Deception and perception in the shadows of time

Author of The English Patient Michael Ondaatje’s new book is his most satisfying novel in years

WARLIGHT

(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)

MICHAEL Ondaatje’s novels are often at their best when exploring the murky byways that run though public and private lives, when they stake out the territory between what a person says and what he or she actually does or thinks in secret.

Think of Almasy in The English Patient, drifting through his carefully curated recollections of pre-war life as he slowly dies in the ruined monastery, or even the inchoate passions of the jazz musician Buddy Bolden in Ondaatje’s early masterpiece Coming through Slaughter.

Warlight flits through the shadows of just such lives, where everything is made cryptic and strange by unexplained gestures, half-understood motivations and withheld information. These are lives lived in the warlight of the title, the muted blackout light of wartime London that still seems to grip the city in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

As the novel begins, 14-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are told that their parents are going to move to Singapore, for their father’s work.

Boarding at a nearby public school, the children will be looked after in the holidays by an enigmatic family friend, “a humble man, large but moth-like in his shy movements” who the children inevitably nickname “the Moth”.

“‘We were always conscious of his tentative presence,” Nathaniel recalls, ‘of his alighting here and there.’ Rachel suspects him of criminality, but when the children rebel against their boarding house regime, it is the Moth who generously intercedes and arranges for them to stay at home instead. He also comforts the children when they realise that their parents have left all of their luggage behind, and have not gone to Singapore after all. They have vanished, and no one will tell them where they have gone.

In this strange limbo of unknowing, Nathaniel and Rachel adapt as only children can; they continue at school, they get jobs in the holidays, and they find themselves forming an integral part of the Moth’s curious retinue of cronies and hangers-on.

These include “The Pimlico Darter”, a former welterweight boxer, as well as his mistress Olive Lawrence, an ethnographer who had helped the Admiralty on sea currents and tides in the early stages of the war.

There’s Arthur McCash, an Esperanto-speaking young man recently stationed abroad “doing crop studies in the Levant”, who hints at a close friendship with Nathaniel and Rachel’s mother.

As Nathaniel drifts into the Moth’s demi-monde of “not quite legal” hustles and scams (spending one summer helping The Darter ferry greyhounds over from Holland to use in rigged dog races, for example), he begins to understand that all of these people have had some connection to his parents, and to his mother’s unexplained wartime activities.

After a sudden and brutal attempt on his life Nathaniel realises the war may be over, but the consequences of his mother’s actions during it are still playing out. In the second part of the book, Ondaatje takes Nathaniel from the secretive world of his unusual childhood into the equally opaque world of the Cold War intelligence services, where he begins to piece together the blood feuds and double-crosses, the pitiless vendettas, that had followed his mother from her operations in wartime Yugoslavia to post-war England.

A poet before he was a novelist, Ondaatje’s spare and evocative prose perfectly captures the crumbled austerity of post-war London, from the ‘grey universe’ of the Criterion Hotel’s kitchens where Nathaniel briefly works, to the network of canals outside the city where he helps the Darter smuggle his doped greyhounds, “floating in the silence of those waterways”, directing river barges to mysterious assignations with gamblers and fixers.

Ondaatje has always had more than just a perceptive eye for specifics though, and with his lightly-worn research he seems able to occupy the whole drifting

Ondaatje, with his lightly-worn research, seems able to occupy the whole drifting milieu of the post-war period