Creative Fiction

An important question to ponder in reading Warlight by Michael Ondaatje is, just what kind of story is it? Fiction or memoir? If it’s fiction there should be elements of traditional story structure therein—a dramatic question, an inciting incident, beginning, middle, and end, climax and resolution.

Is it a memoir?

“A memoir is a factual, narrative nonfiction account written from the author’s personal perspective. Derived from the French word mémoire (meaning "memory"), it focuses on a specific theme, period, or transformative event in a person's life rather than spanning their entire chronological existence.”

Hmm. Well, Warlight doesn’t appear to be factual non-fiction. Nathaniel Williams, the book’s protagonist is not Michael Ondaatje. Nathaniel says he is 14 in 1945; Mr. Ondaatje was born in 1943—he had a very different experience of WWII and the postwar era.

Right?

Hmm. Warlight does seem to fit with the other part of this definition. It does focus on a specific theme, period, and transformative event in a person’s life.

So maybe Warlight is a hybrid memoir/fictional story. I’m going to call it, best B. I think the fact that Warlight is not “factual” precludes it being memoir. But is does give the impression of being memoir.

It’s a trick!

Well, no, it’s not a trick in any malicious sense. Like so much great fiction, it’s illusion and sleight-of-hand, and that’s enjoyable.

What, then, you say, is the specific theme, period, and transformative event in Warlight? The theme is the way humans “fill in” a poorly remembered past in order to see how it constructs a present. The period is WWII and its aftermath. The transformative event? The death of Nathaniel’s mother, Rose. Nathaniel is looking back from the future and trying to make sense of his mother’s death. Why did she abandon he and his sister to pursue such a dangerous path? (that of being a spy). Who was she? Who and what did she care about? What affect did her life and death have on Nathaniel?

‘Kay, plenty of questions to answer.

The first section of the novel is titled “A Table Full of Strangers.” Then, the first line: “In 1943 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” This really is the whole story, encapsulated. The text proceeds to show us how this happened—not why, that will come later along with the narrator’s understanding.

Nathaniel and his slightly older sister, Rachel, live in London with their parents, who announce they’re going away for a year to Asia. The year is 1943. The Blitz, the bombing campaign waged by the Germans against Britain, lasted from 1940-1941, but in 1943, the war remains pervasive. Nathaniel and Rachel were puzzled by their parents’ announcement and preparations to leave, but leave they did, first the father and then their mother, Rose, who was supposed to follow him. Nathaniel and Rachel, in their teens, were to attend boarding schools and be looked after on holidays by their parents’ lodger, a man the siblings nicknamed The Moth for his shy demeanor. Later, he introduced a man into their household known as The Pimlico Darter, a former boxer and current smuggler.

“The arrangement appeared strange, but life still was haphazard and confusing during that period…so what had been suggested did not feel unusual.”

Before their mother leaves, Nathaniel often observes she and the Moth talking, and it is revealed that they used to work together as fire-watchers during the Blitz, stationed on the top floor of a tall building to report on the damage from the bombing. At one point, the Moth reveals their mother worked as a driver to take men at night to the coast where they would embark on clandestine activities. While the Moth describes this, “my mother listened so carefully to what he described that she held the iron with her right hand in midair so it wouldn’t rest on and burn a collar, giving herself fully to his shadowed story.”

And Nathaniel observes from the future: “I should have known then.”

But he does not, or at least, does not say that he knew his mother was a spy at that time.

Rose tells the siblings stories including one they loved about when she was a child and men worked to re-thatch their roof. This foreshadows things to come strongly but at this early stage is thought of as a fairy tale by Nathaniel and his sister.

In fact, this first section of Warlight has a fairy tale quality in that the siblings are separated from their parents and tended by two people who seem almost other-worldly and magical, like elves or dwarves.

“My sister made a list of his (the Moth’s) attributes. Thick black horizontal eyebrows. A large though friendly stomach. His big honker. For a private man…who drifted through the house mostly in silence, he had the loudest sneeze. Bursts of air were expelled not just from his face but seemed to originate from the depths of that large and friendly stomach.”

Rachel searches the house and discovers their mother’s trunk, full of the clothes she packed for the trip to join their father. The two realize that their mother has not gone on that trip but is somewhere hidden to them.

The Moth, who is a classical music enthusiast, tells them that Mahler’s scores are often marked with the word schwer, meaning difficult or heavy. The Moth seemed to use the phrase as a warning to them, that the future would be difficult. Nathaniel and Rachel began to say it to each other as a code word for their present.

Let’s stop there and resume next time.

Till then.

#Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray