Michael Ondaatje

Set in the UK after WWII, protagonist Nathaniel tells the tale of being left in the care of an enigmatic person he calls The Moth while his parents leave the country to take care of undisclosed “business” in Singapore. Teens Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are supposed to go to boarding school, but they talk The Moth into living at home, where they are exposed to the clandestine activities of The Moth’s associates. An ex-boxer, The Darter, soon joins them. Nathaniel accompanies The show more Darter on trips down the Thames. Though he remains mostly in the dark, he suspects these trips involve illegal dealings.

The book is split into two parts. The first relates what happens to the two teens when their parents abandon them. The second takes place fourteen years later and follows Nathaniel’s attempts to reconstruct what was going on with his parents, particularly his mother, during and after the war. He understands more about the situation now that he is ten years older. The narrative sheds light on the aftermath of WWII, where many regional conflicts did not cease with the cease.

“On the continent guerrilla groups and Partisan fighters had emerged from hiding, refusing defeat. Fascist and German supporters were being hunted down by people who had suffered for five or more years. The retaliations and acts of revenge back and forth devastated small villages, leaving further grief in their wake. They were committed by as many sides as there were ethnic groups across the newly liberated map of Europe.”

Though it involves espionage, it is a reflective book involving little action. It is more about the impact of the parents’ espionage activities upon the children. The prose is stellar, as one may expect from Ondaatje. It worked for me as a way of depicting the pieces of a life that we puzzle out, never really knowing the entire picture but making inferences from what little we do know.

“The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.” show less

His dreamily seductive writing will beguile and hold the reader. Occasionally, when Ondaatje comes down to earth, such as a mention of the Persian Gulf war, does he lose the spellbinding quality with a reminder that there is a real world out there. It's not that this is poetic in a flowery way, in fact there are some brutal scenes in this diverging (divisidero?) story yet they do not detract from its elegance. However, to take in the subtleties, Ondaatje's novels require the reader's show more attention, this one maybe more than any other. The strange thing about reading Ondaatje is that I can hear his velvet voice, in the same way I can hear my mother's voice when I read her letters. show less

Oh, the fantasy twenties, the bravenewworld twenties, the isla formosa twenties. Just in case the seething exploitativeness and class privilege of it all wasn't up in your face enough in Gatsby, in Brideshead, Ondaatje slaps you in the face with it. This is a literal colony, and the drunkest idiot son is gonna pay for all those tripping gin walks down cinnamon-scented paths by being, like, a major in the Coldwater Guards and safely protecting Ceylon from the Japanese. Ondaatje makes no show more apologies for being a scion of privilege, and he gets away with it, because this world is that intoxicating. Because more than we want to condemn this world of laughter and mystery and affairs and the great chain of family ties and light-hearted laughter and cold-blooded savoir faire in the face of the fact that all that stops you from being a human stain is that you're beautiful--more than we want to condemn it, we want to experience it. We want to be the ones who lived fast and made this tiny land our own. We want to fly, tonight, and it's a lot more honest to make that flight a flood, like Ondaatje does for his batty grandma Lalla, and to have it end in crushing brutal death and not be the less wonderful for that than it is to cover up and make it Peter and Wendy and "there'll always be an England." There won't and there wasn't, and the same goes for planter Sri Lanka, but the difference is the bright young Ceylonese things knew it, and it redeems them a little and makes them a lot more doomed and desirable. A fantasy world; one that evaporates in peacock cries and dew. show less

Ondaatje's prose is beguiling to say the least. Here he has told a story that like real life, is a fusion of many characteristics. This is a blend of love, peace, war, secrets, history, spies, memories, set in post-war Tuscany. Having poetic language, a good story, and Ondaatje’s inimitable languid air, this was engaging, but in a slow-moving, ethereal way in which a tragedy almost slipped in under the radar. In a strange way, spots that were implausible added to the shadowy quality rather show more than detracting. show less