This story is, however, told at a distance - from Nathaniel’s perspective, years after the action. He writes well about all sorts of things, from British private schools to river navigation to how large restaurants operate. “Warlight” moves at a clip that, in Ondaatje terms, can be said to be breakneck. Later in life, Nathaniel will work in intelligence himself, in part to try to tease out Rose’s many wartime secrets, what he calls “the obscure rigging of our mother’s life.” The men in the house are men she trusts, having worked beside them during the war. It slowly leaks out that she’s not in Singapore but apparently doing dangerous postwar intelligence work. When the teenagers find that Rose, their mother, has left her steamer trunk behind - she had ostentatiously packed it in front of them - they become suspicious about her whereabouts. This book’s resonant first sentence puts the situation this way: “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” The parents of two teenagers break a bit of bad news: For a year the parents are leaving the children, Nathaniel and Rachel, behind to live in Singapore, where the father has been promoted to run a Unilever office. The novel commences in bombed-out London, directly in the wake of World War II. It hooks you in ways that make its quiet storm of bombast (“He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures”) almost possible to bear. “Warlight” reads, at its not-infrequent best, like a late-career John le Carré novel. I was among that sodality of readers who didn’t cotton to “The English Patient,” finding it merely moody, murky and lightly pretentious, a tone poem in search of a whetstone. Ondaatje’s new novel, “Warlight,” is his best since “The English Patient.” That sounds like a publicist’s dream quote, but perhaps it isn’t exactly. The novel’s story was tidied up considerably by the director Anthony Minghella, whose film version won the 1997 Academy Award for best picture. Ondaatje, who is from Canada by way of Sri Lanka, is best known for “The English Patient” (1992), which won the Booker Prize. The spine of the plot, unlike the spine of a steamed fish, will be nearly impossible to remove whole. The nature of storytelling will be weighed and found fascinating. Wartime and/or criminality will feature in the foreground or background. There will be disquisitions on arcane topics including, frequently, mapmaking. By now we know what we are going to get from an Ondaatje novel: A moody, murky, lightly pretentious and mostly nonlinear investigation of lives and stories that harbor tantalizing gaps. His 1979 book of collected poems is called “There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do.”Īs Ondaatje’s titles have settled - recent ones include “Anil’s Ghost” and “Divisadero” - his prose has settled as well. His novel “Coming Through Slaughter” (1976) - for my money, Ondaatje’s masterpiece - is a surround-sound tour of the troubled New Orleans cornet player Buddy Bolden’s life. “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” (1970) is a black-powder mix of poetry and prose, history and myth. ( From the publisher.Michael Ondaatje’s early books had such evocative titles, one had to pick them up and hold them for a while. 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.īut 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?Ī 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. 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. 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. 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.
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