The Possible Annoyance of Questions

As promised, let’s look at the penultimate section of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, entitled “The Boy on the Roof.” Up to this point, the story has been churning along in fine fashion, using the perspective of Nathaniel Williams to carry us to Nathaniel’s mother, Rose’s death. Nathaniel asks his deceased mother to tell him about the man “you lied to me about.” (and this implies that he’s aware and has accepted that she did lie to him about her past). The new section begins with “He would look down from that sloped straw roof whenever one of Rose’s family emerged from the house to collect eggs or get into the car.” This perspective belongs to “sixteen-year-old Marsh Felon” (interesting name) who is a younger member of a family of roof thatchers engaged to repair the thatched roof of an adolescent Rose’s parents. So this is a kind of embedded story—Nathaniel is telling we the readers a story that took place before he was born (1930 perhaps?) and one that he couldn’t possibly know as far as the other characters’ innerness. Is it his imagination? Perhaps, Best B. More on this.

Marsh falls off the roof and due to his injuries, it’s decided he’d be best off staying at the William’s house till he mends. The young Rose visits him as he convalesces in the back kitchen, and there is an attraction between the two youngsters. He heals enough to leave and returns to his family. However, in the Williams’ house, he’s had a taste of a more refined and literate life. More educated.

“It was the hour with that tense new light that Marsh Felon now began searching for in books whenever the writer strayed from a plot to attempt a description of that special hour, perhaps remembered from the author’s youth too. The boy began reading every evening. It allowed him a deafness while his brothers talked.”

“Plenitude. What does that mean exactly? A surfeit of things? Replenishment? A complete state? A wished-for thing? The person named Marsh Felon wished to study and inhale the room around him.”

These are interesting passages. Beautifully written, of course, but also in the storyteller’s voice—not in the characters. Is this omniscience or is it Nathaniel looking back? Is Nathaniel the storyteller in Warlight? Or is there an entity telling the story through the character Nathaniel? These passages, in my opinion, don’t read as if they’re in Nathaniel’s voice. But it’s ambiguous.

Felon (as the story calls him) is taken in by the William’s family and his educational ambitions are encouraged. Next we see him as an adult, getting involved in British espionage in the years before WWII. (Again my friends, internal feelings/thoughts are depicted that the character Nathaniel couldn’t know). He interacts with Olive Lawrence (a character who later is the Darter’s paramour) and reunites with Rose who now is married and has a daughter, Rachel.

‘Kay.

In any case, Felon involves Rose in British espionage.

“Is it Felon who chooses her, or is this something Rose always wished for? Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be? …Perhaps such a life was what she always wanted, the journey she knew she would at some time leap towards.” To me, this reads again more like a storyteller distinct from Nathaniel. A storyteller who is not embodied but is helping Nathaniel make sense of things.

A new chapter “The Night of the Bombers” is in Rose’s perspective—are we being asked to believe that Nathaniel imagines his mother’s consciousness? It’s possible. I read this as more like the future Nathaniel is imaging being told a story that explains his mother’s abandonment.

“On weekends, Rose drives up to Suffolk to visit her children who are living with her mother, safe from the Blitz that is terrorizing London.”

So, we are in the war years, and Rose has children—not just Rachel but also Nathaniel.

The next chapter shows Felon and Rose the spies. Rose has left her children and husband (or he’s left her) to be with Felon—apparently not just as a spy colleague. “He desired her. All those inches of her. Her mouth, her ear, the blue eyes, the quiver at her thigh, her skirt lifted and bunched: was it to satisfy him? His hand wishing to be there. Everything left his mind but that tremor.”

Yikes!

“And she? My mother? What did she feel? And was it he or she who had persuaded the other into this adventure? I still don’t know. I like to believe they entered this tremendous universe as teacher and student…Alongside his wish that for a moment she might awaken as if there were Morse between them in the darkness. Or the place she perhaps wished to be kissed. How she would turn onto her stomach.”

‘Kay. I’m getting kind of overheated here. Let’s remember in the logic of the book, this is Nathaniel reporting these eroticisms of his mother—it’s possible, I suppose but more likely it’s the storyteller making its case. Rose left her children to be a spy and to be Felon’s lover—was she wrong? Selfish? I don’t know, my friends.

By the way, the text contains a lot of questions (so does my commentary?). This is part of Mr. Ondaatje’s style that appears in other books, but in Warlight, it adds to a sense of Nathaniel’s openness and reluctance to judge his mother’s behavior.

Well, the clock on the clubhouse wall says it’s time to go. Let’s pick it up nest time.

Till then.

#Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray