Warlight

I never read Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize winning book, The English Patient, but I loved the movie, so I decided to grab his newest novel and read it. Set primarily in and around blitz-traumatized London in the years immediately following the war and in Suffolk a decade later, it is told from the perspective of Nathaniel, initially a 14-year old boy, and later a man in his late-twenties. Nathaniel and his 15-year-old sister Rachel are left by their parents in the care of a somewhat mysterious man, a boarder in their home who the children refer to as The Moth. Supposedly the parents are going to Asia for a year as part of the father's business. What ensues is a rather lengthy explanation of all the adventures that Nathaniel has with a variety of visitors to the house, especially a man he calls The Darter, who takes Nathaniel on clandestine night-time barge trips in and around London transporting mysterious crates and not very legal greyhound racing dogs. Frankly this part of the book really seemed slow and somewhat surreal. Perhaps that was intentional, and according to reviewers (see below) it is typical of his writing. The second chunk of the book commences when his mother shows up after an attempted kidnapping of Nathaniel and Rachel, in which The Moth (actually named Walter) is killed defending them. Their father never re-appears. Rachel barely registers in the first part of the book and virtually disappears in the latter half, supposedly because she is so angry about her parents' abandonment of them that she can't stand to be around her mother. Nathaniel is sent off to various boarding schools and his mother returns to her family's home in Suffolk, where Nathaniel joins her on holidays. As an adult, after his mother's death, Nathaniel goes to work for the intelligence services, supposedly clearing out any embarassing materials from the war-time archives, and begins to piece together his mother's past as an intelligence agent. This part of the book is much more intriguing although still told in a somewhat disjointed fashion that never allows the reader to fully know how much is fact-based conclusions from Nathaniel's access to archival materials and how much is conjecture. Ondaatje is an elegant writer and that makes the book worth the effort. It is also an intriguing if somewhat hazy look into how the war was carried out behind the scenes. I thought the reviewer from The New York Times summarized Ondaatje's style of writing well when he said: "By now we know what we are going to get from an Ondaatje novel: A moody, murky, lightly pretentious and mostly nonlinear investigation of lives and stories that harbor tantalizing gaps. There will be disquisitions on arcane topics including...The nature of storytelling will be weighed and found fascinating. The spine of the plot, unlike the spine of a steamed fish, will be nearly impossible to remove whole."
Needless to say, there are lots of reviews worth considering: The Guardian, The Washington Post,  NPR, and Kirkus.