WARLIGHT | Michael Ondaatje

The Fog of War Never Clears Completely

Michael Ondaatje is so adept at creating seductive and compelling settings and observations of the human element in his storytelling that he can share the premise and foreshadow the entire novel’s narrative in the opening line. 

In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals. 

In WARLIGHT’s first sentence, he tells us the who, what and when of the novel. There is also something in the voice and phrasing that suggests the where. And by his omission of the why, he hints at an entire universe of mystery, adventure and discovery.  

ISBN 978-0-525-52119-8

Ondaatje writes as if it’s just the two of you apart from distracting crowds, bosses, spouses, children, marketers, even smartphones. He wants you to know this story and tells you exactly what you need to know to get to the next sentence with its revelation of another intriguing surprise. And on he goes, rewarding your interest with deeper insights again and again.

Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents and left in the care of a not very talkative enigma, an ageless fellow they come to know as The Moth. As they become certain that the Moth and his associates are as untrustworthy as their aliases, Nathaniel and Rachel worry less and adapt each in their distinctive way to their mysterious circumstances.  

Years later, Nathaniel penetrates the reality of his myth and that of his parents and others and chooses to continue his journey to understanding.

Ondaatje was born in Columbo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to unreliable parents. By the time Ondaatje was six years old, his father abandoned him for alcohol. His mother left for England. Eventually, he followed his mother and kept going to Canada to study literature.

In addition to being a Booker Prize novelist – The English Patient – Ondaatje is a gifted poet. He writes from a place of such sensitive and elegant connection to truth that one occasionally wants to pause and reread a sentence for its power and artfulness. His writing possesses a sense of time, place, and action so profoundly known and understood that he doesn’t slow down for exposition. Nothing bores a reader faster than telling. It slows the momentum. Any obstacle to complete surrender to the story is to be avoided.

Ondaatje draws upon his distinctive grasp of human aspirations and fears as he relates the young teenagers’ coming of age among a ring of operators who manage to survive during World War II London by skillful manipulation of the levers of hidden night schemes. Each setting evolves from shadows with characters that resonate with the cleverness of Dickens’ Artful Dodger, the resolution of Le Carre’s George Smiley and entirely new yet recognizable strangers who become acquaintances, some of whom we trust. 

Some critics have held Ondaatje’s patience in revealing character strictly through action against him. I laud him for it. In life, we are each on our own ultimately to discover the truth of things in other people and ourselves. 

“If you grow up with uncertainty, you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them. You are on your own.” 

In WARLIGHT, Nathaniel and Rachel grow stronger through uncertainty in ways that Michael Ondaatje seems uniquely qualified to tell us.

~ 

MICHAEL ONDAATJE is the author of seven novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film and several books of poetry. In addition to Warlight, he wrote The English Patient (Booker Prize), Anil’s Ghost (Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Prix Medicis), The Cat’s Table, The Cinnamon Peeler, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Divisadero, Coming Through Slaughter and Running in the Family.

LIMITATIONS | Scott Turow

Overcoming Limitations of the Suspense Genre

Few love to hear the sins they love to act.

William Shakespeare

Pericles, Act I, Scene I

Judge George Mason is at a moral and professional crossroad with only three choices for a way forward, none of which offer any hope for his nagging conscience.

George, a former criminal defense attorney familiar with internal struggles between loathing, amusement, intrigue, envy, and empathy, is now an appeals court judge hearing motions about a case that has multiple mitigating factors. The case is old, and the clock is about to run out on the law’s statute of limitations for rape. The politics of the appeal and the particular way he and his fellow judges on the Appeals bench prefer to deal with it, each for his own distinctively non-legal reasons, is boxing George into choices he’d prefer not to make. He is also struggling with dark fears associated with death threats from an anonymous troll.

