Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel is quintessential literary fiction, and also a tale of espionage narrated in exquisite prose. The story opens in post-World War II, blitz-shattered London: “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” The narrator is Nathaniel Williams, all of 14. After he and his sister, Rachel, hardly a year older than him, are left behind by their parents, they set about unravelling, or trying to, the mystery of their parents’ disappearance.
They have a lot of questions which do not seem to have answers. For example, they find that the trunk their mother had so painstakingly packed for a life in Singapore is still there in the basement. And their life is strange. They are in the company of characters straight out of a Dickensian cosmos — protective, but not quite regular. The children have nicknames for them.
Looking back
There is The Moth, a man of mild appearance but with enormous and controlled power within, given to music and musings. He is the person who mostly plays the role of their guardian. He finds Nathaniel a part-time job at a catering establishment, and is okay with 16-year-old Rachel wandering off alone for a whole night.
There is The Darter, a former boxer, who takes them out at night, smuggling greyhounds in barges on the Thames. And the ladies who float in and out of their lives — Olive Lawrence and Agnes.
The narrator’s relationship with his absent mother is curious. He misses her, and he doesn’t. “Did she really assume that the shell of our world would not crack?” he wonders. When she comes back after a brutal episode that puts Nathaniel and Rachel in obvious danger, the novel goes on to examine how external factors control our lives.
The POV shifts later: it’s not another character that takes up the thread but an older Nathaniel, armed with new perspectives. Ondaatje has used this technique of dual perspective before — in his fictive memoir, Running in the Family , as well as in his novels, Divisadero and The Cat’s Table, where a grown man looks back at his childhood and tries to figure out if meanings of things have changed.
The answers to the questions posed in the first half of Warlight slowly become apparent as the 28-year-old Nathaniel finds employment in the archives reviewing wartime files. He now lives in Suffolk, a neighbourhood he recollects from his childhood. It’s the 1950s now and Nathaniel employs his imaginative and investigative skills to solve the puzzle of the work done by his parents and their companions during the war.
Recurring motifs
Warlight , the title of the novel, is an apt motif for his life-story. Warlight is the dim light used during blackouts in wartime to guide people to a destination, but not to illuminate a scene. Likewise, the plot evolves slowly in half light, never illuminating the contours of the novel’s landscape fully till the narrative tightens and a history of betrayal surfaces.
Ondaatje uses fragments to build his world — the loosely strewn details, people and patterns, all fit in perfectly in the end. Given the storyline, this could have been a fast-moving spy-thriller. Instead it is a deftly woven, slow-paced read with recurring motifs that will leave you joining the dots.
The motif of maps keeps returning: the child Nathaniel loves maps, later he talks about “battles in the creases of maps,” and still later, he talks of how the “indistinct maps of childhood” have become “reliable and exact”. The narrator is obsessed with stories too. He confesses, “We were used to partial stories,” and muses on “the way things happen in twice told tales.” Is there a single truth in the various stories relating to the lives of the two children abandoned by their parents? Ondaatje says, “No one really understands another’s life or even death.”
The author uses short sentences which are technically incomplete to convey truths too deep for words. These sentences are the essence of the novel’s craft. Their lyricism creates an effect of poetry, flowing and faltering like memory. If The English Patient was a classic, Warlight is Ondaatje’s masterpiece.
The writer is a journalist, writer
and translator.
