Living in the twilight zone, post-blitz London

Semi-fictional memoir looks back on narrator’s troubled childhood

I WAS charmed by Michael Ondaatje’s semi-fictional memoir, Running in the Family, in the 1980s.

The “peg” on which he hangs much of his story-telling is the attempt in adulthood to regain and make sense of a lost childhood.

To quote Alex Preston, in The Guardian: “If we think about memory this way – as a medium of visual metaphors – then we begin to understand the extraordinary intensity of Ondaatje’s writing style: he is a memory artist.

“The unique reality effect that he achieves in his best work is the product of his ability to summon images with an acuity that makes the reader experience them with the force of something familiar, intimate and truthful.”

In Warlight, we find Nathaniel, 14 years old in 1945, contemplating the departure of his father to Singapore. The father is a shadowy figure and attention is focused on the mother, Rose, who is busily packing a trunk in anticipation of going to join him once she has settled the children.

Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are to be left in the family home in the care of The Moth, who lives on the top floor.

The boarding school arrangement is not successful and he facilitates the swopping of their boarding schools for day schools and so they are soon sharing in the life that he has instigated in their London home.

Ondaatje lets Nathaniel describe often clandestine activities through luminously crafted visual pictures – the Thames at night with a greyhound smuggler; first sexual encounters in empty houses.

These fragments exemplify the feeling that Nathaniel has that his life is being lived in a sort of twilight zone – hence the title Warlight which describes the atmosphere in postblitz London.

Eventually Rose returns and it seems that she never went to Singapore (the children had found her trunk stashed, unopened) but is not telling them where she has been nor about her connections.

After various episodes that make it apparent that she is in danger due to this secret activity (by now it is becoming clear that she is a spy or secret agent) and that the children are also in danger, she and Nathaniel end up in a village near her childhood home.

In the second half of the book, Nathaniel, in his late twenties, lives in the same village where he is piecing together the jigsaw pieces of his mother, the secret agent and a local man, Marsh Felon. He can only “step into fragments of their story”.

Ondaatje offers tantalising glimpses of fascinating back stories.