This is a great start and more than enough to keep readers turning pages, not only in the bookstore where a strong start is a competitive advantage yet also on airplanes, park benches and in bed late at night.  Scott Turow knows his craft as a legal thriller writer. He is a lawyer. He is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author who has published eleven fiction and three nonfiction books and sold more than 30 million copies. He also served effectively as president of the Authors Guild during one of the most challenging eras for writers and authors in history. He is more than an author. He is an expert who can translate legal arcana and ethics into meaningful tutorials for the rest of us.

There is another thing that Scott Turow is – he is a novelist, which is saying he is something more. He practices the craft side of his talents deftly in ways that don’t let the seams, the diversions, and the subtle mechanics of literature show. It is the storytelling side of work that qualifies as literary art. His characters grow before us on the page as they encounter life challenges and reveal themselves in the way they react, sometimes freezing, sometimes fleeing, more often planting their feet and facing up to their fears.

Gail Caldwell of the Boston Sunday Globe compares Turow to John le Carre for his ability to share “an introspect’s embrace of the gray-zone ambiguities of modern life.” It’s a good observation and, as a long-time fan of Le Carre’s writing, I can mostly agree with it. The critical difference for me between the two authors is that while le Carre is deeply wary of the government and the people responsible for its present and future, Turow seems to be more optimistic and forgiving, which results in more neatly fitting resolutions. 

Writing this during these trying times when values such as truth and character are so easily compromised by weak, selfish and narcissistic leaders makes me realize how much we have to appreciate in the works of writers and artists during society’s worst moments. LIMITATIONS was written before our current crisis of faith and confidence in our social institutions, which is both good and not so good. Good because it reminds us that man’s struggle with truth and honor has a long and varied history. Not so good because it enables readers to make allowances for George’s and his enemy’s moral and ethical framework.

LIMITATIONS is a good novel and more than worth its low cover price. 

First Picador Edition, November 2006

NO GREAT MISCHIEF | Alistair MacLeod

As I begin to tell this, it is the golden month of September in southwestern Ontario. In the splendid autumn sunshine the bounty of the land is almost overwhelming, as if it is the manifestation of a poem by Keats.

MacLeod’s opening lines had me straight away. I trust him. Like his fellow Canadian, Farley Mowat, he tells it simply. This is a deeply felt, passionately imagined and beautifully written novel. 

MacLeod's truth isn’t simple; it is complex, nuanced, seasoned over time to a depth and richness that calls to us in our unguarded moments. And his voice is authentic, like the family myths that knit our experience to the lives of our parents, their parents and those who preceeded them.

He continues in a responsive son-sibling-nephew voice that dutifully cares for imperfect elders without judgement. He cares for his family members and his past, yet never drifts into sentimentality. He doesn’t question his role. He accepts his responsibility to his inherited DNA, his red hair and innate talent for epic songs. He embraces his obligation to his living relations. And he contentedly shoulders his obligations to the future of his clan Chalum Ruaidh.

This novel celebrates writing and one of North America’s and Scotland’s hardy family histories. It will endure.

Call of the Writing

Imagine how rewarding it could be to have a tradition of sharing the day’s pages with a few fellow writers around the fire as Jack London did early last century at Wolf’s Lair.

He’d read aloud what he had written that day and get real-time reactions from friends.  If Buck’s howl resonated in the imaginations of his listeners, then the passage succeeded.  Buck’s extraordinary connection with his canine ancestors as he dreamt of freer days in the pages of the manuscript that would become Call of the Wild (published 1903) came alive in the flickering darkness and Jack knew that what compelled him had found its voice; his pen had touched truth that morning.  When that happened, imagine his excitement.  He had penetrated the universal heart and borrowed a pulse or two of Life.

That arrangement among fellow writers was unusual back then. In today’s publishing market where only ‘finished’ manuscripts are read by agents or editors, much less published, it may be vital to a writer’s survival.

THE CAT'S TABLE | Michael Ondaatje

Occasionally, writing penetrates the walls we build around ourselves, opens the windows to let sunlight in, and reminds us of who we are, what events shaped us, and hints how we got to this particular place. Michael Ondaatje’s writing does this for me.

Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.

This truth, a defining presence in Ondaatje’s writings, is a powerful current in the flow of this novel. The Cat’s Table is understated and life-affirming, with a cast of characters that capture a lifetime of experiences during several weeks at sea.

THE BIRD ARTIST | Howard Norman

Fabian Vas is a young man with talent and a passion for sketching and painting birds in turn-of-the-century coastal Newfoundland.

His powers of observation are so finely tuned that he rarely needs to describe events. He simply lives them and, in so doing, brings every scene alive. A complex achievement skillfully executed by Howard Norman.

It is written in a stripped-down style that inspires colorful notions and emotions. The characters are vivid, flawed and fun to know.

National Book Award Finalist

The Bird Artist: A Novel

IT'S FINE BY ME | Per Petterson

True, Lonely, and Uplifting

Rare is the author or his/her work that I can order sight unseen and know. Know that the book will be a permanent presence on my shelf of quality literature, revisited and reread often. Per Petterson’s novels are among the rarest for me.

I promised myself that I would understate these observations about Petterson’s third book, the novel, IT’S FINE BY ME (1992), but I’ve failed already.

With exceptions for love and great ambition, restraint is a desirable quality in most things. Writing, in particular. Petterson’s mastery of restraint shows in his spare use of adjectives, and his refusal to embellish any description of setting or action. He simply writes what is, what happens, period. It’s up to us to figure out the why of it. Just like life. And he does this without affectation or apparent effort, which reinforces his credibility with the reader and simultaneously sets the stage for profound, moving and often tender human insight.

Audun Sletten is Petterson’s 13-year old protagonist in IT’S FINE BY ME, a working-class teen who identifies with Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, and is annoyed by adult hypocrisies, and his sister’s choice of her James Dean wannabe boyfriend. He has outgrown the rules of childhood and is experiencing the contradictions of adulthood as he strives to understand his emerging identity, which is being defined as he responds to the messes that parents, sisters, friends, strangers and co-workers create for themselves. The culture of adulthood is a strange and chaotic bazaar of public selves and private rules that his elders seem to have accommodated in their own failed personal dreams of freedom and success. In this world seen through Audun’s adolescent senses, adulthood is life lived under a succession of truces in which the line between what might be and what is shifts and morphs like light under water.

Previous Reviews of Per Petterson’s works:

IN THE WAKE 

OUT STEALING HORSES

A trained librarian, Petterson worked as a bookstore clerk, translator and literary critic before he became a full-time writer. He cites Knut Hamsun and Raymond Carver among his influences.

The KILL ARTIST | Daniel Silva

The restorer raised his magnifying visor and switched off the bank of flourescent lights. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the murkiness of evening in the cathedral; then he inspected a tiny portion of the painting just below an arrow wound on the leg of Saint Stephen.

The KILL ARTIST by Daniel Silva

So begins The KILL ARTIST (2000), Daniel Silva's fourth novel, the first in the Gabriel Allon series. GABRIEL ALLON is back to the solitary life he requires, the life of the artist tending to great works of art injured in never-ending wars of commerce, transcultural migrations, and time. He bandages the detritus of clumsy repairs, incompetent preservations and restorations, even overpaintings of classic works by the original artists in response to client patrons who could not bear others seeing his portraits of them. Allon finds meaning in peeling back layers of time, varnish, and the dust of timeless centuries. It is more rational and productive than his professional past of dark operations for the state of Israel, the up-close assassinations of ruthless terrorists, the cycle of personal vengeance that resulted in the death of his daughter, the damaging of his wife, the self-imposed exile from life, professional work, and any meaningful connections with another woman, let alone love.

He is alive in technical terms only. His heart beats. His mind turns. He eats, drinks, sleeps, sails, and restores great paintings. This is the life of Gabriel Allon.

