An interesting thing to note about Lion is that four of the characters—Patrick, Hana, Caravaggio, and Clara—appear in Ondaatje’s next prose book, The English Patient, a work I have written about here. In English Patient, Hana and Caravaggio become more central, Patrick dies. At the end, Clara appears in Hana’s thoughts and in letters. It’s not unheard of to have characters migrate from one book to another; it happens all the time in series like Lord of the Rings. Perhaps this

In The Skin of a Lion has not one but two scenes in which Patrick Lewis is sketched. Early in the story, his father Hazen “outlined the boy’s body onto the plank walls with green chalk. Then he tacked wires back and forth across the outline as if realigning the veins in his son’s frame. Muscles of cordite and the spine a tributary of the black powder fuse. This is how the boy remembers his father, studying the outline which the boy has just stepped away from as the lit fuse s

In a previous post having to do with a different book, I wrote about What Do You Do When I Can’t See You—that phenomena in fiction of the reader only being given certain particulars about the characters’ lives. Real life is lived moment to moment, a stream of sometimes random experiences that is often so mundane that we don’t pay much attention. Fiction more or less erases much of the mundane, leaving scenes that further the story and the development of the character. It is n

Let’s consider some implications of the narrative style of In the Skin of a Lion. Umberto Eco suggests that a text contains three entities that interact with the reader. There is the author, the real person who wrote the book. There is the narrator, who may be a character in the text who speaks in a kind of storyteller voice—identified as “I” or “We,” or who may be unnamed and nearly invisible. Then there is what Eco calls the “model author,” the style of the novel, a textua

Last week, I threatened to write about In the Skin of a Lion’s narrative structure. Going to do it today. The book is often described as being a prime example of post-modern narration, and that links up with the quote from John Berger. “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” Post-modern narratives offer converging stories, stories told from different perspectives about the same events. Let’s consider the second section of the novel, “The Brid

This week, a new story, Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 book, In the Skin of a Lion. At times, the past becomes bit murky, but I believe I first read Lion before The English Patient, Ondaatje’s best known novel. I knew Ondaatje was a great writer and was also attracted by the Toronto and Ontario settings of the book, as my father’s family was Canadian. (Loud whiny voice: I wanted to pick the next book. You promised I could. You said.) I see. What is it you had in mind? (Something mo