![]() ![]() I’m thinking of the lurking crime drama and love drama that remain in the background of his shipboard story The Cat’s Table, for instance or the absences, stoppages and indirections that prevent Anil’s Ghost – set in war-torn Sri Lanka – from becoming a straightforward war story. ![]() Hence, too, the procedures of his other novels, in which similarly striking narrative potential is mostly kept in check, or actually stifled. Hence the tactics of his best-known novel The English Patient, joint winner of the 1992 Booker prize, in which a potentially very dramatic set of circumstances is generally delivered to the reader by means of hint and indirection: scenes are habitually softened by half-lights, and all action and most reflection are slowed by rich (some would say overwritten) prose. ![]() The frustrations of Warlight’s cul-de-sac-like plotlines ultimately serve to remind us that all of our stories will be necessarily incomplete - we are all always operating in the titular half-light.Michael Ondaatje likes writing about uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, not quite with the Keatsian ambition of resisting “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, but because he relishes the idea of thoughts being fluid and characters essentially unknowable. ![]() Ondaatje tantalizes us with these alternative histories resting just beyond the story we have, each of his characters only ever picking out the patterns within their own small sphere of illumination. But at other times it seems to work against its own impulses, as though it hopes we take seriously things that are very hard not to laugh at. Warlight feels more akin to the playful absurdity of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, and at its best it embraces a postmodern two-dimensionality that works in sync with its absurd feel. This is something of a departure, as the author’s spare novels have typically given a feeling of energetic movement and lifelike realism despite their reticence. In this latest book, Ondaatje largely eschews robust characters and gripping plotlines to instead spend his creative energies on atmosphere, observation and theme. Most comfortable as an observer, Nathaniel’s passivity can make Warlight at times satisfyingly methodical and contemplative, and at others slow and frustratingly peripheral. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |