anil’s Ghost, set in Sri Lanka.
His latest novel, Warlight, features a pair of young siblings, Nathaniel and Rachel, who have been abandoned by their parents and left in the care of a range of colourful characters in post-war London.
It’s due for release on May 8. In an exclusive interview, the Star spoke to Ondaatje, 74, on the phone from a warmer clime, where he has spent the winter along with, among others, his elderly cat.
“I just gave him a needle for diabetes,” the author begins, laughing. “He’s a good guy.”
Your books often bring the history of cities to life — beginning with New Orleans in Coming Through Slaughter; Toronto in In The Skin of a Lion and now London in Warlight. Why London this time? I lived in London when I was a teenager; I knew the landscape there. I’ve always been interested in what is underneath the formal landscape of a place, whether it’s New Orleans or Toronto. The locale and place is substantial to me. That’s what grounds me, I guess, when I’m writing a book. It’s the location and time because I have something very real to go with. And I can then research.
How much time did you spend doing research? I do a lot of research into the geography and historical time when I write books like In The Skin of a Lion. Even in a book like Divisadero there was … research on location ... on villages, and habits, and cooking, and all these things. That kind of grounds me.
(For this book) I went to England several times. I went to Suffolk, which is where some of the book takes place. And then the river was another thing; I went on various treks up and down it and also saw a lot of archives of the river during the war. I was just very interested in the hidden aspect of a river or a city.
When you start a book how much do you know of what’s going to happen? You’ve said you start with the place and the time. What happens from there? I have to admit I know very little (laughing). I mean there are writers who know everything about the book before they begin and I’m one of those kind of remiss people who has to sort of discover the book as I’m writing it and as I’m plodding along and the characters emerge from there. You could ask me, who is Marsh Felon or who is the daughter (Rachel) or who is Olive Lawrence? You know, two days before I started the book I would not know them. It’s sort of shocking, actually.
Do they materialize as they’re needed? The first time the Darter turns up is in the family living room. And I had no idea. It was a stranger entering the book, and then he became interesting to me and therefore he evolved and he became more complex. And that’s usually the pattern.
Is this book a war story? I didn’t want it to be a book about the Second World War, or a war novel. It was much more a domestic situation in a way. The ending of wars is always kind of a treacherous time you know, we (take it) that it’s always kind of a positive thing, but all these deals are being made, contracts are being signed, so it was just that leap from a war period to a peacetime period and all those hidden things that go on.
How much of your own experience do you draw on in the creation of Nathaniel? Nathaniel is pretty much an invention. It’s interesting to me, most of the characters I write about are invented; they are never really based on one specific person. I think that limits you as a writer so that when you start a novel with a character like “Nathaniel” in quotation marks, I don’t really know very much about him and it’s only gradually that you discover him and how he really turns out to be. Now there are things, obviously, things emotionally that (you) can relate to certain aspects of him, you know. So Nathaniel isn’t me in any way but if you write about anything you’re going to draw yourself into the story in what you recognize and what you notice and how you think.
There’s a point where he says, “The family did not in any way resemble a normal family, not even a beached Swiss Family Robinson.” But there was still caring and connection and nurturing. You seem to be exploring how family can be more than one thing. I think it’s quite interesting that the family in The English Patient is made up of strangers, for instance, and I think certainly, there’s a lot of echoes between the characters in Warlight. Felon, he escapes his family, the Darter escapes his family and they’re a kind of education to Nathaniel who does not want to escape his family, perhaps. So I think in all of those connections there are echoes and rhymes between the situation ... and the people in the book. I mean it (wasn’t as if ) I planned the progress but that’s how it happened.
It seemed to me that they were very evocative of storytelling in the vein of Dickens. I’ve read my Dickens! I wasn’t very conscious of trying to be Dickensian but I can see now looking back, with those river scenes and what is underneath the surface of the city.
Despite the heaviness there’s a lightness to this book. I think the book is pretty funny, too. It’s also dark. There was an entertainment involved in some of the characters, like the Darter, you know. It’s not a conscious (decision), “OK, I have to make this scene funny,” but when you’re writing a book many, many aspects of yourself come into it: the drama of it, the sorrow of it, the shame and the humour. It’s all one. All those elements which are natural to us exist side by side and the humour is sort of important.
Another theme that comes up repeatedly in your books is the idea of memories fading or being hidden in fog: in this book, certainly — and in Coming Through Slaughter there’s a picture of ( jazz pioneer) Buddy Bolden that’s faded; you can’t quite get a sense of him. It’s a powerful image — fading, fog, the inability to remember. The past sort of getting lost. Again, it’s that archeological mine, you know, that the writer has. Bolden really was lost to history, the recordings of him, the usual biography of him. When I began writing that book ... they had his address, the name of his wife, the name of his kids and that he was a famous musician. That’s all there was. So in a way the book is trying to evoke him and bring him back to life. I think that’s why I’ve always thought that if I know too much about a theme or a period of time, that kind of limits you … it becomes locked into an official portrait. I mean someone like Louis Armstrong, one of the great jazz musicians. How could you write a book about him, you know, apart from with a non-fiction tone? Where, with Bolden, there was still a lot unsaid, unknown, so that allowed you an opportunity to invent and to also go deeper.
I understand you start off writing your books by handwriting. In fact you had a poetry collection not that long ago titled Handwriting. Is this key to your creative process? Very much so. I don’t think I could write a book on a typewriter or on a computer. I do have to write by hand, and several drafts are done by hand. It doesn’t feel like a slow process; my handwriting is pretty fast. It just seems more natural to me and I can think better by handwriting as opposed to typing … (Also) you can see what you’re crossing out and it’s still there if you want to go back to it.
You might not have a road map for writing — but there are many maps mentioned in the book both as symbols and as practical items. Why mention maps so much? It’s funny, I don’t remember too many maps. There’s the one that Felon draws. There’s the boy mentioning he could draw a map of the canals … and as a boy he drew an imagined map of his neighbourhood. Which is quite a lot when you actually think about it.
And there are the maps in the map room ... Well I guess there are a lot of maps (laughing). It’s amazing. Even looking back at a story you’ve written, the thing starts looking a little different.
Anything else you want to say? No, I try to say everything in the book! And it feels quite strange because this is my first interview about the book so it’s kind of interesting. You’ve kind of made this thing and then someone starts talking about it. So that’s why I felt a bit awkward about answering some of the questions. Because I didn’t know — do I have the right to say what it could mean or not mean? D.H. Lawrence said to trust the tale, not the teller. At this point the reader knows more than the author about the book and the story, I think.