Aboard a ship of infinite wonders
Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table honoured by university in Alberta
Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel takes place almost entirely at sea. The Cat’s Table, from 2011, is set onboard a steamship in the 1950s, during a three-week trip from Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka) to England. It’s a loose, exuberant novel that delights in investigating the ship’s hidden corners and corridors, and spends most of its time with a group of low-status passengers — including a trio of unsupervised adolescent boys — who have all been given seats at the very worst table in the dining hall: the titular “cat’s table.”
But a few months before the novel was completed, the much-laurelled CanLit icon realized something. Despite the fact that Ondaatje had taken this very same trip as a child, he hadn’t spent all that much time on boats since.
“So I got on a ship from New York to London,” Ondaatje says, reached by phone at his home in Toronto. “I’d pretty well written the book, but I wanted to get a sense of the landscape of a ship.” How did it compare? “It was interesting. I was led to the table I was allotted to for my meals, and sitting there were these people who were not my characters. I thought, ‘Oh Jesus, who the hell are these guys?’ So I walked away, and ate in the cafeteria for the whole journey. I didn’t want to be with those people. I wanted to be with my people. The fiction of the ship had replaced the reality of it.”
Alberta’s MacEwan University recently named The Cat’s Table its book of the year for 2012/13. It’s the most recent accolade for a man with a long string of them; Ondaatje already has a Man Booker Prize, a Giller, five Governor General’s awards (three for fiction, two for poetry), France’s Prix Médicis étranger, the first Canada Reads, and a host of others under his belt.
The MacEwan distinction, however, means that this year the novel will be taught in 41 classrooms across campus, to more than 1,000 students. It’s also the impetus behind several events being held around MacEwan this month — culminating in a public evening event with Ondaatje himself in Edmonton.
At the heart of The Cat’s Table is the aforementioned trio of 11-yearold boys: rambunctious Cassius, mild-mannered Ramadhin, and the narrator Mynah, who’s somewhere in the middle, and thus equally susceptible to both. They spend their days running wild from deck to deck, stealing food from the firstclass tables, smuggling dogs onboard, and eavesdropping on private conversations from the safety of the lifeboats.
“Cassius, Ramadhin and I had already established one rule,” Ondaatje writes early on. “Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden.” They’re never short on ideas.
Despite the intrigue of their highprofile fellow passengers, from the captain to a mysterious dying millionaire, Mynah and the others wind up growing far more interested in their odd tablemates instead.
“Mynah has a sense that there’s much more verve and excitement on the periphery,” Ondaatje told me. “If you’re unofficial, you’re much freer. Because you’re invisible. You can do things that the guy at the head table cannot do. He’s stuck with some boring old man at his left.”
And even though Mynah is about to arrive in a foreign land, where he will be reunited with his mother and start a completely new life with her, he never gives much thought to what the future has in store.
Obviously, the fact that he’s aboard a ship of seemingly infinite wonders is at least partly to blame. But Ondaatje says it’s also a basic function of youth.
“When we, as adults, talk about going to New York, or Rangoon, we’re at an age where we can check it out (ahead of time): the weather, and stuff like that,” he says. “You don’t think that far ahead, as a kid. You think about your breakfast that morning, and the dog you met on the street. You’re not thinking 21 days ahead.”