Until he is called back to the service of his mentor, uncle, grandfather, boss, confessor, protector and tormentor, Ali Shamron, director of the Office. Gabriel is drawn back from his anonymous life as a recluse art restorer for one important mission, a secret sanction, the elimination of the terrorist Tariq before he can hurt Israel on the eve of its historic signing of a treaty with the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

Silva’s storytelling makes a contract with his reader in the first sentence and honors that contract through nearly 500 pages with hardly a false note, a rash edit, or ill-considered choice of color and texture.

THE RED FOX | Anthony Hyde

Some first novels arrive from nowhere and become milestones in their genres, touchstones to understanding the world through specific stories. Anthony Hyde’s first novel, THE RED FOX (1986), is such a book.

When journalist Robert Thorne’s ex-fiancee, May Brightman, asks him to locate her missing father, Thorne is wary. Years ago, May broke their engagement and cut Thorne adrift. Since then, he’s moved on. Despite himself, reluctantly, he agrees to search for Harry. Soon, he discovers that Harry wasn’t your ordinary fiance’s father. His background is as dark, conflicted and dangerous as any in contemporary fiction. Others are after Harry, too. Thorne is savvy. He knows that he is in over his head, and yet he follows the trail of clues anyway.

Evocative of time, place, character and motivation, THE RED FOX provides a strong sense of presence in a world dominated by Cold War espionage. Hyde’s deft literary hand displays the discipline and attitude of the journalist. His voice is often energetic, sometimes self-deprecating, always erudite. A remarkable achievement for a first novel.

Another Time

Hyde published this novel just after John Le Carre’s THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL swept the market and advanced Le Carre’s already iconic standing as a master novelist. Robert Ludlum’s BOURNE SUPREMACY also came to bookstores that year. The average life was overshadowed by superpower tensions and yet change was in the wind. Whether for the better or the worse remained to be seen. Terror came from just two polarized political systems and their overwhelming national firepower. An entirely different world environment from the more complicated, fragmented terror we know today.

The story of THE RED FOX grows from diverse and intense emotions – anger, hurt, betrayal – and is delivered with a constancy that derives from a deeply embedded moral compass. It is visual and tactile and was a feast for readers of the late 1980’s who were navigating the changeable cultural seas between the pre- and post-Internet revolutions. Written in the pre-Internet time period, it is satisfying to re-experience the journalist’s life pre-Google and pre-smartphone, to be reminded of the discipline and skills required to ferret out disparate bits of information, connect the dots and develop understanding at a comparatively reflective pace. And yet, events move on apace and we are pulled from page to page, setting to sinister setting.

The Red Fox

SAINT: A Priest's Review

What Readers Say:

Fr. Daniel M. Ruff, S.J.

I recently had the chance to re-read a wonderful novel which I discovered, somewhat randomly, during my years at Loyola College.  As near as I can tell, it is the only novel of an author named Mark Bailey; entitled Saint, it claims to be “a novel of intrigue and faith.”  The “teaser” lines on the cover of the paperback state: “He is a miracle of science, a messenger of God.  And he has returned.”

The “he” in question is St. Peter.  The book asks us to believe that a bio-genetic researcher in California has made a breakthrough in “memory resurrection.”  By concentrating and injecting DNA from one subject into another, Dr. Andrew Shepard has managed to transfer the consciousness of the DNA donor into the recipient.  Eventually, he obtains a strand of DNA from the bones of St. Peter and succeeds in “resurrecting” Peter’s personality and memories in the body of a Portuguese fisherman, Nicolao Soares.

I am no bio-geneticist, so I can’t really say how plausible the science is.  I am, of course, interested in faith, spirituality, morality, and theology; and the novel poses some interesting questions in those areas.  (Is the researcher “playing God”?  What happens to the personality and memories of the fisherman “host”?)  Dr. Shepard happens to be an ex-Catholic; “science is his religion, the search for truth in the maze of genetics his mission.”  We gradually learn that the death of his six-year old daughter from a brain aneurysm has destroyed his marriage, along with what was left of his faith.  Thus, he wrestles with the age-old problem of theodicy: if God is all-good and all-powerful, then why do horrendous things sometimes happen to good and innocent people?

