Warlight

This week, dear friends, a new story, Michael Ondaatje’s 2018 Warlight. Like Ondaatje’s The English Patient, this novel is set in the aftermath of WWII. In fact, one reviewer said that Warlight is like the B-side of English Patient—this was meant as praise, meaning that Warlight explores similar themes but is not as overtly romantic; in a sense, quieter and more restrained. (There are no planes in Warlight. There are boats—barges and leaky fishing craft).

The title refers to the dimmed orange lights that guided river traffic in blacked-out England during the Blitz, a particular quality of light, a crepuscular murk in which disguise and lying persist.

I first read Warlight when it came out, being a huge fan of Mr. Ondaatje. At a first reading, I have to say I remember being underwhelmed, perhaps disappointed by the more reserved pace. No longer, best B.

Things get going with a quote before Chapter One: “Most of the great battles are fought in the creases of topographical maps.” This implies, I think, that maps are valuable more for the accidental features they accumulate over time than for their original purpose.

The story is often told in first person, sometimes third, and occurs in simple past tense and present tense. The narrator, the “I,” is Nathaniel Williams, an Englishman who is looking back at his adolescence years after WWII, and the way he was gently misled by his mother and other adults. He is trying to reconstruct his youth and that of his slightly older sister’s, Rachel. However, the story is steered by a largely hidden narrator into the perspectives of other characters, chiefly Marsh Felon, who knew Nathaniel’s mother Rose even before Nathaniel was born. Rose, too has herself presented, although another way to look at this is to say that Nathaniel imagines the world of others who were significant. These passages are in present tense.

Here is Nathaniel as he introduces a new section and narrator. It is the way Mr. Ondaatje transitions to these distinct parts of the story:

“My last night…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.”

This concludes a section of the book; next we have a new section in present tense, the story of Marsh Felon and Nathaniel’s mother before Nathaniel was born. Is this a kind of magical realism, you ask? Conversing with the dead? No, I say. It’s a person coping with raw loss who imagines a past he is otherwise shut out of forever—another loss. And it provides a neat bridge to a different interlocking story.

What is it about Mr. Ondaatje’s prose style? It is poetic; it uses no contractions. It is instantly identifiable.

“Felon watches Rose with the daughter tucked under her arm. She places Rachel on the grass and picks up the fishing rod, his gift. He knows her first response will be to test its weight, balance it on her fingers, then smile. She rubs her open palm against the grain of the impregnated rod, then picks up the infant and walks over to embrace Felon…”

It’s a series of declarative sentences in present tense that describe behavior, very patient, very expressive. Very present—the way a poet observes the world and translates it to language. A sense of a silent narrator observing Felon observing Rose, someone hidden from the characters in the scene.

A major difference between The English Patient and Warlight is that Warlight is all about someone trying to re-construct a past, to “fill-in” a story from memory fragments and stories told by others, while English Patient is about (I think) a known past indelibly marking the present.

Here’s a small story in Warlight—which may be a mise en abyme—that suggests what Nathaniel is trying to do: “…a parrot that had been found in the Far East, that had lived for decades with a tribe that was now extinct, its whole vocabulary lost. But a zoo had the parrot and it turned out the creature still knew the language. So the man and the linguist were trying to re-create the language from that one bird.” Nathaniel is trying to understand the way he is by working like an archaeologist to re-construct the past.

The story has to do with Nathaniel’s mother Rose being a spy who is involved in the mass killings that occurred in Italy and the Balkans after WWII, killings which were often motivated by revenge. Communists against Fascists. And Rose herself is eventually murdered in an act of revenge by a relative of one of the massacres’ victims.  

Near the end of the book, we encounter the protagonist/narrator, Nathaniel, in the story’s present: “A year ago, I came across a book by Olive Lawrence in our local store and that afternoon…I kept waiting for evening so I could read it without interruption. Apparently it was the basis for a forthcoming television documentary, and so the next day I went out and bought a television set. Such an object has never been a part of my life, and when it arrived it was a surreal guest in the Malakites’ small living room. It was as if I had suddenly decided to buy a boat or a seersucker suit.”

There’s a sense here of a rather restricted and solitary life. No mention is made of others. How did he get there? The question the book poses is whether this existence is a result of the protagonist’s earlier experience or the result of conscious choice.

Here’s the answer:

“We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. Who guided me to something better? …how much damage did I do?”

This just in! The last novel we covered here, Taiwan Travelogue, has won the International Booker Prize. Well, deserved, in my opinion.

Till next time.

#Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray