A surprisingly good read from an often disappointing writer. I first encountered Ondaatje in the late 90s through The English Patient and then In the Skin of a Lion. I thought he was one of the greatest living writers at that time and eagerly bought, in hardback, Anil’s Ghost in 2000; but none of the characters really came to life, and the setting (Sri Lanka) held no interest for me, though that latter is a purely personal note. I repeated my folly in 2007, buying Divisadero in hardback and regretting the purchase with great vehemence: I found it incomprehensible and uninteresting; it just came across as a creative writing project hastily cobbled together for a publisher. Having learnt my lesson I bought The Cat’s Table (2011) second-hand from Oxfam for 2 euros, years after its release, and to my surprise found it quite enjoyable, if rather slight.

Perhaps, I reasoned, there is an inverse correlation between my financial investment and the readerly return, when it comes to Ondaatje. I accordingly stole a copy of Warlight, and found it very good indeed. It’s set mostly in and after World War 2, following a boy whose mother works with partisan groups for British Intelligence. His father mysteriously disappears, the mother is gone for long periods, so he and his sister are effectively raised by a group of semi-criminals loosely associated with British Intelligence.

The setting and background – WW2-era espionage – recalls The English Patient. I think one reason so many writers choose this period is that it seems the last time greatness and large drama were so casual and everyday; it’s as if a door closed in 1945, and thereafter you have a lesser race of men, bureaucrats instead of brigadiers, forms signed in triplicate instead of massive tank battles commanded by men like Georgy Zhukov and Erich von Manstein. One senses something of this in The English Patient, with its two time frames (late 1930s Cairo & the desert; and then an Italian monastery in 1945): Almasy and Katherine seem grander, more mythic than Hanna and Kip, and even Caravaggio; the burnt, scarred Almasy of 1945 is as it were a remnant of a greater, destroyed world.

Warlight doesn’t quite rise to the peaks of The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion; none of the Warlight characters have that mythic splendour, nor does the prose reliably meet that standard. There are, however, many excellent passages, e.g. this description of a gardener:

He wore bottle-thick spectacles. His ox-like stature made him distinct. He had a long lowland “badger coat,” made out of several skins, which smelled of bracken, sometimes of earthworms. And he and his wife were my watched example of marital stability. His wife no doubt felt I lingered around too much. She was organized, ardently neat, whereas he was the rabbit’s wild brother, leaving what looked like the path of an undressing hurricane wherever he went. He dropped his shoes, badger coat, cigarette ash, a dish towel, plant journals, trowels, on the floor behind him, left washed-off mud from potatoes in the sink. Whatever he came upon would be eaten, wrestled with, read, tossed away, the discarded becoming invisible to him.

I feel that Ondaatje is, here, really making an effort to write an enjoyable, good book for the first time in 30 years. There are many fine moments, asides, secondary characters, observations. It has a very Ondaatjian sense of frequent wildness in the everyday, as the characters construct a personal routine & discipline which seems, from day to day, reasonably stable & even normal, but which is permeated by strange & maraudingly poetic event, by e.g. a nun falling off a bridge, caught by a construction worker swinging on a harness, by Bedouins recovering a burnt Hungarian pilot from his ruined plane, and pressing their cache of rifles and handguns against his hands for him to identify by feel alone, by a boy driving at night in a car full of illicit greyhounds.