Even more interesting is the “what if” aspect.  “What if” we actually had St. Peter here in the present-day world and Church?  What questions might he answer for us about Jesus – what He really was like, what He really said and believed, and so on?  And if Peter’s testimony conflicted with the inherited tradition, would it be welcome?

Not surprisingly, in the novel, Peter is somewhat astonished by what Christianity (even the word is new to him!), and the Catholic Church in particular, have become.  Still, at one point, he muses about the constancy of the human condition.  “People don’t change so much.  In my time they were simpleminded, willing to take literally the things their leaders told them then.  You still accept today.  What I see on this television, these assurances that the right medicine, the right shampoo, the right leader, the right pair of jeans will give you a perfect life, is no different from the village fool in my day believing some magic potion will make him attractive to women, when what he really needs is to eat fewer onions and learn a trade and stop loitering about the well annoying other men’s wives.  Everyone wants easy answers, in your time as much as mine.  It’s not the people, only the things they desire, that change.”

There is much wisdom in “Peter’s” reflections, I think.  In fact, having been programmed by the media, we almost certainly have far greater expectations of instant gratification and easy answers than did Peter’s contemporaries in 1st- century Palestine.  What remains constant, however, is the desire – a longing for purpose, for meaning, for direction.  And what also remains constant is that real answers, answers that actually “work,” are never quick, easy, or black-and-white.  Real answers are found in and through relationships, over time.  And real answers always remain partially shrouded in unfathomable mystery.

Near the end of the novel, when he finally succeeds in having a face-to-face conversation with his successor, the present-day pope, Peter offers an even more challenging observation.  “I see too many believers using their faith as an excuse.  They choose their Christ or Yahweh or Buddha or Allah or whatever name they call God by, figure they’ve found the answer, and stop questioning, stop their search for truth.”  He suggests instead that “finding” and even naming God – that is, affiliating with and studying a religious tradition – should be just a beginning.  And he argues that the Church’s mission should be to learn, as much as to teach.

He sums up: “You have the power to make each moment count.  Live each hour consciously, gratefully, generously.  Give something to every person and every creature you meet….  Look them in the eye and feel their concerns for a moment; give to them your undivided attention.  Better yet, share the humility of your own spirit….  Understanding grows from humility of spirit, from learning, not from the conceit of knowledge.  Give that which you most desire to another person.”  In other words, live by the “Golden Rule,” some version of which exists in almost every major religious and philosophical tradition.  Jesus said it this way in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12).  Simple?  Yes.  Easy?  Never.

©2010 Fr. Daniel M. Ruff, S.J. Old St. Joseph's Church, Philadelphia, PA

This book should have been a New York Times Best Seller. As far as I know it did not make that list. But the plot is great, the biotechnology is great, and the plot twists at the end are excellent. 

   ague | Nov 18, 2007   (LibraryThing)

e-Publishing Opens Doors for Authors

Good Times

Just as when the IBM personal computer arrived (1981), Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh with GUI (1984), the venerable Selectric and Selectric II became obsolete, and a universe of entrepreneurial and artistic opportunities opened to writers, the Kindle, Sony Readers, iRex, Lexcycle's Stanza and other downloadable readers have opened doors to a new world of publishing possibilities. While the major players sort out the e-Publishing landscape, engineer the infrastructure, and build the new e-pub world, we writers are exploring, beta testing, and blazing new entrepreneurial paths ... all while continuing to write, write, write. This is a good time to be a writer, don't you think?

♦

Kindle UPDATE - Kindle vs. B&N Free eReader:  See David Pogue's PERSONAL TECH column, "New Entry in E-Books a Paper Tiger," in the August 6th edition of the New York Times.  Barnes & Noble's new e-reader offers PC access to e-books.  The eReader tablet itself is promised for later.