A Curious Pleasure

The overall theme of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, seems to be how the past effects the present, or, to put it another way, how our experiences make us who we are. One of the experiences the narrator Nathaniel reflects on in the story is his relationships with women. He undergoes the disappearance of his mother, Rose, just before his sexual awakening. Coincidence, you ask? As our old friend Don Juan said, there are no coincidences—especially in fiction. (He didn’t say that last part). In any case, we could say that, just before he becomes sexual, a solid boundary is established between he and his mother.

Roughly a year after Rose’s disappearance, Nathaniel takes a job at a busy London hotel where he meets a number of interesting co-workers, including Mr. Nkoma, a man in his forties who entertains the younger boys, including Nathaniel, with tales of his sexual exploits, providing the story with a mise en abyme as he describes an encounter he had with an older woman who taught him about sex and life.

The older Nathaniel reflects from the present:

“What did that glimpse of storytelling do to the boy I was?”

Indeed, it should be said that we the readers never get the answer to this, as Nathaniel gives us few clues about his adult life, only, as I indicated last week, that he is solitary and a recluse. Perhaps the implication is that he is dissatisfied in the book’s present and is looking back in time to try to figure how how he became the person he is.

Nathaniel became fascinated by Olive Lawrence, a woman The Darter is “dating.”. “Like the Darter, she was tall and slim, with a dazzle of unkept hair, shaped and reshaped I am sure by whatever weather she was in…Olive was the only person who came into our house who appeared capable of clear judgement…Hers was the calmest voice I knew when I was a boy. There was never argument in it. She had just this tactile curiosity about what interested her, and that calmness allowed you to be within her intimate space. In daylight she always caught your eye as she talked or as she listened; she was completely with you.”

As things develop, Nathaniel learns Olive is an ethnographer who was (and is) involved working for the British government. She and the Darter end their relationship, and Olive leaves London but continues to send postcards to Nathaniel and his sister from faraway places.

Nathaniel reflects: “There are moments after I’ve put down such thoughts about Olive Lawrence when I almost believe I am composing a possible version of my mother.”

“In any case, the curious pleasure of female company was in me now.”

He takes another job in a restaurant, and it is here that he meets his first love. “A girl, a green ribbon holding back her hair…asked if she could “borrow” the small piece of ham out of my sandwich. I did not know what to say. I must have handed it to her silently. I asked what her name was and she looked shocked at my forwardness, ran back and organized a group of three or four waitresses to circle me and sing about the dangers of desire. I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and childhood.”

Nathaniel and this woman go to an empty house on Agnes Street, a house that is for sale—the young woman’s brother is the realtor and provides her with the keys. She and Nathaniel go through the darkened, empty rooms having sex.

‘Kay.

 Nathaniel refers to the young woman as Agnes. “Along with the wildness of her talk, I loved her voice, the thickness and rhymes of it, a sea change after the way the boys at my school talked. But something else made Agnes different from others. The Agnes I knew during that summer was not the Agnes she would be later…Was that future woman I imagined aligned with her wishfulness for herself? …During that era teenagers were locked into what we thought we already were and therefore would always be…”

This is an important comment on the book’s theme. Nathaniel, looking back, reflects on how he did not expect to change with time, as if the feel of that youthful, erotic connection would persist forever. And, of course, he understands that this was an illusion.

Once, when they are leaving the house on Agnes Street, they are menaced by a man. They evade him, feeling guilty that he may be the owner of the house they’ve just occupied. And this is a foreshadowing of what is to come.

Let’s stop there and resume next time.

Till then.

#Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray