Let’s pick up on our plunge into Ben Lerner’s excellent Transcription. In this first section of the story (first of three), the as yet unnamed protagonist arrives in Providence, Rhode Island where he went to school some twenty years before and where he met his wife, Mia, and studied with Thomas, his mentor. As I mentioned, he’s returning to Providence, a place redolent with memory, to interview an elderly Thomas. The night of his arrival, he intends to go to Thomas’ house and at the hotel, calls Thomas to make plans and then calls home to talk to his daughter. There’s a sense of the protagonist inhabiting multiple roles which don’t integrate. He’s trying to function as a father (fatherhood/sonhood becomes a strong theme), a husband, a mentee, a journalist intent on getting an interview, a man re-visiting his university but feels awkward. Talking with his daughter, trying to talk to his wife, and talking to Thomas—all on the phone—he feels disconnected and alienated. Looking out the hotel window, he remembers attending a play long ago in the adjacent building. “I was distracted by the idea that a version of myself was still watching the play…” He exists in versions of himself—an intensely post-modern idea. He is a different person in different contexts, lacking a unique, stable identity—which is a modernist idea. We will see that his mentor, Thomas, does indeed possess a single, stable identity—not that this necessarily makes him happy. He’s a different sort of human than the protagonist, somewhat mysterious. Then, the protagonist drops his phone in the bathroom sink—a contemporary disaster. The phone dies, and for him, it’s like losing the key to reality. (Thomas has no phone). In a comic scene of desperation, the protagonist tries to get a new phone, but the Apple store is closed till the morning. He tries, unsuccessfully, to borrow a phone. He realizes he’d intended to record that evening’s conversation with Thomas on his phone and now will have to rely on memory or note-taking. He sets out for Thomas’ house, phone-less. “I would typically start walking directions on the map—even though I knew the way. And I checked my phone whenever a transition presented itself, whenever I left one space for another, or changed from a standing to a sitting position (or vice versa) or stopped or started walking. “I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyCheck alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past…because only in the past would I be deviceless.” I hope what comes across here is that Transcription is not a sort of diatribe against technology, an absolute condemnation and desire to return to the “olden days.” It is a showing of a contemporary person who is bewildered by the sudden loss of a way to experience the world. There is no value-judgment. The protagonist walks through the campus area where he had been a student twenty years previously. He muses that, if he had a phone, he could take a picture of the building that his wife had stood in front of twenty years ago and send it to her, instead he must remember the way she looked. He encounters a woman known from the past, Chloe, who knew he and a woman, Anisa, whom he was involved with after a breakup with Mia, “the fall of our junior year.” So, there’s a nice narrative flow here: he walks through an area full of memory, encounters a real person from that time, and then seemingly remembers a story from that time. That story is presented in the same verb tense—simple past—and set off by paragraph breaks. A more conventional way to do this would be to change the tense of the memory section. Thus, the first sentence might be: “The fall of our junior year, Mia had spent a semester in Granada…” vs. “The fall of our junior year, Mia spent a semester in Granda…” After this initial marking, verb tenses could revert to simple past. But Mr. Lerner does not do this; he relies on that first clause—The fall of our junior year—to indicate the past and then continues with the same verb tenses used to indicate the story’s present. The effect is seamless, as if a consciousness is moving through time and space, sensing the present (a few instants behind, as we humans do) and having it trigger recollection. Another stylistic feature in this section describing the past is that the protagonist states that after a break-up with Mia, he attempted suicide. “It was conventional undergraduate stuff…” ‘Kay, a suicide attempt, even if it’s a gesture, is no laughing matter, bro. Mr. Lerner doesn’t exactly make light of it but he does treat it dispassionately, and this is a feature of the story—that mortal matters are rendered cooly. There is little shouting or table-pounding, and that contributes to the story’s tone—reserved and unemotional. The narrative returns to the present with Chloe’s comment: “We’re not in touch, Chloe said. but I know from Instagram she’s in Atlanta.” The protagonist moves on and arrives at Thomas’ house, but I think we should postpone our look at this till next time. Till then. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

