Flashing Through Time

Warlight, a novel by Michael Ondaatje.  Vintage.  285 pp.  $16.95. *****

The Cat’s Table a novel by Michael Ondaatje.  Vintage.  265 pp.  $15.95. *****

I spent the early weeks of my self-isolation reading Michael Ondaatje.  First his latest novel, Warlight, which was a gift from a friend.[1]  While I was reading and admiring that, she mentioned that another of his novel’s, The Cat’s Table, was one of her favorite books of all time, so I ordered and read that.  With nothing but time on my hands, and not too many books up here in our mountain cabin, I’ve read them again.  They both bear a second reading.  Warlight, in fact, seemed a rather different book the second time through.

The first thing to say about Ondaatje[2] is that his prose is exquisite.  Even if the stories weren’t captivating, the writing alone would grab me.  The other thing is that he is a literary chameleon.  You think you’re reading one kind of book, then all of a sudden it’s another.  It might transform again.  By the end of The Cat’s Table I wasn’t sure what the hell it was.  But I was in awe at the performance.

Both books seem initially to be about teenagers.  Warlight concerns two young people living in London during the war, a boy of 14 and a girl nearly 16.  The opening sentence, in fact, narrated by the brother, Nathaniel, is a real hook: “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.”  Everything about the parents is vague: where they will be going, what they will be doing, but war work was like that in those days, especially in England; later in the book, there’s a long section about the vitally important war work that perfectly ordinary British people did.  The father goes off never to return, but the mother’s departure is at first delayed—she will be taking a trunk, and keeps putting things in it—then finally happens, but with her, too, her final destination is obscure. Later Nathaniel will discover she lied about everything.

The children are entirely adrift.  The man taking care of them—whom they call The Moth—is around some but mostly not, gone during the day and hovering at night, living in an apartment above them.  The plan was to send the two of them to boarding schools, but they hated that experience so much that The Moth converted them to day students.  Even so he didn’t seem to take care of them.  His habit was to eat street food for dinner, so he gets them to do the same.  The feeling they have—and that we have—is that they’re on their own.  Weirder than that is that all kinds of strange people show up in their apartment.  Among them is a man they call The Darter, because he is an ex-boxer and was known for his quick moves in the ring.

I can’t think of any criminal activities that The Moth was involved in, but The Darter is a shady character, and soon involves Nathaniel in his night time activities, smuggling greyhounds into the country.  Everything seems edgy, but The Darter is perfectly nice to Nathaniel and gives him lessons about life.  He lives by his wits and is reputed to be a “boulevardier,” with many girlfriends.  Nathaniel feels unmoored, but there’s something exciting about the situation too.  He likes these people, and they like him.

Suddenly it’s a teenage novel no more.  The time with The Moth and The Darter ends abruptly and sadly, the mother comes back, and the novel’s time frame shifts altogether.  Nathaniel is a grown man working for the government, in a building where he has an opportunity to research what his mother was actually doing, also who The Moth and The Darter really were.  Everything about his youthful experience suddenly seems different.  The changes, as the novel flashes forward, are sometimes astonishing.

Ultimately I would say this is a novel about a mother and son, though it hardly starts out that way.  The missing mother seems to be a theme in Ondaatje’s work; there’s one in The Cat’s Table as well.  Nathaniel does get to know his mother after she has come back from the war, and though she’s slightly off-putting as a parent, she’s trying to teach Nathaniel from the experience she’s had, which has been remarkable.  I didn’t like her as a person, but did admire her.  And I learned a lot about the British war effort, and the aftermath of war.

If anything, I was more impressed with The Cat’s Table, which Ondaatje wrote a few years earlier.  The premise is similar: a situation which sounds terribly sad, almost tragic, for a young person, becomes a wonderful experience.  At the age of eleven, our narrator is taking an ocean liner from Sri Lanka, where he has been raised, to London, where he will be picked up by his mother, whom he hasn’t seen in several years.  Again it’s the situation a young man who is almost an orphan (my grandson happens to be eleven at the moment.  I can’t imagine such a situation for him). The narrator in this book is named Michael, and as we discover from later flash-forwards, he’s a well-known writer.  But in the author’s note Ondaatje says, “Although the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional—from the captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat down to the narrator.  And while there was a ship named the Oronsay (there were in fact several Oronsays), the ship in the novel is an imaginary rendering.”

One wonders.

In any case, it’s the story of a riotous twenty-one days, which at various points flashes way into the future, including the present day.  The expression the cat’s table, which I hadn’t heard, refers to the least desirable table in the ship’s dining room, the opposite of the Captain’s table.  While the Captain’s table was probably populated by pompous blowhards, the Cat’s table turns out to be fascinating, if only because Michael meets two boys roughly his age and the three become inseparable.  They in fact they become notorious around the ship for various pranks they perform.  They are also witnesses at the end of the voyage to an amazing dramatic incident.  And our narrator discovers more about it than anyone else.

The three boys rise early every day and take a tour of the ship, including first class.  They’re so early, in fact, that no one impedes them, and they take a dip in the First Class pool and swipe some food from the First Class buffet (retiring to the privacy of a lifeboat to eat it).  On their early morning rounds they encounter a young woman who is roller skating around the vessel, not just for fun, but for the exercise.  And at night, when people on the ship have all retired, they watch as a shackled prisoner is brought on deck, and given the chance to get a breath of fresh air.  The man has a menacing air.  And he is known, as the boy’s eventually discover, for his escapes.

One of the boys, named Cassius, is a year older than Michael and was notorious at his school for various pranks.  The other, Ramadhin, is a willing companion to the boys but a little less adventurous because he has a heart condition.  Their most notorious prank came during a terrible storm at sea.  Cassius suggested that they be tied to a place on the foredeck where they would be helpless but would have a great vantage point for the storm.  Ramadhin could not participate, but fortunately was an expert at knots, because the storm proved to be far worse than what they had thought.  The description of that incident alone is spectacular.  The prank brings the boys to the attention of the whole crew, even the captain.

Also on the boat is a woman in first class who has agreed to look after Michael, though she doesn’t do much of a job.  Not in first class, but in a class higher than Michael, is an older cousin named Emily, who has been important to Michael’s life and will continue to be.  If anything, the flash forwards in this book are more startling than in Warlight, and more skillfully done.  Ondaatje takes us far into the future of a number of characters, also into the past of a few, but keeps the narrative firmly anchored in the voyage.  As with Warlight, I enjoyed the book more the second time.  I can easily believe the whole of this novel didn’t actually happen—the plot is wild when you look back on it—but can’t believe it didn’t have some basis in fact.

The story Ondaatje makes out of it is stunning.

[1] Actually, she gave it to me twice.  The hardback for my birthday and the paperback for Christmas.  This person really wanted me to read this book.

[2] I read The English Patient years ago when I reviewed it for a paper.  I remember being mightily impressed, but I think the assignment was to review two or three novels, and I didn’t have time to take a deep breath and appreciate it.  I hadn’t followed his subsequent career.  I’ve now ordered two more of his books.