by Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's latest puzzler informs, but fails to ignite
My only other experience reading Ondaatje was more duty than pleasure. “In the Skin of a Lion” is a novel that keeps you at a distance. Major characters disappear to return as minor ones in other guises. When the story settles on a single narrator, it continues to ramble. You just have to go with it and give up expecting a conventional narrative arc.
A lot of the same can be said of “Warlight.” While it is told, for the most part, from a single POV, the narrator doesn’t know what’s happening any more than the reader does. An old technique that can be engaging. And it is, up to a point.
In the first half of the book, at the end of WWII the protagonist and his sister are abandoned by their parents and left in the protection of two mysterious characters—criminals possibly—known by their nicknames: The Moth, The Darter. The siblings’ childhood home, once a sedate refuge, now becomes a revolving door for these men’s equally mysterious and entertaining friends.
All stories are puzzles and piecing together the fragments is the secret subject of every book, only here overtly so. The second half bounces around in time and place (this is an Ondaatje novel, after all), as the protagonist seeks answers surrounding his mother’s disappearance, reappearance, her war crimes and mysterious death. (The father never resurfaces.)
Along the way, we get the briefest glimpses into the mechanics of espionage and illegal dog racing, the canal system around London, the Blitz, the tradition of roof climbing in Oxford, nitroglycerin production, more espionage, the Allies’ unholy alliance with Tito’s partisans and the atrocities committed on all sides for geopolitical advantage during and after the war.
What we don’t get much of, if any, is human kindness, all the characters remaining, for us, and for the protagonist, barely more than ciphers.