The light of other lives
Aftermath of childhood abandonment during a war
At the start of “Warlight,” Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, two children watch their mother sleep in the predawn hours: “Best of all, when first light slipped into our rooms, we’d enter her bedroom ... and gaze at her undressed face, the closed eyes, the white shoulders and arms already stretched out to gather us in.”
Through the magic of light, their mother is seen but unseeing, exposed but distant. In this quiet, lushly shaded and haunting novel, one of those children — Nathaniel Williams — attempts to unveil his mother, Rose Williams, to uncouple her from all the gradations of light thathide more than they clarify.
He wants to understand why she left him and his sister for a year in the immediate aftermath of World War II. “Warlight” is replete with physical descriptions of light: the sulfur lights of theaters and the eerie cast of a gas fireplace; the playful shading of tree leaves reflected in water; the momentary illumination of a bolt of lightning; even a community newspaper named The Mint Light.
And there is the eponymous warlight, which is as much a state of mind, a sign for the fog of memory, as it is a reference to the small orange lights on bridges, guiding ammunitions barges down the Thames during the war. In the postwar world Mr. Ondaatje creates, light shuttles people between salient experiences from childhood reminiscent of fairy tales to adulthood where even basic facts about one’s life fail to communicate any fullness of truth.
The novel is narrated by 29-yearold Nathaniel but begins when he is 14 in 1945 London. His mother and father announce that they will be leaving him and his sister, Rachel, fora yearlong trip to Singapore.
No explanations are offered, and little comfort is on hand after the parents depart, only a sometimesguardian and vaguely criminal figure nicknamed The Moth. From The Moth and the people who orbit about him, Nathaniel cobbles together disparate stories about his mother, including her actions with BritishIntelligence during the war.
Through a first love affair and his own introduction into criminal activity (helping to smuggle unregistered racing greyhounds into England), Nathaniel becomes a wary teenager, gazing upon his own life from a distance.
“Warlight” unfolds into another dimension of complexity as Nathaniel leaves the scene of his adolescence and wades through memory and government archives, looking for the mother he never knew. Incidental aspects of Rose’s life become “clues,” and revelations unfurl like a slow-opening flower rather than arriving like a bolt out of the blue.
I found my orientation as a reader changing, as well. At one point, while reading a description of a character searching for references to light in books, I paused, realizing I was about to (and had been) enacting the same gesture.
My experience as a reader enfolded into the novel’s domain largely, I think, because “Warlight” uses our desire as readers to know the “whole” story, bringing your experience to bear on Nathaniel’s quest in the subterranean channels of memory and nostalgia.
This is an immensely rich and rewarding, and at times uncanny, aspect of reading Michael Ondaatje. Both “Anil’s Ghost” and “The English Patient” weave relationships from the finest threads and require the memories of childhood, meaningless at the time, to find a sense of meaning as an adult.
In the end, with enough facts to understand his mother’s absence, the totality of her presence eludes Nathaniel.
He fills in the gaps of her life the only way he can: through his imagination. The child becomes the author of his mother’s story by borrowing a technique of Japanese art, the “lost roof technique”: “A high perspective allows you to see over walls into usually hidden distances, as if into other lives and countries ... a lateral awareness allowed by height.” Throughout “Warlight” Nathaniel searches for the clarity of this “lateral awareness” but realizes too late that his aloof stance stunts his own relationships. One of the fallouts is his sister, Rachel, a missing link in this novel.
The lives of parents before their children are always something of a mystery to those children. Growing up, it can be difficult to imagine that our parents even existed before we arrived on the scene. As “Warlight” lyrically indicates, parents’ lives always exist simultaneously within themselves and in their children’s imaginations.