INTRODUCTION
Born in Ceylon in 1943, Ondaatje's erratic family split up and he went with his mother, in the middle of his schooling, to London where he attended Dulwich college [like Raymond Chandler, PG Wodehouse and other literary figures]. He chose to go to University in Canada in 1962, and from then on English Literature was his chosen path. He wrote poetry, published from 1967, and most of his books are still of poetry. The English Patient made his international reputation, winning the Man Booker Prize, and later the award for the best novel ever to win the award. He is also an essayist, editor and film maker. He lives with his second wife and has children. His credits also include “Leonard Cohen [ Literary criticism]” in 1970. He continues to write novels, each taking years to complete. Warlight was published in 2018.
Why did the proposer choose it? A friend who is a Professor of Eng Lit gave him the book and suggested it should be read. The proposer felt enveloped by its mood and atmosphere. He loved the characters and the recounting of events was subtle and nuanced.
The title referred to light not visible from the air. The proposer considered it a book about family memory. There were parallels with the Secret Scripture in this respect. The past never remains the past. It came back to Nathaniel because he became reconciled to his mother Rose. He tried to get his mother to help him and she only offered slight insights although she did offer herself to him more fully in the present. His memories were those of a boy of 14 over a period of about two years. His sister Rachel was 16 at the start and her assessment of what was happening was more mature; she understood the Moth and his role. But she never forgave her mother’s action in abandoning the two of them. She took some of the same opportunities with Nathaniel but she also seems to have been the young woman of parties etc. Her relationship with her brother, like her mother, did not survive and she remained embittered. Nathaniel sensed that his mother would not answer many of his questions and he often pulled out of asking them. Of course his mother’s work was top secret. However his mother might have said more and invited him to ask while saying she would not always be able to answer. The chess games with the mother were interesting , perhaps a metaphor for the need for concealment and sacrifice of pieces. Only a secretive boy would have failed to ask about his father, i.e. why did he never appear even after the war?
The young Nathaniel befriended the Darter and Agnes. He may have been remote at school but he got himself together and went to college where he became a linguist like his mother. He then bonded with Mr Malakite but finally he ends up with a greyhound as his only friend. The end is the saddest part of the book. All folly, risk taking and comradeship are gone. And what of Rose? Possibly “groomed” by Felon [a hint in his name?], she then abandons her children and possibly she abandons her husband too. In return is she a heroic figure? Her orders latterly were to neutralise right wing former enemies, being ex-fascist Croats and Italians. Was she always Felon’s property at the expense of her children? Was Rachel right? The end of their relationship was when Nathaniel went back to mum. In reality Mum wrecked the lives of both children .
DISCUSSION
There was general agreement that the book was unusual and intriguing. There was an amazing level of research and detail and it was no surprise that there were long gaps between his novels.
A number of members had found it necessary to read the book twice.
There was a consensus that in Warlight it was difficult at times to work out what is happening. The novel is narrated by the central protagonist, Nathaniel, who is an adult at the time of writing, but is remembering the destabilising years of his boyhood, years that made him an uneasy, unsettled man. His mother, as he recalls it, left him and his sister, Rachel, at boarding school and went to join their father in Singapore, where he worked for Unilever. When his narrative begins, Nathaniel is 14 and Rachel is 16: they hate their schools, and run away from them almost at once. When the children arrive back in London they find that The Moth – the odd character their mother left in charge – has taken up residence in their home, along with various cronies, including The Pimlico Darter. The Moth and The Darter, like their names, come from a Dickensian dream of London: up to their necks in greyhound racing, smuggling and art theft, they navigate the backwaters of the Thames in suspenseful darkness, and are full of arcane expertise. The Moth’s face is ‘lit by a gas fire while I asked question after question, trying to force an unknown door ajar’. There are middle-class mavericks too, weaving in and out of the children’s lives, always appearing to know more than they let on, never quite telling their whole story. Gangly, schoolboyish, clever Arthur McCash hands Nathaniel a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories as if it were a clue; Olive Lawrence, an element in The Darter’s colourful love life, is an ethnographer and geographer who speaks to the children ‘of Asia and the ends of the earth’.
The children slip the leash of the middle-class conventions of their era, and escape into the wilderness of the city. Nathaniel takes a job in the kitchens of the celebrated Criterion hotel; Rachel goes partying, comes back late, yet no one asks where she has been. They join The Darter on mysterious expeditions, smuggling dogs and goods (and, it turns out later, explosives). The idea of a teeming secret London concealed under the grey surface of postwar privation, throbbing with life and trade and risk and pleasure, is engaging enough.
