Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, £16.99) Review by

Richard Strachan

Michael Ondaatje’s novels are often at their best when exploring the murky byways that run though public and private lives, when they stake out the territory between what a person says and what he or she actually does or thinks in secret. Think of Almasy in The English Patient, drifting through his carefully curated recollections of pre-war life as he slowly dies in the ruined monastery, or even the inchoate passions of the jazz musician Buddy Bolden in Ondaatje’s early masterpiece Coming Through Slaughter. Warlight flits through the shadows of just such lives, where everything is made cryptic and strange by unexplained gestures, half-understood motivations and withheld information. These are lives lived in the warlight of the title, the muted blackout light of wartime London that still seems to grip the city in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

>> As the novel begins, fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are told that their parents are going to move to Singapore, for their father’s work. Boarding at a nearby public school, the children will be looked after in the holidays by an enigmatic family friend, ‘a humble man, large but moth-like in his shy movements’ who the children inevitably nickname ‘The Moth’. ‘We were always conscious of his tentative presence,’ Nathaniel recalls, ‘of his alighting here and there.’ Rachel suspects him of criminality, but when the children rebel against their boarding house regime, it is the Moth who generously intercedes and arranges for them to stay at home instead. He also comforts the children when they realise that their parents have left all of their luggage behind, and have not gone to Singapore after all. They have vanished, and no one will tell them where they have gone.

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>> In this strange limbo of unknowing, Nathaniel and Rachel adapt as only children can; they continue at school, they get jobs in the holidays, and they find themselves forming an integral part of The Moth’s curious retinue of cronies and hangers-on. These include ‘The Pimlico Darter’, a former welterweight boxer, as well as his mistress Olive Lawrence, an ethnographer who had helped the Admiralty on sea currents and tides in the early stages of the war. There’s Arthur McCash, an Esperanto-speaking young man recently stationed abroad ‘doing crop studies in the Levant’, who hints at a close friendship with Nathaniel and Rachel’s mother. As Nathaniel drifts into The Moth’s demi-monde of ‘not quite legal’ hustles and scams (spending one summer helping The Darter ferry greyhounds over from Holland to use in rigged dog races, for example), he begins to understand that all of these people have had some connection to his parents, and to his mother’s unexplained wartime activities. After a sudden and brutal attempt on his life Nathaniel realises that the war may be over, but the consequences of his mother’s actions during it are still playing out. In the second part of the book, Ondaatje takes Nathaniel from the secretive world of his unusual childhood into the equally opaque world of the Cold War intelligence services, where he begins to piece together the blood feuds and double-crosses, the pitiless vendettas, that had followed his mother from her operations in wartime Yugoslavia to post-war England.

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>> A poet before he was a novelist, Ondaatje’s spare and evocative prose perfectly captures the crumbled austerity of post-war London, from the ‘grey universe’ of the Criterion Hotel’s kitchens where Nathaniel briefly works, to the network of canals outside the city where he helps The Darter smuggle his doped greyhounds, ‘floating in the silence of those waterways’, directing river barges to mysterious assignations with gamblers and fixers. Ondaatje has always had more than just a perceptive eye for specifics though, and with his lightly-worn research he seems able to occupy the whole drifting milieu of his chosen period; a post-war world of itinerants and obsessives, of people with devastating secrets. Unusual details catch his interest, from maps and dog racing to thatching and the wartime production of explosives at Waltham Abbey. If his main theme is the shade and distortion that time can throw on the recollection of youth, a period of licence where self-invention is almost expected, Ondaatje’s subterranean theme is the enormous potential war can have to liberate men and women from their straitened circumstances, to throw them for the first time on their own resources and demonstrate the range of their previously-unsuspected capabilities. This isn’t to glamourise war as such, but it’s of a piece with the shadowy, seductive allure of The Moth’s criminality, or of Nathaniel’s later recruitment into the intelligence services. It shows that ‘warlight’ can illuminate as much as disguise, although Ondaatje suggests the moral compromises that take place in its furtive glow will have to be paid for in the end.

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>> There’s always the risk of the sententious in Ondaatje’s prose, the stumble into aphorism, but this is easily his most satisfying and seductive novel in years. It’s also his most English book, lingering on the place names of great swathes of Suffolk and south London, the same places Ondaatje must have know as a child when he moved from Sri Lanka. With his earlier novel The Cat’s Table dramatising that oceanic journey, it seems Ondaatje might perhaps be in the process of writing fictionalised autobiography, plummeting from the present into those hidden depths of memory and childhood.