By Michael Ondaatje
McClelland & Stewart
The latest novel by Michael Ondaatje returns to the Second World War, a time he brilliantly illuminated in The English Patient, his 1992 novel which this summer won the Golden Man Booker Prize as the best of all Booker Prize-winning novels.
While The English Patient took place in Italy and North Africa, Warlight takes place in the decade just after the war in London. Two teenagers, Rachel and Nathaniel, are left behind by their parents, who move mysteriously to Singapore. They’re left in the care of a man they call The Moth, a man with an interesting cast of friends who take the children under their wing.
Later, their mother returns, under even more mysterious circumstances, with no sign of their father. As Nathaniel grows up, he tries to piece together his past to make sense of his teenage years.
Warlight is a complex story, in which nothing is quite as it seems. It’s a mystery, a spy story, a coming-of-age story and a tale of family bonds, but it’s not a novel that easily fits into any of those boxes. Ondaatje takes readers into the shadows of memory and time, occasionally bringing us into the conversation, but at other times leaving the details to our imaginations.
Warlight is beautifully written novel with a story that is exquisitely told by Ondaatje.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com
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