Once more into the darkness with Ondaatje
Michael Peterman reads Warlight, the latest novel from the Canadian author
It is always a pleasure — delicious with mystery, disturbing but engaging, often cleverly surprising — to engage with a new Michael Ondaatje novel. A personal engagement is of course far from a simple reading experience. He is a challenging author. One of Canada’s best-known novelists and poets, he was the winner of England’s Booker
Prize for The English Patient; in fact, that book was recently voted the best novel among all the Booker Prize winners over the past 50 years.
Warlight is his eighth novel. It tells the story of two “abandoned” teenagers in postwar London. It focuses on Nathaniel, the youngest of the pair as he attempts to make sense of his mother’s disappearance when he was 14; in the telling many mysteries emerge about her life as a spy during World War Two and its murky aftermath. The novel is Nathaniel’s “memoir” of a complex and loyal parent under trying circumstances.
Ondaatje offers an interesting perspective on memoir writing. “When you attempt a memoir…, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. ‘A memoir is a lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look.” Such is Nathaniel’s fate as a writer. He is deep in memories of his own lost inheritance and trying to find a meaning in his curious experiences.
Warlight carries something of the dark atmosphere of “gaslight,” a word it echoes. The novel insists upon mysteries and takes the reader into a dark, troubled world where the ordinary is displaced at every turn and one struggles to make sense of motivations, spectral figures, and confusing fragments of information. Ondaatje’s mélange of mystification takes place in the aftermath of the war in dark and uncertain London; in 1945 nothing is as it seems; many of the old conventions of social order have been tossed aside and upended by losses and new pressures.
It seems that every reviewer of the novel has a different favorite among Ondaatje’s previous books. Mine is one not often cited in London and New York literary circles. It is his impressive Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion. Warlight resembles it in its vividly impressionistic narrative method, its pursuit of an always fragmented truth, and its focus on a dark urban realities not to be found in tourist brochures and local histories. And just as the immigrant streets of Ondaatje’s Toronto need to be seen from a geographical and spatial distance — in that case Marmora, Ontario — so war-torn London is viewed in Warlight from the peaceful distance of Suffolk, a rural county in East Anglia, carefully researched by the author.
Warlight is divided into two parts. The first depicts the curious lives of Nathaniel and Rachel in postwar London after their parents leave them, apparently to take up work in Singapore. In their new reality they are overseen by some very odd ducks, particularly “The Moth” and “The Pimlico Darter,” who are conscripted to look after the family house in south London and oversee the education of the orphans. Ondaatje lets us know early on that what Nathaniel experiences in London are but “partial truths” — the boy recalls his experiences as if they were parts of “Authurian legends”; they tantalize and seem to inform, but in fact they further mystify “the obscure rigging of our mother’s life” and Naathaniel’s experiences as her son.
As narrator Nathaniel seeks above all to know more about his elusive mother and her life. “We order our lives with barely held stories,” he later writes, putting due emphasis on the absence of a normative narrative thread by which he can make sense of things. For her part Rose as mother is of little help because her secret work as a radio operator and spy obliges her to keep details of her life and duties from her children. As Nathaniel later concludes, “Rose is disquieting in her fierce determination to remain unreadable.” His own mistrust of her as parent conspires with her tight-lipped personal reticence to obscure the kind of truths that Nathaniel seeks.
The first half of the book focuses on the adolescent lives of Nathaniel and Rachel. Many of Ondaatje’s early scenes are magical in their evocativeness. We see them in London’s unlit streets taking their meals at “street barrows.” We see them as The Darter’s helpers in ferrying greyhounds from track to track through London’s darkened canals. We see Nathaniel as a kitchen worker under The
Moth’s direction at the Criterion Hotel in Piccadilly Circus. We see his affair with Agnes, a fellow kitchen worker, usually undertaken in empty London houses. There is something dark, disturbing and Dickensian about these characters and events. They leaving the reader fascinated but uncertain about them. Characters like Olive Lawrence, Harry Nkoma, and Arthur McCash each play a part in the teenagers’ lives (but ‘what is that part?’ we find ourselves asking). So too they are closely connected with the story of Rose and their elusive father. It is Olive who gives Nathaniel an important warning about writing memoirs: “Your story is not the important one.” It is his nature to take such advice seriously.
The second and longer part of the novel takes place in Suffolk. It is 1959 and Nathaniel is 28 (twice as old as in Part One); he works for a government archives in London sorting out military records and classified documents from the war. Increasingly obsessed with understanding his mother, he has chosen to live in the countryside where she grew up — the area is called “The Saints” near the Blyth River. He lives alone in the house once owned by his older friend and employer Sam Malakite, and there he especially cherishes his enclosed garden. The house is a walk from the old cottage, White Paint, formerly owned by Rose’s parents. Through his talks with Sam we learn more about Rose’s inner life, particularly her attachment to Marsh Felon (a Dickensian name to be sure) who she had met as a very young girl when Marsh and his family thatched the roof of White Paint. Ondaatje makes clear that Rose carefully protects her identity in retirement just as she had during the war.
The novel’s two parts articulate a surprising truth: “An unauthorized and still violent war had continued since the armistice.” “The repercussions of peace” and “dangerous intelligence work” are complex and dangerous; hence, Rose has to hide out and continue to find ways to protect herself and her two now-grown children. Despite Rachel’s (fervent and surprising) hatred of her, she had done what she could. At the same time Rose knows that sometime in the future her killer will arrive, bent on a different kind of duty.
Warlight takes us into this uneasy, dark, and fragmented world where our conventional reliance on social certainties is nakedly absent. It is a wonderful read, full of surprises and evocative writing. I suspect that it would have won this year’s Giller Prize had its author allowed it to be included in the competition.