tl;dr

Warlight is so good I nearly pushed aside the many novels vying for my attention so I could start on Ondaatje’s back catalogue.  Nearly.

opening remarks

Another day and another literary novelist who everyone else has read and I’ve never picked up (and not even seen the movie adaptation of said author’s most famous novel).  This time it’s Michael Ondaatje and his new book Warlight.

knee-jerk observations

This is a lovely bit of scene setting; adding a mythic quality to the recollections of a story that’s decades old.

What I’m taking away from this anecdote of boarding house life is that P.G. Wodehouse enjoyed a vigorous slash in a sink.

The novel begins in 1945 with London struggling with the after-effects of the War.  For reasons that aren’t initially clear, Nathaniel and Rachel’s parents head off to Singapore for a year.  When brother and sister escape their respective boarding houses and return home the mysterious Moth, already lodging in their house, and a wartime friend of their mother, decides to be their guardian.  While both kids like the Moth (real name Walter) they assume he’s a criminal.  He works at the Criterion hotel and is possibly a gambler, but if he’s up to no good he keeps it secret:

Nathaniel and Rachel discover that their mother is not in Singapore, her packing case is still in her room.  The Moth assures Nathaniel that their mother is not dead, though he has no idea where she is.  This leads to a disturbing story about how their father dealt with a cat that would not shut up.

The Moth arranges a job for fifteen-year-old Nathaniel at the Criterion.  He begins by doing the laundry and eventually ends up in the kitchen washing dishes.  There he meets Harry Nkoma who, during lunch, describes, in graphic detail, his sexual escapades, thirty years previously, with an older woman.  Also during lunch, the men play a game of Scratch Ball.

In the meantime, The Moth invites all manner of dubious and suspicious “friends” over to the house.

Ondaatje’s prose is quite marvellous.  There’s a lovely section detailing the relationship between The Darter, an ex-boxer and associate of The Moth (friends even) and Olive Lawrence, an independent, strong woman who happens to be a geographer and ethnographer.  The bit about their first date involving the consumption of a goat’s head is very funny.

Warlight is a novel about memory, how stories and experiences diverge and how the recollection of the same events differ between people, even siblings.

Nathaniel takes on a job with The Darter to transport greyhounds (‘wastrels with no recorded past’) by boat on the Thames.  I chose the excerpt below not just because it’s beautifully written, a painted picture of post-war Thames, but because it features the novel’s title.

I am learning about greyhound racing back in the 40s which was illegal and therefore unregulated.  The way the dogs were treated was fucking abominable.  Recent bans in New South Wales (though the Government recently back-flipped) suggests not much has changed.

The appearance of the bespectacled and seemingly harmless Arthur McCash deepens the mystery around Nathaniel and Rachel’s mother.  In the excerpt below McCash questions Nathaniel about the night he was accosted by two men in the Underground.

My suspicions about Nathaniel and Rachel’s mother prove to be correct (not that it was difficult to figure out).  Warlight is no ordinary coming of age story.

Part Two of the novel skips 14 or so years and see Nathaniel working for the same institution that employed his mother – the Foreign Office.  He takes on a job reviewing various files in the archives and destroying those that speak an uncomfortable truth about the UK’s espionage activities during the War.

Regarding Nathaniel’s current state of mind:  “A minor anarchy was still in me”.  I like that.

Unsurprisingly, Nathaniel uses his access to the archives to find dispatches and notes about his mother and her covert activities during the War.  He wants to understand what dangers she faced when not playing the role of mother.

As Nathaniel learns about his mother’s past, there’s a shift in focus.  We are introduced to Marsh Felon, an old friend of his mothers; they met when he was in his teens and she was eight.  He joins the intelligence service as a ‘gatherer’, and ultimately he introduces Rose to the same life. 

The account of Marsh Felon and Rose is speculative, Nathaniel piecing together the information he has gathered.  He firmly believes that Marsh was attracted to and probably loved his mother but Nathaniel doesn’t know how Rose felt about Marsh.

The paragraph below is gorgeous, but especially the line – “It was her biography since birth, her biology”.

The Gist Of It

I want to say that having finished Warlight I’ve gone and bought Michael Ondaatje’s back catalogue and am currently reading his debut, Coming Through Slaughter.  But that’s not how I ride.  I find it difficult to look backward, especially when there’s a new Rachel Cusk out, a Stephen King just around the corner and a Meg Wolitzer I haven’t read yet (and may never get to unless it’s nominated for a National Book Award).  But that’s not to say I’m not tempted, because Warlight is a sublime novel.  

The first half of the book is a coming of age story set in post World War Two London.  Nathaniel and Rachel have been abandoned by their parents – they’ve ostensibly gone to Singapore for a year, though we discover this isn’t entirely true – and after escaping their respective boarding schools, the siblings are left in the hands of a friend of their mothers, Walter, or as the kids call him, The Moth.  Nathaniel recalls that time with a sense of nostalgia, beautifully depicting a London in the very early stages of post-war recovery.  The highlight are the trips through the narrow canals of the Thames with The Darter, one of a number of enigmatic characters that feature in the novel.

The second half of novel is Nathaniel piecing together what his mother did during the war.  Part of this is based on top secret files he has access to, and part of this is a product of his imagination, inspired and informed by those files and the hints and suggestions dropped by his mother and those that knew her.

Warlight is about a man coming to terms with who he is in relation to his absent parents – especially his mother – and those men and women – The Moth, The Darter, Harry Nkoma, Olive Lawrence and Agnes – who informed and influenced his character. While I found myself more engaged with the first half of the novel, Nathaniel’s portrayal of his mother in the book’s second half is the core of the story.  It’s a complicated study, one that depicts his mother as detached… maybe cold… but not short on love even if it was from a distance. 

Warlight is a short novel, but it isn’t a quick read.  Ondaatje’s nuanced, poetic prose can’t be rushed; sometimes the pleasure is in re-reading a paragraph or an entire page.  This is top drawer fiction, and I’d be stunned if the novel doesn’t feature on this year’s Man Booker longlist.