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Warlight Michael Ondaatje 9781787330726 Books

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Warlight Michael Ondaatje 9781787330726 Books

Opening the pages of "Warlight", the new novel by Michael Ondaatje, is like stepping back to 1945, both because of the setting and because of the elegant prose.

Immediately after the war, most of London still in rubble from The Blitz, siblings, Rachel and Nathaniel find themselves largely on their own after their parents decamp to Singapore leaving them under the dubious guardianship of a "friend" whom they call The Moth. Gradually it is revealed through our first-person narrator, Nathaniel, that all is not what it seems. Who is The Moth? Criminal? Spy? Both? What is really going on with their parents?

Ondaatje makes the English language sing as he tells the story of this brother and sister as they grow up quickly in this well paced and plotted novel. Focusing on Nathaniel, we learn that their home quickly fills up with other “strange” characters, and one of them, a former boxer, known only as The Darter, enlists Nathaniel into helping him smuggle Greyhounds for the burgeoning and entirely unregulated Greyhound Racing business. Nathaniel and The Darter become close until a violent confrontation changes everything.

The second part of the novel moves us to Suffolk in the late 1950s as adult Nathaniel attempts to piece together the mystery of his parents, and their cohorts’ war work. “The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.” Says Nathaniel. Through a mixture of investigation and imagination, Nathaniel fleshes out his own origin story, for in essence, this is a mother-son story merely set around WWII where the muted light at night is called “warlight”.


Tags : Warlight [Michael Ondaatje] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Please Read Notes: Brand New, International Softcover Edition, Printed in black and white pages, minor self wear on the cover or pages,Michael Ondaatje,Warlight,JONATHAN CAPE,1787330729

Warlight Michael Ondaatje 9781787330726 Books Reviews

While I love beautiful writing -- which this has in spades -- I tire of books that are so nonlinear and cryptic that one spends much of the time trying to figure out what's going on, who's being described, even what time period it is. The characterization and the description of place and period is superb, but there is very little plot. The first part describes the experiences of the boy and his older sister being raised by some strange but lovable characters after their parents have mysteriously disappeared. The second part describes the now-adult's attempts to figure out what his mother really had been doing in secret. The story is told from the boy's point of view, and his sister barely appears, his father not at all. The story very gradually unfolds in part two (no spoilers), but in such a roundabout fashion that I found it frustrating.
The word “warlight” suggests a murky shrouded light that serves to only partially and poorly illuminate a tableau, and indeed, this is an apt title for Michael Ondaatje’s latest book.

Our narrator is a teenage boy, Nathaniel Williams, who is left, with his slightly older sister Rachel “in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” Their mother, Rose, disappears from their lives in 1945, purportedly to engage in some sort of undercover or espionage actions. As a result, they spend their teenage years surrounded by Dickensian characters a man they refer to as The Moth, a greyhound racer and bon vivant called the Darter, and others who flitter in and out of their lives. It is only in part two, a decade or more later, that a little bit of light is shed.

The book, as one might expect from Mr. Ondaatje, is elegantly and lyrically crafted. It’s a pure pleasure to read prose this assured. An ambiance is set that keeps the reader on edge and off balance. Michael Ondaatje takes the all-too-common coming-of-age trope and turns it on its ear, as if he’s a magician pulling mesmerizing scenes out of his hat.

But. Something changed for me in the second half of this novel. I am typically a big fan of novels that are non-linear and that switch from one point of view to another. But in this case, I found the switch to be distancing. I believe the author’s theme can be encapsulated in this line “We never know more than the surface of any relationship after a certain stage, just as those layers of chalk, built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures, work in almost limitless time.” If my interpretation is correct, then Michael Ondaatje delivers on what he sets out to do.

Yet still, I couldn’t help but feel dissatisfied, as I do sometimes when I meet a self-professed “private person” who keeps me at arm’s length. Like Nathaniel, I kept trying to make my way to a core place called “home” – and maybe that’s precisely the point.
The hinged time before and after the end of World War II, 1945, helped me see that war isn’t contained between two endpoints. Just as the English Patient taught me that we do t own each other, Warlight gave me the more accurate understanding of how we carry a circular history that lives in the people I love, even when I am absent. I loved this book because of the women in it.
This is a beautiful evocative piece of literature. How does a person make sense of his youth and present when he really only remembers faint glimpses of it?. If you are looking for a completely linear novel this is not that book. If you are looking for an amazing piece of writing that illuminates a sense of loss of ever being able to understand both the past and the future, read this.
'Warlight' refers both to the physically available light in England when the black out was in place an also the dim way we see the past as we use it to interpret the present. Lovely.
Opening the pages of "Warlight", the new novel by Michael Ondaatje, is like stepping back to 1945, both because of the setting and because of the elegant prose.

Immediately after the war, most of London still in rubble from The Blitz, siblings, Rachel and Nathaniel find themselves largely on their own after their parents decamp to Singapore leaving them under the dubious guardianship of a "friend" whom they call The Moth. Gradually it is revealed through our first-person narrator, Nathaniel, that all is not what it seems. Who is The Moth? Criminal? Spy? Both? What is really going on with their parents?

Ondaatje makes the English language sing as he tells the story of this brother and sister as they grow up quickly in this well paced and plotted novel. Focusing on Nathaniel, we learn that their home quickly fills up with other “strange” characters, and one of them, a former boxer, known only as The Darter, enlists Nathaniel into helping him smuggle Greyhounds for the burgeoning and entirely unregulated Greyhound Racing business. Nathaniel and The Darter become close until a violent confrontation changes everything.

The second part of the novel moves us to Suffolk in the late 1950s as adult Nathaniel attempts to piece together the mystery of his parents, and their cohorts’ war work. “The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.” Says Nathaniel. Through a mixture of investigation and imagination, Nathaniel fleshes out his own origin story, for in essence, this is a mother-son story merely set around WWII where the muted light at night is called “warlight”.