The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table. From the point of view of an 11 year old boy now grown up looking back on the 21 day voyage of the Oransay from Ceylon to England. The narrator is assigned to the Cat’s Table, the insignificant table most distant from the Captain’s Table. In it he goes go back to tell of the escapades of the narrator and 2 other boys, Cassius and Ramakhin as they stalk the ship almost unseen and ignored by all the adult crew and passengers. They have wild adventures in the bowels of the ship, in its lifeboats, in the first class pool, and on various decks.



In a sense it is a Tom Sawyer adventure on a ship but with much of the earlier life and later lives of the characters intertwined in the story.



In the course of their adventures the trio discover many secrets about passengers, secrets and peculiarities of said characters told in the short chapters. There is the narrator’s beautiful cousin who is supposed to be his chaperone, an eccentric man tending a garden of plants in the bowels of the ship, a thief who recruits the narrator to sneak through the transom in order to open doors, a teacher surrounded by books who never leaves his cabin, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti whose mystery is not revealed until the end of the book, a shackled prisoner who is brought out late at night to get air, a girl who jogs around the deck early in the morning, and many more.



It is well written and entertaining, deceptively simple. Still I wonder why it rated the author a place on the Giller list of nominees. 4 of 5







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