Everything we read about war is about the war – strategy, maneuvers,
the drama and death. We too rarely read about, or watch on film, the immediate
aftermath of war in a country, like England, ravaged for years. The slow return
to past lives. The reparation – financial, personal, emotional. Or, an
underground force still at war to tie up loose ends and ensure its end. It’s a
fascinating time, brought to life by the great Ondaatje. A novel as intimate as
memoir, and, to my mind, his best yet.
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| Ondaatje won the 50 year Booker Award this year for The English Patient, worth rereading. |
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 toward you. ‘A memoir is a 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.
If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of
another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her
small hall of mirrors and I in mine.
In this, his eighth work of
fiction, Ondaatje sets his sights on this transitional period, through the eyes
of a young man employed by the government who finally uncovers his mother’s
role in the war, and learns more about the people she placed he and his sister
with to keep them safe.
However, as we know, and are
reminded of late, children removed from their mothers are inexorably changed,
in their view of the world and of themselves. This narrator, introduced as a school
boy, evolves into an astute observer, a loner tethered to the past, while his sister
becomes unforgiving and distrusting. Around them, a charismatic cast of endearing
characters with their own secrets, who protect them and serve as surrogate
family.
A lot happens, much is revealed,
but slowly, quietly, in exquisite prose. Take your time.
Warlight is rendered in images. No trappings
of war, only suggestions of its existence on the periphery. Nathaniel tells the
tale, and also manages to convince us so completely of his revelations over
time, he is able to describe events in places he couldn’t have been.
He learns his mother was a notorious
spy, integral to the war effort in western Europe. So valuable, that long after
the war, the extremist opposition searches for her to exact vengeance. She is
never as safe as her children, who have been left with seemingly unsavory neighbors
and their eccentric circle of acquaintances. The mother called her children by
pet names, so the children give their caretakers odd names like The Moth,
another The Darter. There is a story embedded in every name, every move they
make – love stories and stories of profound friendship, also disappointment.
“We order our live with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in
a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken – Rachel, the
Wren, and I, and Stitch, sewing it all together in order to survive,
incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war.
Warlight
is a stunning work of fiction, recently released in hardcover or for your
favorite e-reader.