‘The munitions factories had been dismantled and the unused canals were silting up, becoming narrower between their overgrown banks. And on weekends this was where Rachel and I, the sidekicks of The Darter, now floated in the silence of those waterways … What we carried was probably not dangerous, but we were never sure … Rachel and I no longer fully believed The Darter’s stories about the delivery of European china to pay back the merchant who had let him borrow his barge during dog-racing seasons.’
It was mentioned that the post-war London scene was well set out in John Boorman’s film Hope and Glory. The blogger mentioned that the young seven year old star of the film was in his daughter’s class at the time in the late 1980s.
The Suffolk sections of the book were also very powerfully described.
Nathaniel has an affair with Agnes, a girl from the Criterion, whose brother is an estate agent and has the keys to a succession of empty houses: this is rather a wonderful idea, and these sexual encounters, where the young lovers run around naked in the dark, are some of the best passages in the book.
And yet all these scenes and their striking ephemera – the greyhounds, the china, the empty munitions factories, Agnes’s handstands in an empty house, the sculptures of goddesses hidden in tunnels under the Criterion – are not quite as seductive as they ought to be. Part of the problem is in the awkward narrative positioning, with everything told through Nathaniel’s long retrospect. Since we only hear about it afterwards, in descriptive summary, we are never actually present in any scene; every element of the action, all the adventures and encounters, come to us muffled and at arm’s length. The present of Warlight is located nowhere in particular, in a lost man wandering inside his past: the adult Nathaniel spends his days searching in a Foreign Office archive for traces of his mother’s story – and yet even the time of his searching is voiced as if from a distance still further on. Such time-play is standard novelistic sleight of hand, but it ought to be managed so that we do not notice it. And because the story is not anchored in any present, it shifts scene too often, adding to the blaze of its effects: there is simply too much that is striking, atmospheric, evocative. No detail, no place, no particular moment, has the breathing space to come into its own.
Rachel discovers their mother’s steamer trunk hidden in the basement of the house: the same trunk she packed with ostentatious care in front of her children, choosing dresses suitable for evening parties in Singapore. They wonder if she is dead, but the truth that gradually emerges is stranger than that: she is a brilliant, exceptional woman, estranged from their father and working for British intelligence in the Balkans, among other places. Later she seems to become disenchanted with this work: not only does her high-minded self-sacrifice come up against the grubby equivocations of real politics (she may have inadvertently helped Tito’s partisans locate a village where they massacred the inhabitants), she also realises that she has left her children at the mercy of malevolent forces. There is at least one attempted kidnapping. Her qualms seem belated. It is all very well, in fact it was standard middle-class practice at the time, to go abroad and leave your children behind, if you have important work to do (or even if you have not). But would she not have provided them with solid, ordinary defences: surrogate parents, establishment figures to oversee their safety and shelter their ignorance? For that matter, why not hide your steamer trunk somewhere less obvious? The plot of the novel – The Moth, The Darter, The Darter’s enthusiasm for Henry James, Agnes’s love-talk full of poetry, the near kidnapping, the archive, the effortless class slippages – strains credulity. Of course in a romance it does not strictly matter what is believable in real-world terms; but the other-world has to work, according to its own logic.
Every one of the adults around the baffled runaway teens seems brilliant and exceptional, not only their mother. The Darter has all along been engaged in essential government transports, alongside his smuggling; Olive Lawrence’s expertise on climatic conditions was invaluable on D-Day. We learn that their mother had a formative relationship with Marsh Felon (Marsh Felon, ‘Buster’ Milmo, The Forger of Letchworth, Sam Malakite: very Dickensian names). Marsh came from a local family of thatchers; she helped to nurse him after he fell from the roof of her house and her family paid for his education. Later, Marsh becomes her mentor in the secret service. The adult world in Warlight is charged with power, as if everyone is in on secrets the children are shut out from – even though Nathaniel is an adult as he writes, and is supposed to have his hand on all the secrets contained in the archive. Now that time has passed and his mother is dead, he is trying to make sense of what she did to her children; he is trying to forgive her for it, but first he needs to understand it. Not following up on the father is odd. The narrative leaves a lot of unanswered questions
There was a recognition by members present that children never really understand their parent’s lives, particularly as the most significant part of their lives was usually, as in the book, before the children were born. Children also are not usually interested in their parents’ lives until they are much older and may not get the truth, particularly the bad stuff, from them. For example, holocaust survivors did not tell until they were very old and concerned about holocaust denial.
All-in-all members found the book, despite its faults, rewarding and enjoyable .
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