Visiting with Mom

Hello. I have returned from NYC where I attended a conference focused on marketing rather than writing a novel. I learned a lot and am happy to be back. Let’s jump into Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight.

The next chapter of the book is entitled “In the Archives” and has to do with Nathaniel’s work in the Foreign Office in 1959. He continues to look for information regarding his now-deceased mother and her wartime activities but finds little. Although he describes being estranged from his sister Rachel, he runs into her and learns she has a daughter and husband. But Rachel confronts him about their past: “You had no idea what was happening (during their teen years when the Moth was living with them). He was the one protecting us…You managed to ignore what our parents had done to us…We were damaged, Nathaniel. Recognize that.” With this, Nathaniel must accept—at least—that his sister is extremely angry at their parents for abandoning them, and that the Moth was their guardian.

Nathaniel uncovers evidence in the archives about his mother’s activities after the war, activities that linked her with British espionage during the time she was away from the family.

Then, at the archives, Nathaniel encounters a figure from those times, Arthur McCash. The two have lunch together, and Arthur says: “When your mother left the Service, she did so eliminating every trail behind her for one reason only. It was so that no one could come after you and Rachel again. And there were guardians around you, always…She stayed away from the two of you because she was fearful you might be linked to her.”

Essentially Arthur confirms much of what Nathaniel has been learning on his own—and what Rachel told him: their mother, Rose, was a British intelligence agent during and after the war, involved in secret and violent deeds. She chose this life over that of being a mother and wife.

The next section is entitled “A Working Mother,” and goes back in time to the point during Nathaniel’s late teens when Rose reappeared and they lived together in rural England, watched over by the Malakites. In Warlight, time goes forward, jumps ahead, backs up, and moves forward again. This is the way the story is told. Of course, it is told through Nathaniel as he looks back from a future point, full of the knowledge he’s amassed.

The style, like much of the novel is faux memoir, by which I mean we the readers are presented with a story presented by an “I” who writes from a future vantage point. But of course, this “I” is not a real person, but a fictional device for the “real” author.

An interesting digression occurs in this section when Rose and Nathaniel learn that a stranger has moved into the neighborhood. Rose is suspicious of strangers and spends some time investigating, learning that the stranger is “some sort of writer, apparently quite well known, even in other parts of the world.” This is the only mention made of this person, and it appears to be another instance of Mr. Ondaatje rather slyly inserting himself into one of his novels—I believe he does this in The English Patient too. Why do this, you ask? I think it’s just for fun.

Nathaniel describes his time spent with his mother and that she never revealed much about her spying. Then, she is murdered, shot to death by someone bent on revenge. Nathaniel describes the funeral, and how he returned to the house that evening and spent time in his mother’s room, unable to sleep. Then he writes:

“My last night at White Paint, two nights after the funeral, I went to my mother’s room, got into her narrow, sheetless bed and lay there in the dark, the way she must have done, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Tell me about him,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘The person you lied to me about. The man whose name you said you couldn’t remember. The man who spoke to me at your funeral’”

‘Kay. So, he’s apparently imagining this conversation with his deceased mother. But the next section leaps back in time before Nathaniel’s birth, into the consciousness of another character. We’ll get into that next time.

Till then.

#Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray