This was, I hate to admit, my first Ondaatje book. I’ve tried a few times in the past to read him, but I’ve never made it very far. I think this was due, in part, to having watched the film adaptation of The English Patient when I was about fifteen and a bit too young to really understand or be comfortable with it. It left me feeling that I wasn’t equal to the task of reading his work, and that sense of being out of my depth has lasted. Of course, it’s not true. This book proved that Ondaatje’s work is actually quite accessible. Proof: this is the first book I’ve finished in a month, and I did so in just three days. I didn’t want to put it down.
Warlight was already on my radar because of its fascinating blurb (a time period and location I love – London just after WWII – plus a really weird set of circumstances and characters). But then, fresh off winning the Golden Man Booker for The English Patient, Ondaatje proves he’s still got what it takes when his new book that also shows up on this year’s Man Booker Longlist. It was one of the few Man Booker books I already had on my shelves and the most appealing, so I picked it up. I’m incredibly grateful that I did.
Reading Ondaatje is, based on my reading of this novel, very much like being a passenger in a vehicle driven by an experienced and knowledgeable driver. I felt, very soon after beginning the book, that I could relax and give in to it. I didn’t have to worry, Ondaatje knew exactly where he was taking me. Furthermore, he had set a course that was both efficient and scenic. I was in capable hands.
We begin the story as a family prepares to separate. The two teenaged children will be staying at home in England while their parents travel to Singapore for their father’s job. Overseeing them will be the lodger, who the children refer to as The Moth. We get a hurried introduction to the parents before they disappear, seemingly without a trace, and the lives of the two children are forever changed. What follows is the story of this fateful year and the adventures that befall our 14-year-old narrator and his older sister, 16-year-old Rachel.
The Moth proves an enigmatic and eccentric caregiver. Possibly a little bit of a criminal, The Moth inhabits a shadowy underworld peopled by characters as odd and unconventional as he is. But the children learn something from each of them, either about navigating an ever more complex world, or about themselves and their place within it. Some of these people will become as important in their lives as their absent parents.
As the book continues, we begin to fill in some of the holes in the story. We learn some of what took place in his mother’s life before the story began and what happens to him in the years after.
Ondaatje made a bold decision when it comes to the narrative voice of the book. He tells the whole story through the eyes of this one narrator, even the parts that took place before he was born or that he would have no way of knowing. At first, this struck me as an odd choice. But I realized that the entire book is set up to create a sense of unreliability.
This begins with the narrator’s recollections of his parents’ disappearance. We all know how hazy memory can be, and how those teenage years are often tinged with mis-remembered events that we didn’t really understand at the time, and that never truly come into focus. Ondaatje’s narrative choices work brilliantly to create a stifling atmosphere of uncertainty. It’s as if his missing parents have stepped into another world, or perhaps never truly existed in the first place. The mystery of their absence creates an undercurrent of danger and instability that underpins the frankly wacky experiences our narrator shares with us. We are left unsure of the truth behind every character – and distrusting even the memories that form the basis for the entire story. The later recounting of other people’s experiences and emotions – perspectives the narrator has no possible way of knowing – just further this unreliability. Are his own memories to be trusted, or was more going on than he saw and understood? Is he recounting events as they actually occurred, or is this the story he made up for himself to fill in the blanks in his own life? And if that’s the case, is any of this story the truth?
These are questions that are never really answered. We are given a version of events that answers some of our questions (though some are left without resolution), and it is up to us, as the readers, to decide whether to accept this version or question it. This could have left a lot unresolved, but oddly it was very satisfying, and I found that I didn’t really care that much what was true and not. A story is a story.
The setting of the novel is another of its strengths. Ondaatje evokes a time and place such that it felt to me that I could reach out and touch the crumbling rubble of a bombed-out home, or smell the briny tang of the Thames at night. I don’t know if his descriptions are accurate, but I do know that they felt like they were. I’ve read many books set during the war, with bombs raining down, fires raging, carnage strewn all around. I’ve also read books set several years after the war ended, when life is beginning once again, cities are being rebuilt and communities are being put back together. This book inhabits the in-between. The damage is done, but the reconstruction has not yet begun. Entire neighbourhoods are left abandoned, houses half gone. It’s an eerily fitting background.
There’s really not much fault to find with Warlight. There were a couple of times when I got a little impatient, but it didn’t last, and I’m hard pressed to find any book that doesn’t have any bits that drag at least a little. In this case it wasn’t so much a dragging as an impatience to find out what was going to happen next. The writing was exceptional – not only did Ondaatje execute the broad strokes masterfully, but he paid as much attention to the detail. Imagery and themes recur throughout the novel, creating a feeling of fluid continuity that brings the novel as a whole together.
I think this was a brilliant introduction to Ondaatje’s work. It wasn’t as intimidating as some of his other books, and the story is an easy one to get into. His writing style plays perfectly on the emotions of the reader – tugging a little over here, unravelling a few threads over there, never going too far, but never allowing us to get too comfortable. It’s a balance between threat and safety, the unknown and home, post-war chaos and social constraint. I’d highly recommend picking this book up, and as my first Man Booker read, it was an excellent start. It’s going to be hard to beat.
From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The English Patient a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.
In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself–shadowed and luminous at once–we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings’ mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn’t know and understand in that time, and it is this journey–through facts, recollection, and imagination–that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time. – Goodreads
Book Title: Warlight
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Series: No
Edition: Hardback
Published By: McClelland & Stewart
Released: May 8, 2018
Genre: Fiction, WWII, London, Family
Pages: 304
Date Read: August 7-10, 2018
Rating: 9/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.8/5 (5,899 ratings)