Review of Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Michael Ondaatje’s new novel is set in England in the aftermath of World War II, in the secretive world of British intelligence agents. Among them there is the sense that the war is not really over, but lives on in an environment of secrecy, dark deeds, and vengefulness. The novel centers on Nathaniel and his sister Rachel, who are inexplicably abandoned by their parents, as teenagers, and left in the care of strangers whose identities and connections to them they don’t understand. Throughout the book, Nathaniel attempts to piece together the broken fragments of their family history, their mother and her role during the war, the identity of the strangers who cared for him--and consequently to piece together his own identity. Among the strangers who shape his life: the Moth, who resides with them in their family home; the Darter, who leads Nathaniel into an underworld of illicit greyhound smuggling on the river system surrounding London. The teenage Nathaniel relishes these nighttime adventures on barges and trucks that weave unerringly through the streets of London, much like during wartime. Meanwhile, a girl he meets at one of his first jobs, Agnes, leads him on adventures of a different kind in the rooms of empty, for-sale homes in London.
After a dangerous attack on the two siblings, their mother abruptly reappears and removes them from this life of adventure and uncertainty. Much later, as an adult, Nathaniel continues his efforts to unravel his mother’s life and his own, now through his job in the archives of the intelligence service. What emerges is a picture of a strong woman, shaped by her childhood in Suffolk, by her compatriots in the intelligence service, and by the will to be involved as the war unfolds. Taking on a necessarily secret identity, Rose becomes a woman who is unknowable, even by her children. As she states when questioned about her role in the war, “My sins are various” (p. 225). Nathaniel, too, is wrapped in secrecy, as is the novel as a whole. The largely first-person narrative is both analytical and sensuous; both revealing and concealing. It is particularly attentive to the muffled nighttime atmosphere; the mysterious sounds of birds and animals; the labyrinthine rivers, streets, and war-time maps that seem to encompass the hidden and inaccessible layers of the past. Like an archaeologist, in this novel Ondaatje excavates the unknowable shards of time, place, and persons. This is a novel that must be read through to the last sentence, in order to begin to see the fragments put together. By turns perplexed and enthralled, in the end I was deeply moved.




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