Today, let’s examine a new book, Ben Lerner’s 2026 novel, Transcription. Mr. Lerner is the acclaimed author of three previous novels and several books of poetry. Transcription is written in first person, simple past tense although the first person narrator is a different character in the story’s third section which indicates the work of the implied author. There are three distinct sections to the book. I’ll say more about this but today I want to compare the story’s beginning to a story written more than fifty years earlier, Alistair MacLeod’s very fine offering from 1974 The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Hopefully, this exercise will reveal something about Mr. Lerner’s style. Blood begins: “Now in the early evening the sun is flashing everything in gold. It bathes the blunt grey rocks that loom yearningly out toward Europe and it touches upon the stunted spruce and the low-lying lichens and the delicate hardy ferns and the ganglia-rooted moss and the tiny tough rock cranberries. The grey and slanting rain squalls have swept in from the sea and then departed with all the suddenness of surprise marauders. Everything before them and beneath them has been rapidly, briefly and thoroughly drenched and now the clear droplets catch and hold the sun’s infusion in a myriad of rainbow colours. Far beyond the harbor’s mouth more tiny squalls seem to be forming, moving rapidly across the surface of the sea out there beyond land’s end where the blue ocean turns to grey in rain and distance and the strain of eyes. Even farther out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit, to say nothing of North America’s more western cities; seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination’s mist.” This story is written in first person, present tense, and is about a man who returns to Canada’s coastal area where he has a strong connection. Here’s the beginning of Transcription: “I was falling asleep on the train. I was going to interview Thomas, who had just turned ninety. My seat was facing opposite the direction of travel, making it difficult to read his latest book, which I was holding in my hand. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or as my ten-year-old Eva put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I’m “facing the past.” ‘Kay. These stories represent very different styles. The beginning of Blood is formed of an intense amount of description. It’s beautifully written but gives little clue as to what the story is about. If we think of the basic questions that fiction should answer, Blood answers When—in the early evening, although this has an imperfect, timeless sense as if it could occur in any year. The last sentence references imagination’s mist, which suggests a consciousness perhaps looking out and imagining the sea. This may answer, or begin to answer, Who. And Where is answered, although again, to mention the seacoast facing east toward Ireland, is pretty imperfect and un-specific. So this passage is very timeless and open. And it asks the reader to be patient and appreciate the prose and the beauty. There’s no mention of technology which might place things more in time. What we learn going forward is that this relates to a story about a character who has a strong connection to this beauty. If Blood is un-specific, Transcription is more particular, although still open. But not imperfect. We are reading a scene that occurs at one particular point in time. A character, an “I,” is on a train, trying to read while facing the rear of the moving train, a position which upsets his stomach. And “I” is trying to read something by “Thomas” whom “I” is going to interview. “I” has a ten-year-old daughter, Eva, who was traveling with “I” last summer to Lublin, which is in Poland, and she made a remark which can be taken literally—facing the past—and also more philosophically, that when the “I” is facing backward, “I” is facing the past, which is exactly what “I” is doing in this story by going to interview Thomas, an important figure from the past. The question Where is partially answered. The “I” character (and we don’t know the gender or age yet, although we might infer that it is a man, naively, because the real author, Ben Lerner is a man) is on a train but we don’t actually know where the train is. There is a mention of a city in Poland, although it is separated in time from the moving train. The question Who is answered—a person who gets nauseous sitting backwards on a train and who has a ten-year-old daughter. Whereas the beginning of Blood tells us little about the protagonist of the story, Transcription has many references to an “I” who experiences. The “I” was falling asleep, was going to interview Thomas, was holding a book in its hand, etc. Technically these are called filters or filtering comments. Instead