Remembering The Darter and Others

At the same time that Nathaniel, the narrator/protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, is having sex with Agnes in otherwise abandoned buildings, the Darter, a family regular since the disappearance of Nathaniel’s parents, involves Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, in nightly boat trips to smuggle greyhounds into Britain for dog races.

Nathaniel enjoys it. Woof!

“That first magical summer of my life we smuggled more than forty-five dogs a week at the height of the racing season, collecting the gun-shy creatures from a dock near Limehouse onto the mussel boat, and riding the river in darkness into the heart of London at Lower Thames Street.”

Nathaniel loves these adventures, but “I was often exhausted by these far-flung duties I was given. Bone and blood tests needed to be fictionalized. False seals from the Greater London Greyhound Association had to be forged so our immigrants could enter any of the one hundred and fifty dog tracks in the country…”

From the future, he reflects: “What kind of family were we part of now? In retrospect, Rachel and I were not too different in our anonymity from the dogs with their fictional papers. Like them we had broken free, adapting to fewer rules, less order. But what had we become? When you are uncertain about what way to go as a youth, you end up sometimes not so much repressed, as might be expected, but illegal, you find yourself easily invisible, unrecognized in the world…Did my assignations with Agnes insert a thief’s guile into my nature? Or my escapes from school to spend time with the Darter?”

Well, as I’ve tediously mentioned, we don’t know the answer as we are not told much about Nathaniel’s present life, only that he is alone. And he does seem a bit resentful. There is a sense that, as he says, he winds up illegal, invisible and unrecognized—certainly to himself. Of course someone having such unusual experiences would be affected by them. Is he a smuggler? Don’t think so. A dog lover? Sure. A spy? Well, let’s delve in further for the answer.

At this point, another individual, Arthur McCash, begins frequenting Nathaniel’s home. “What did we ever really know or discover about Arthur McCash? He spoke French, as well as other languages…McCash claimed he’d been recently stationed abroad doing crop studies in the Levant.”

Arthur will assume even greater importance for the adult Nathaniel.

Nathaniel muses: “I am still unable to give precise ages to the individuals who had taken over our parents’ home. There’s no trustworthy recording of ages when seen through the eyes of youth, and I suppose the war had further confused the way we read age or the hierarchies of class.”

A scene occurs in which Nathaniel is dancing with Agnes at a club and glimpses a woman watching them who resembles his mother. He tries to approach her, but she disappears. Much later, he will learn that it was indeed his mother.

There is a growing sense that Nathaniel and Rachel are being stalked and menaced by anonymous parties, and this culminates in an attack on the siblings during which the Moth is killed, and Rose emerges out of hiding. This is the fear (Mahler’s schwer) that the Moth has warned will overtake them all.

Let’s step back for a moment. We have a story told—a story that reads as memoir but is expertly crafted fiction—about an adolescent whose parents mysteriously disappear, leaving he and his sister under the supervision of several eccentric criminals. And Nathaniel has his first sexual relationship with a young woman. In this story, Nathaniel looks back from middle-age and, now knowing exactly what was going on, reinterprets his circumstances in the past.  

The adult Nathaniel explains it all: “You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. it is not to be a reliving but a rewitnessing.”

Rose appears after Nathaniel and the others are assaulted by anonymous assailants. She tends to their wounds after angrily denouncing the siblings’ guardians for not protecting her children. “’Always knives,’ she murmured. ‘Felon always said they were going to come after us. Revenge. If not the survivors, the relatives, their children…People don’t forget. Not even children. Why should they…’ She sounded bitter.”

Nathaniel and Rachel—who’s been rescued by The Darter, are escorted into a van by their mother and the police. “Where were we going? Into another life.”

This is a halfway point in the story, and the point at which Nathaniel realizes his mother had disappeared because she was doing some secret work, evidently for the government. And he realizes the stakes are life and death.

Let’s stop there and pick it up next time.

Till then.

#Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray