Under the surface

Author: Michael Ondaatje Publisher: Jonathan Cape Year: 2018 Pages: 290

The author was born in Ceylon, today Sri Lanka, in 1943 and immigrated to Montreal Canada when he was 19 years old.

He is best known for his lyrical The English Patient (1992) which was turned into a film in 1996 and won many awards.

It was also a co-winner of the Booker Prize in 1992.

It takes place in an Italian villa that was being used as a hospital in World War II. The book was noted for the richly described interior lives of its characters.

The author’s first best known work, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems was followed by another book of poems, Secular Love, which contains poetry about the break-up of his marriage.

Ondaatje’s prose works, better known than his poetry, include

Coming Through Slaughter

(1976), a novel about the descent into insanity of the New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden; Running in the Family (1982), his memoirs about life in Ceylon; and

In the Skin of a Lion (1987), a novel about the clash between rich and poor in early 20th century Toronto.

Later novels include Anil’s Ghost

(2000), set in Sri Lanka amid the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s; Divisadero (2007) and The Cat’s Table (2011), which refers to the table farthest from the captain’s table on a cruise ship, chronicling a voyage from Sri Lanka to England in the 1950s from the perspective of an 11-year-old boy and his two comrades.

The book being reviewed today tells of a teenage boy and his sister left with two mysterious men when their parents move to Singapore after World War II.

Nathaniel is 14, his sister Rachel 16, when they are left under the guardianship of their parent’s lodger, a man they call The Moth.

The book is told mostly by Nathaniel, looking back at the age of 29 at their adolescence. Though Rachel and he are supposed to be safely in boarding school, it isn’t long before they find reasons to escape. Their family home in Ruvigny Gardens is in the care of The Moth, whose colourful collection of friends drop in for short or long visits.

Many of these colourful characters have a Dickensian touch to them – the setting many times reminds the reader of Dickens’ haunts around the Thames.

The title “warlight” refers to the dimmed light in which everyone went about their lives in those times of blackouts and curfews.

Their world takes on an underwater night-time quality, against the background of the war, the cratered streets, the bombing. A friend, Olive Lawrence, takes them on night excursions through the Streatham woods; an ex-boxer and greyhound smuggler called the Pimlico Darter introduces Nathaniel to London’s rivertides and barges, the boats on which dog smugglers bring in tired greyhounds, the careful avoidance of the river police.

Their mother, Rose, makes a dramatic reentry in the second part of the novel. Working as an archivist years after her death, Nathaniel pieces together much of her career in war intelligence.

This is not just a novel about war, though Ondaatje is a sure guide to the lives of people damaged and turned in different directions by war’s crushing force.

Warlight is also about what lies under the surface of cities, and of sibling lives, family lives, all those powerful subterranean currents, the wreckage and the reclamation.