of showing what it’s like for a character to fall asleep, the writer uses “I was falling asleep.” It’s a reminder that the reader is reading about another character; the filter stands between the reader and the experience. It creates distance. There is considerably less distance in Blood, where the reader is put within a consciousness experiencing the seacoast. Are these stylistic differences somewhat driven by the stories being written fifty years apart? Yes. In fact, in you wanted to write something that suggested the seventies, perhaps a character in the seventies, you could emulate the style of Blood and use long, lyrical sentences deeply embedded within a character’s perspective. And, if you wanted something contemporary, you could use filters to create distance. In either case, readers would be cued by the form. If we look beyond the first paragraph of Transcription, we learn more about the story. The train is going to Providence, Rhode Island. The “I” is masked, a pandemic reference which places things in time. The “I” writes, “My main concern was that I would somehow fail to record us on my phone…” This is foreshadowing; this fear is realized. He texts his wife and mentions a hard morning getting their daughter to school (here we have a clear sense of the protagonist’s gender; he is male. He refers to “Eckert,” an unfamiliar entity who will become important later on. The conductor comes by and scans tickets that are on the protagonist’s phone—there are many references to technology, which is one of the book’s themes. He uses earbuds to listen to Thomas giving a talk in 1973. He apparently falls asleep and dreams. “I was in Paris…I was getting Eva from what must have been her school. The gates swung open, but a woman—dark, beautiful, familiar…stopped me and said ‘Impossible.’ He realizes he’s about to cut into a line of other parents waiting and is embarrassed. The other parents are disgusted by him. He walks back to find the distant end of the line and realizes he’s walking away from his daughter. There are a lot of unanswered questions: What is he doing the interview for? Why Providence and the train? What is his relationship with Thomas? (there are hints that it is more than professional). Why was the morning hard? Who is Eckert? The dream seems to be about obstacles the protagonist must deal with in completing an important task—picking his daughter up from school. This process of working through obstacles is central to the story. What also comes across in the beginning to Transcription is that many questions are raised because neither the protagonist nor the implied author explains everything. The reader is asked to be patient and wait for answers—which is a similar request that Blood makes. Let’s stop there. Till next time. #Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray

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

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

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

Hello. My apologies but I am not posting this week. I am in New York City at a writer's conference, trying to get my new novel published. I'm learning a lot but it's taken up my time for other things. I'll return next week with more on Warlight. I hope everyone is well. Till then.

The second section of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is entitled Inheritance. What has been inherited, you ask? Let’s continue, searching for answers. It begins: “In November of 1959, when I was twenty-eight, after some years of what had felt like wildness, I bought a home for myself in a Suffolk village that could be reached by a few hours train-ride from London.” A short digression on craft. Mr. Ondaatje lets we the readers know when and where we are in a direct and masterly way. The reader, it is said, should always know where and when she/he is in a story. The new time of this section of the story has jumped far ahead from the early post-war years. What has Nathaniel been up to? We are not told, only that it was wild. Where has his mother been during this time? His sister, the Darter? Arthur McCall? More questions than answers, best B. We shall see. We quickly learn that Nathaniel bought this house from a Mrs. Malakite and that, “It was a house I loved.” Nathaniel has been in the house before and knew both Mrs. Malakite and her husband, well. After the attack in which The Moth was killed, Nathaniel and his sister were sent to different boarding schools, he’d return on holiday and stay with his mother, who now lived in an area of England known as The Saints, in her parents’ home, and Mr. Malakite, Sam, becomes a trusted guardian. “It was a time when my mother and I were not close. The domestic ease we loved during those weeks before she abandoned my sister and me no longer existed. I could not erase my distrust, given her deceptive departure.” But at this time, Nathaniel still does not understand the reason for his mother’s disappearance. It is clear to the reader, and this irony helps to establish Nathaniel’s likability as a character; he is angry at his mother, mistrustful but still loyal. “I did not know at that time that my mother, Rose Williams, after the attack on us had ended all contact with Intelligence. Although the fracas at the Bark Theater had been quickly hushed up by authorities, there were hints of my mother’s wartime work in the newspapers…” This is the adult Nathaniel reporting—at the time, he was unaware (he didn’t read newspapers). Or did he actively avoid awareness? We are told immediately after the attack, that Nathaniel realizes his mother was doing some secret work and that, given the Moth’s fate, the stakes are life and death. He seems to approach the truth but always stops short. “The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out. But during my late teens when I would stay with my mother at White Paint (her house), I discovered no clues. Until one day I came home from work, walked into the kitchen where she, in shirtsleeves, was scrubbing a pot in the sink…I saw a row of livid scars like those cut into the bark of a tree by some mechanical gardening tool…I was never to know how many other scars there were on her, but here were those slate-red ones…evidence from that time. It’s nothing, she muttered. Just the street of the small daggers…She said nothing more about how she got those wounds.” ‘Kay. There is a real gulf between son and mother that neither wishes to cross. Many sons or daughters would say, “Holy Schmoley, Ma, how did you get those scars?” Nathaniel does not tell us he does. After the deadly attack on Nathaniel and Rachel and their mother’s re-appearance, many would say, “Ma! Where you been? Who are these people who murdered The Moth? What’s wrong with your arm?” And many mothers would say, “Look, I’ve been a secret agent and have been tortured, but I’m going to stop and try to be a proper Mum.” The fact that Nathaniel and Rose do not say these things tell us that Nathaniel doesn’t want to know. (at this time) and that Rose doesn’t want to tell. Why? Perhaps Nathaniel (more than his sister, who’s angry and distances herself from the family) tries to help keep his mother’s secrets out of loyalty. A paragraph break signals a leap in time: “A decade after my mother’s death, I received an invitation to apply to the Foreign Office.” This is, I believe, the first mention of Rose’s death, although there’s been plenty of foreshadowing. The Foreign Office is the Intelligence section of the British government—spies, my dears. Nathaniel is recruited to work with the same group that his mother worked for. “I assumed that nepotism and my bloodline must have been considered a reliable entrance into a profession that trusted lineage and the possibly inherited quality of secrecy.” His job is to review secret documents from the war and post-war years. Nathaniel concludes that this may be golden opportunity to find out what his mother was doing when she abandoned him. “It was the possibility of an inheritance.” The job is known as ‘The Silent Correction,” and its purpose is to review archives in order to judge which espionage activities worked and which did not. Nathaniel learns that in many ways, the war continued after the surrender of Germany in 1945. Fascists and Communists continued to battle each other, particularly in southern Europe. A new chapter jumps ahead to the previously referenced time of 1959 when Nathaniel buys the house from Mrs. Malakite who does not remember him. “…I decided to write down what little I knew of her (his mother) time in this place…When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. ‘A memoir is the lost inheritance,’ you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait, everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected…So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.” Let’s stop on this beautifully written note. We have several mentions of inheritance here to explain the use of this title for the section. Nathaniel seems to be rushing toward an understanding of his mother—years after the fact. A not so unusual state, eh? Till next time. #Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

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

The overall theme of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, seems to be how the past effects the present, or, to put it another way, how our experiences make us who we are. One of the experiences the narrator Nathaniel reflects on in the story is his relationships with women. He undergoes the disappearance of his mother, Rose, just before his sexual awakening. Coincidence, you ask? As our old friend Don Juan said, there are no coincidences—especially in fiction. (He didn’t say that last part). In any case, we could say that, just before he becomes sexual, a solid boundary is established between he and his mother. Roughly a year after Rose’s disappearance, Nathaniel takes a job at a busy London hotel where he meets a number of interesting co-workers, including Mr. Nkoma, a man in his forties who entertains the younger boys, including Nathaniel, with tales of his sexual exploits, providing the story with a mise en abyme as he describes an encounter he had with an older woman who taught him about sex and life. The older Nathaniel reflects from the present: “What did that glimpse of storytelling do to the boy I was?” Indeed, it should be said that we the readers never get the answer to this, as Nathaniel gives us few clues about his adult life, only, as I indicated last week, that he is solitary and a recluse. Perhaps the implication is that he is dissatisfied in the book’s present and is looking back in time to try to figure how how he became the person he is. Nathaniel became fascinated by Olive Lawrence, a woman The Darter is “dating.”. “Like the Darter, she was tall and slim, with a dazzle of unkept hair, shaped and reshaped I am sure by whatever weather she was in…Olive was the only person who came into our house who appeared capable of clear judgement…Hers was the calmest voice I knew when I was a boy. There was never argument in it. She had just this tactile curiosity about what interested her, and that calmness allowed you to be within her intimate space. In daylight she always caught your eye as she talked or as she listened; she was completely with you.” As things develop, Nathaniel learns Olive is an ethnographer who was (and is) involved working for the British government. She and the Darter end their relationship, and Olive leaves London but continues to send postcards to Nathaniel and his sister from faraway places. Nathaniel reflects: “There are moments after I’ve put down such thoughts about Olive Lawrence when I almost believe I am composing a possible version of my mother.” “In any case, the curious pleasure of female company was in me now.” He takes another job in a restaurant, and it is here that he meets his first love. “A girl, a green ribbon holding back her hair…asked if she could “borrow” the small piece of ham out of my sandwich. I did not know what to say. I must have handed it to her silently. I asked what her name was and she looked shocked at my forwardness, ran back and organized a group of three or four waitresses to circle me and sing about the dangers of desire. I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and childhood.” Nathaniel and this woman go to an empty house on Agnes Street, a house that is for sale—the young woman’s brother is the realtor and provides her with the keys. She and Nathaniel go through the darkened, empty rooms having sex. ‘Kay. Nathaniel refers to the young woman as Agnes. “Along with the wildness of her talk, I loved her voice, the thickness and rhymes of it, a sea change after the way the boys at my school talked. But something else made Agnes different from others. The Agnes I knew during that summer was not the Agnes she would be later…Was that future woman I imagined aligned with her wishfulness for herself? …During that era teenagers were locked into what we thought we already were and therefore would always be…” This is an important comment on the book’s theme. Nathaniel, looking back, reflects on how he did not expect to change with time, as if the feel of that youthful, erotic connection would persist forever. And, of course, he understands that this was an illusion. Once, when they are leaving the house on Agnes Street, they are menaced by a man. They evade him, feeling guilty that he may be the owner of the house they’ve just occupied. And this is a foreshadowing of what is to come. Let’s stop there and resume next time. Till then. #Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

An important question to ponder in reading Warlight by Michael Ondaatje is, just what kind of story is it? Fiction or memoir? If it’s fiction there should be elements of traditional story structure therein—a dramatic question, an inciting incident, beginning, middle, and end, climax and resolution. Is it a memoir? “A memoir is a factual, narrative nonfiction account written from the author’s personal perspective. Derived from the French word mémoire (meaning "memory"), it focuses on a specific theme, period, or transformative event in a person's life rather than spanning their entire chronological existence.” Hmm. Well, Warlight doesn’t appear to be factual non-fiction. Nathaniel Williams, the book’s protagonist is not Michael Ondaatje. Nathaniel says he is 14 in 1945; Mr. Ondaatje was born in 1943—he had a very different experience of WWII and the postwar era. Right? Hmm. Warlight does seem to fit with the other part of this definition. It does focus on a specific theme, period, and transformative event in a person’s life. So maybe Warlight is a hybrid memoir/fictional story. I’m going to call it, best B. I think the fact that Warlight is not “factual” precludes it being memoir. But is does give the impression of being memoir. It’s a trick! Well, no, it’s not a trick in any malicious sense. Like so much great fiction, it’s illusion and sleight-of-hand, and that’s enjoyable. What, then, you say, is the specific theme, period, and transformative event in Warlight? The theme is the way humans “fill in” a poorly remembered past in order to see how it constructs a present. The period is WWII and its aftermath. The transformative event? The death of Nathaniel’s mother, Rose. Nathaniel is looking back from the future and trying to make sense of his mother’s death. Why did she abandon he and his sister to pursue such a dangerous path? (that of being a spy). Who was she? Who and what did she care about? What affect did her life and death have on Nathaniel? ‘Kay, plenty of questions to answer. The first section of the novel is titled “A Table Full of Strangers.” Then, the first line: “In 1943 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” This really is the whole story, encapsulated. The text proceeds to show us how this happened—not why, that will come later along with the narrator’s understanding. Nathaniel and his slightly older sister, Rachel, live in London with their parents, who announce they’re going away for a year to Asia. The year is 1943. The Blitz, the bombing campaign waged by the Germans against Britain, lasted from 1940-1941, but in 1943, the war remains pervasive. Nathaniel and Rachel were puzzled by their parents’ announcement and preparations to leave, but leave they did, first the father and then their mother, Rose, who was supposed to follow him. Nathaniel and Rachel, in their teens, were to attend boarding schools and be looked after on holidays by their parents’ lodger, a man the siblings nicknamed The Moth for his shy demeanor. Later, he introduced a man into their household known as The Pimlico Darter, a former boxer and current smuggler. “The arrangement appeared strange, but life still was haphazard and confusing during that period…so what had been suggested did not feel unusual.” Before their mother leaves, Nathaniel often observes she and the Moth talking, and it is revealed that they used to work together as fire-watchers during the Blitz, stationed on the top floor of a tall building to report on the damage from the bombing. At one point, the Moth reveals their mother worked as a driver to take men at night to the coast where they would embark on clandestine activities. While the Moth describes this, “my mother listened so carefully to what he described that she held the iron with her right hand in midair so it wouldn’t rest on and burn a collar, giving herself fully to his shadowed story.” And Nathaniel observes from the future: “I should have known then.” But he does not, or at least, does not say that he knew his mother was a spy at that time. Rose tells the siblings stories including one they loved about when she was a child and men worked to re-thatch their roof. This foreshadows things to come strongly but at this early stage is thought of as a fairy tale by Nathaniel and his sister. In fact, this first section of Warlight has a fairy tale quality in that the siblings are separated from their parents and tended by two people who seem almost other-worldly and magical, like elves or dwarves. “My sister made a list of his (the Moth’s) attributes. Thick black horizontal eyebrows. A large though friendly stomach. His big honker. For a private man…who drifted through the house mostly in silence, he had the loudest sneeze. Bursts of air were expelled not just from his face but seemed to originate from the depths of that large and friendly stomach.” Rachel searches the house and discovers their mother’s trunk, full of the clothes she packed for the trip to join their father. The two realize that their mother has not gone on that trip but is somewhere hidden to them. The Moth, who is a classical music enthusiast, tells them that Mahler’s scores are often marked with the word schwer, meaning difficult or heavy. The Moth seemed to use the phrase as a warning to them, that the future would be difficult. Nathaniel and Rachel began to say it to each other as a code word for their present. Let’s stop there and resume next time. Till then. #Warlight #MichaelOndaatje #AlanBray

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

As we approach the end of our stroll through Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, it would be good to give further consideration to the intriguing preface and several afterwords, known collectively and formally as paratext. Our friend A.I. says, “Paratext refers to the elements surrounding a text—such as covers, titles, prefaces, and footnotes—that frame, promote, and help readers interpret it. Coined by Gérard Genette, this "threshold" material, including design and formatting, shapes audience reception.” This also includes peritext—elements inside the book like dedications and footnotes. The whole phenomenon serves to “package” the text and provide context. Well, sure, AI. I’d say Ms. Yang is a master of using peritext to shape Taiwan Travelogue a certain way, and this, as we know, is the work of the implied author. Yay! We’ve talked about the book’s introduction, entitled, ”A Truncated Dream, a Foreign Splendorland,” purportedly written by a Japanese woman (I mistakenly said she was a man earlier) after the year 2015 when she claims to have first become acquainted with the text. Let’s not belabor something we’ve already discussed but point out again that this intro was really written by Ms. Yang around 2020. It states that the text was written around 1954 as a novel based on the author, Aoyama Chizuko’s, 1938 travels in Taiwan. A close and clever reader might say, hmmm, why did the author do this? Why write a novel based on travel experiences? Of course, it is all a fiction, best B. The character Aoyoma Chizuko is a creation of the real author, Ms. Yang, who wanted to give the text a particular meaning—that is, a book that was written long ago, based on the “real’ experiences of a “real” person. Yes, this makes a claim to give the story authenticity but it’s so obviously part of the fiction that one must wonder why? Why did the author give the book this feature? This feature, which might be called a framing device, gives the reader the impression that several people or voices are telling the story. A sense of polyphony, of a sort of community packaged as a novel. Perhaps, the illusion of being a “real” story contributes to the urgency of the book’s messages—prejudice is wrong, it’s easy to delude yourself by thinking you’re righteous. After this introduction, there is a page of dedications. However, they are written by the story’s narrator, Aoyama Chizuko, who, as we know, is a fiction. In a self-deprecating manner, she thanks three of the characters in the story as if they were real—including “Miss Ong Tshian-hoh,” Aoyama’s translator and companion, Chi-chan. Well, these dedications continue the illusion that the story was based on real people and narrated by a real person. Then in the English edition, we have two elegant pencil drawings of the house Aoyama resided in while living in Taiwan. Is this a real house or imaginary? We don’t know. But the drawings were done by Aoyama Chizuko. This whole introductory section is credited to two fictitious people and written, we can only assume, by one real person, Ms. Yang. (Wink, wink). Let’s look at the afterwords: The first is credited to Aoyama Yoko, identified as the adopted daughter of Aoyama Chuzuko. She writes a tribute to her mother that is said to have been done in 1970, the same year she says her mother died. Here it is said that Aoyama included the twelfth chapter in a later edition of the novel. This is the final chapter that describes Aoyama seeing Chi-chan one last time. Then there is a Translator’s Notes section, said to have been written in 1977 in Columbia, Missouri, by Chi-chan. It is claimed in a footnote by Lin Kang, that Wu Cheng-mai, the Mandarin name of Chi-chan’s eldest daughter, published a self-funded and self-translated edition of the book—translated from Japanese to Mandarin Chinese—in 1977. In this note, Chi-chan claims that Aoyama’s daughter Aoyama Yoko visited her at her home in Missouri and showed her the Japanese book Taiwan Travelogues, and the two women exchanged stories about Aoyama Chizuko. The third afterword is purportedly by Chi-chan’s daughter Wu Cheng-mai and is entitled “Editor’s Note” and written in 1990. It concerns Aoyama’s book and how it came to be published in Mandarin and also tells the tale of Chi-chan’s death. The fourth offering is by Yang Shuang-zi and is entitled “Translator’s Note,” written in 2020. This piece tells how the author and her sister “discovered” Aoyama Chizuko and got her book published in 2020. She writes: “Why did Aoyama Chizuko choose to rewrite the story as a novel instead of publishing her travel essays on Taiwan as a collection? …would travel/historical writing have been more ‘real?’ Are novels/fiction ‘made-up’ by comparison? …a novel is a piece of amber, one that coagulates both the the real past and the ‘made-up’ ideals. It is something that can be visited again and again in its unparalleled beauty.” Finally, there is an afterword by Lin King from 2023 about her work translating the story into English. So what we have is a foregrounded story commented on by a number of voices, not unlike a play where other characters are meta-communicating in asides to the audience. And the story contains two fictional characters who are somewhat hidden and one-dimensional, but who appear in an extremely well-done scene at the book’s end, a scene of forgiveness and letting-go. I think the author’s description of a novel as a piece of amber is a beautiful conclusion. Thank you, Ms. Yang. Next week, a new one. #TaiwanTravelogue #YangShuang-zi #AlanBray