The Nature of Things

Warlight refers to the dim lights that were used for emergency vehicles' navigation during blackouts in London in World War II. Michael Ondaatje's new novel takes place mostly in London in the years after the war. It is a story hidden in murkiness, camouflage, and intrigue with only the dimmest of lights to guide us through.  The atmosphere is obviously intentional. The first hundred pages or so are all about atmosphere and it is there that the tone of the book is set. The plot moves with glacial slowness as Ondaatje builds his character studies and begins to hint at the drama to come. The story begins in 1945 when two children, 14-year-old Nathaniel Williams and his older sister, Rachel, are left by their parents, who are supposedly going to Singapore, in the care of two men. One of the men is the family's upstairs lodger called (by the children) the Moth and the other is his friend, a former boxer known as the Pimlico Darter. The Moth and the Darter thus effectively becom...

“There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feel it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You find in this way the path of your life.” -  The Cat's Table Michael Ondaatje insists that this novel is not autobiographical and why should we doubt him? Even so, the intimate and poignant tale certainly  feels  autobiographical and Ondaatje admits that the story has parallels with his own.  The central event of the book, an eleven-year-old boy's voyage on a big ship by himself from Colombo in what was then called Ceylon to England in 1954, was a journey that the writer himself made at that age. In the end, I suppose the argument could be made that all fiction is autobiographical in that it springs from the writer's imagination and that imagination is a product of his/her experiences. Discerning the autobiographical bits becomes a circular and rather pointless exercise, I think. Bett...