Swee' Pea

Today, let’s look at the conclusion of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight and make our own meaning of this fine story. In the chapter entitled “The Astral Plough,” we return to Nathaniel’s narration, along with a time leap to 1949, when he was working at the Archives. This short chapter ends with two italicized sentences, the first a question addressed to his mother:

“What did you do that was so terrible?” and an apparent answer from his deceased mother: “My sins are various.”

I believe his question comes out of the knowledge that Rose, his mother, was murdered—so, he is posing the question of why were you killed.

The next chapter begins to explain this question, a question that shapes the whole story. Nathaniel, in the Archives, is asked to translate a recording made just after the war made in Italian (he speaks Italian). It is, he quickly realizes, a recording of the interrogation of an Englishman who is adept at not giving away any secrets. By way of obfuscation (a meaty word) the Englishman offers the story of a parrot in the far East that survived the extinction of all the human members of a tribe. The bird knew the tribe’s language—no one else did—and the Englishman and a translator had tried to reconstruct the language from that lone parrot. This diverting story (which I believe I mentioned earlier) is a wonderful metaphor for Warlight as a whole, in that like the Englishman, Nathaniel tries to reconstruct an entire world from fragments.

On the tape, the Englishman goes on to describe a woman who had an “air of solitude” and a pattern of birthmarks on her neck and upper arms, a pattern which he refers to as resembling The Astral Plough (a formation of stars). Nathaniel makes an intuitive leap here, deciding that this woman being talked about was his mother. The Englishman is Marsh Felon.

Then the storyteller tells us the fuller tale of Rose and Felon’s love affair and Rose’s espionage activities which resulted in her scars. Of course, this answers Nathaniel’s question about why she was killed. And we have the story of Rose’s death, again through the storyteller’s perspective. In many ways, this is the climax of the story, and what follows shows Nathaniel’s reaction over time.

The final section is entitled “A Walled Garden,” and brings us back to the story's present. Nathaniel is living in the house that used to belong to his guardians, the Malakites who are long departed. The title implies a private and protected sanctuary, something Nathaniel appears to need. However, he is shown, after his mother’s death, reaching out to others who might help him remember his past. He describes watching a television program about Olive Lawrence and reading her book. Then he recounts the story of reconnecting with the Darter and with his old paramour, Agnes Street.

Nathaniel has learned through the Archives that the Darter’s smuggling of greyhounds was a cover for his real job of delivering nitroglycerin to the military, a dangerous task. Nathaniel says: “Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves.”

Nathaniel locates the Darter, whose name is Norman Marshall, and visits him. Norman is surprised to see Nathaniel but invites him in and tells him that he, Norman, now has a wife and daughter who are not at home. Norman is unwilling to talk about their past and Nathaniel prepares to leave. In the hallway, he sees a framed piece of embroidery with words. After he leaves, he reveals what is written on this piece of embroidery:

I used often to lie awake

Through the whole night

And wish for a large pearl.

And this, he remembers, is something Agnes often said long ago. He concludes she and the Darter are together. Now the story slips back into a tale imagined by Nathaniel/told by the storyteller. Agnes became pregnant by Nathaniel shortly before he leaves her, (an abandonment, as his mother abandoned him) and went to the Darter for help. They married and raised the baby as Norman’s own.

The ending of the story has Nathaniel at his home in his solitary existence except for a greyhound dog. (a fragment from the past). At the end of his day, he describes, in imperfect time, how the dog will come to him. “He comes to me even with all my separateness and uncertainties…As if he might wish to tell me about his haphazard life, a past I do not know. All the unrevealed neediness that must be in him.” Surely, Nathaniel is talking about himself.

“We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken…sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war.” (The sea pea was an aquatic plant that flourished during the war because humans withdrew from it due to the war’s dangers, a story that picks up on the book’s themes—Rose is a sea pea, best B.).

At the end, Nathaniel recounts a day from the time just after his mother’s murder. He went to her house and washed some of her clothes, then put them away. Then he leaves “forever.”

Warlight is a beautiful book. My posts have largely focused on just telling the story with some digressions into the leaps in time and the nature of the story’s narrator. Ultimately, Warlight is about a man making sense of his youth and his mother, but it is also a story of his mother and the choices she made. Is Nathaniel just like her? Perhaps he needs confirmation of that—or disconfirmation. He is solitary and reserved as she was—is this nature or nurture? You decide, best B. Warlight is a story of a man who is obsessed with his peculiar upbringing and desperate to determine whether or not it damaged him. It seems, in the end, he concludes that it doesn’t matter, that he must live his life, giving up on an attempt to find “order.”

Till next time.

#Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray