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Need one good reason as to why I should read Warlight. What is the comparison to "The English Patient" about?
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Betty
This is a hilarious question. One good reason why you should read ANY book...because you want to read it?
Cathryn
President Barack Obama just recommended it today, 8/19/18. Good enough reason for me! :-)
Roger Brunyate
Those who have read The English Patient will find a generally simpler style of writing here. But there are also similarities of theme in that both deal with the period at the very end of WW2, with private back-stories that stretch back before it. Both also contain characters that inhabit a half-light between criminal and hero.
For your first Ondaatje, though, I would suggest The Cat's Table.
For your first Ondaatje, though, I would suggest The Cat's Table.
Jane
Odd question ... read it because it sounds interesting and the author is award-winning (and has written more than The English Patient). Why does anyone read anything??
Greg
Ramona, I read it because President Obama read it. And because I liked "English Patient". And because I liked the title. And because I LOVED the opening line: once I had read that at the library, I knew I was going to take it home.
kittykat AKA Ms. Tortitude
One reason to read any book... does the premise interest you?
Yes - read it.
No - don't read it.
Yes - read it.
No - don't read it.
Ramona
I asked this question in all sincerity and shouldn't be surprised at some of the responses I have gotten. I read over 100 books a year...and have very little time to read a lot of reviews. I wanted to know why "you read it, what you liked". A simple question requiring a simple answer! I don't have time to waste starting a book that I will not finish...and I like to finish what I start. I pretty much read every book I do choose, to the end. So, thank you to those of you who told me why I should read Warlight!
Jayati
Yes, I can give you several reasons why this should read. I liked it even better that The English Patient. The story is kind of lit up from within though London is still reeling from the war and the whole place is kind of dark in Warlight. Highly recommended.
Lorene Shyba
More appropriately, why would anyone read Warlight when they could read a more original and amusing story/series about orphan siblings by Lemony Snicket?
Nancy Martin
Read it because it adds to your knowledge about the ordinary people who become secret heroes in England's Foreign Service during WWII. Ondaatje uses a young man from ages 14 to about 30 to relate what he learns from the various people his missing mother sends to watch over him and his sister. They are unusual characters but kind and patient with the teens--if a little too benign. Their experiences are comic, until you realize these are teens basically raising themselves. It's a whole new understanding of how everyday skills can be used in unique ways during a war.
JOSEPH V. FRISA
If you like eccentric characters with mysterious pasts that come vividly alive amidst the gloom of immediate post war London then read the book.
Theresa Kennedy
It is exquisitely written, with his typical poetic ability to charm and confound with the mystery of his words and with what he does not reveal. He’s not a perfect novelist, but his exposition is so compelling that you can overlook the huge gaps, the silences in his novels and what is not resolved. There is just no one quite like Michael Ondaatje. I am determined to read every one of his lovely books!
Pamela
Because you think it looks interesting? Because you like the author's writing? I guess if you say no to both of these, then don't read it. He wrote the English Patient and it is common in marketing to remind you if someone wrote a popular book as sometimes people remember the book and not the author.
Rebecca
Don't be a lemming. Read a book because it seems interesting or you think it might have something of value or enrichment to you or simply because it might entertain you. Don't read a book simply because a famous person says they read it.
Shail
@Ramona - Stated as a personal preference, to me this is a very pertinent question. I'd rather skip this book and preserve my fond memories of reading 'The English Patient' (and continue to cherish the parts of my life I saw being played out in that story), than to read a book by the same author only to find out that it turned out to be quite an antithesis to his/her magnum opus.
Asterope
The cover says: "Winner of the Brooker Prize for the English Patient"
As in the author, who wrote The English Patient won the Brooker Prize for it. They want to remind people that the author wrote another award winning book and hey, if you liked that one, you might like this one. That's all. ;-) It's like when an actor does one really good movie and wins awards for it, that'll be plastered all over and quoted as a marketing ploy.
As in the author, who wrote The English Patient won the Brooker Prize for it. They want to remind people that the author wrote another award winning book and hey, if you liked that one, you might like this one. That's all. ;-) It's like when an actor does one really good movie and wins awards for it, that'll be plastered all over and quoted as a marketing ploy.
Geof Sewell
Michael Ondaatje is one of my favourite novelists and poets. I have just read his 2018 novel called Warlight. It is set in England just a little later than The English Patient after the war treaties have been signed. London is still in semi-darkness, hence the title. Bombed out buildings await repair and food is rationed. It reminded me of the Dickens films David Lean made to celebrate the British victory: atmospheric, joyous and horrifying by turns.
Like Pip and Oliver Twist, Nathaniel, Warlight’s central character, has to grow up without parents. First, his father flies off on a business trip to the Far East and never reappears. Then his mother disappears, embroiled - as we later discover - in the guerrilla wars that still fester in the Balkans, leaving Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel in the care of “two men who may have been criminals”. The man they referred to as the “Moth” had been their lodger. “We were always conscious of his tentative presence, of his alighting here and there”. He is a “man of many doors”, a black marketeer but also the manager of an exclusive hotel, who “organised the silver polishers and cake decorators, the oilers of trolley wheels and lift gates, the lint and vomit removers, the replacers of soap in each sink”. The Moth gets things done, even negotiating with the Head of Dulwich College, Nathaniel’s new school, that he should stop boarding and become a day boy. The Moth warns the teenagers that their new life will be “schwer” – meaning complicated, difficult but never dull.
The family home fills up with Dickensian eccentrics: the Pimlico Darter, their other main protector, was the “best welterweight south of the river”, a “quick scoffer”, an illicit importer of unregistered greyhounds and an ex-jailbird. “He had a furtive walk, as if he was saving his energy for a later moment.” His girl-friends include an opera singer, an “argumentative Russian” and Olive Lawrence, the eth-no-grapher. “Her talk sparkled”. “When Olive spoke it was more like a private shuffling of her thoughts, a soliloquy from somewhere in the shadows of her knowledge, something she was unsure of”. She had spent the nights before D Day high over the channel in a glider, charting the weather for the MoD and travelled the “Chiloango River regions of Angola, where there was ancestor worship”. And it is ancestor worship, or more specifically the unravelling of his own and his mother’s identities, that becomes the focus of the novel’s second half.
Nathaniel also has a girlfriend he called Agnes, who is a waitress at the Moth’s hotel restaurant. They take part in the Moth’s piracy, evading customs cutters on the Thames, like Magwitch in Great Expectations. Until they met, “passion was an abstract thing, layered with hurdles and rules I did not yet know.” Agnes borrows keys to bombed-out properties from her brother, who worked as an estate agent. “There was a For Sale sign outside; inside there was no furniture, just carpeting.” He and Agnes would race around the place, shedding their clothes, accompanied on one astonishing episode by some of the Darter’s greyhounds. “It did not feel like a romance”.
The real romance is the attempt on Nathaniel’s life after he and Agnes are spotted emerging from their hideaway by a renegade Balkan, his reunion with his mother and the creation of the “family fable”. Like Pip in Great Expectations, Nathaniel is a “noticing boy”. He gradually pieces together her half-forgotten wartime exploits, much like the way in which the Caravaggio does the role of the Count in The English Patient.
I loved the mingling of esoteric fact with imaginative fiction, the characters’ unlikely but credible expertise and the play on names. Agnes is not Agnes but Sophie. She is called Agnes because the house in which she and Nathaniel discover sex is on Agnes Street. My mother’s real name was Kathleen but at the dance where my father first met her just before D Day, she was wearing her favourite combination of red and green. So, he called her Christmas and the name Chris stuck thereafter. I have always imagined half the population of Europe assuming Noms de Guerre as a way of making sense of the little joys war allowed them. Looking over the reviews in Goodreads, I’m not the only one to have deliberately paced my reading to delay the heartbreaking moment when I finished this
Like Pip and Oliver Twist, Nathaniel, Warlight’s central character, has to grow up without parents. First, his father flies off on a business trip to the Far East and never reappears. Then his mother disappears, embroiled - as we later discover - in the guerrilla wars that still fester in the Balkans, leaving Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel in the care of “two men who may have been criminals”. The man they referred to as the “Moth” had been their lodger. “We were always conscious of his tentative presence, of his alighting here and there”. He is a “man of many doors”, a black marketeer but also the manager of an exclusive hotel, who “organised the silver polishers and cake decorators, the oilers of trolley wheels and lift gates, the lint and vomit removers, the replacers of soap in each sink”. The Moth gets things done, even negotiating with the Head of Dulwich College, Nathaniel’s new school, that he should stop boarding and become a day boy. The Moth warns the teenagers that their new life will be “schwer” – meaning complicated, difficult but never dull.
The family home fills up with Dickensian eccentrics: the Pimlico Darter, their other main protector, was the “best welterweight south of the river”, a “quick scoffer”, an illicit importer of unregistered greyhounds and an ex-jailbird. “He had a furtive walk, as if he was saving his energy for a later moment.” His girl-friends include an opera singer, an “argumentative Russian” and Olive Lawrence, the eth-no-grapher. “Her talk sparkled”. “When Olive spoke it was more like a private shuffling of her thoughts, a soliloquy from somewhere in the shadows of her knowledge, something she was unsure of”. She had spent the nights before D Day high over the channel in a glider, charting the weather for the MoD and travelled the “Chiloango River regions of Angola, where there was ancestor worship”. And it is ancestor worship, or more specifically the unravelling of his own and his mother’s identities, that becomes the focus of the novel’s second half.
Nathaniel also has a girlfriend he called Agnes, who is a waitress at the Moth’s hotel restaurant. They take part in the Moth’s piracy, evading customs cutters on the Thames, like Magwitch in Great Expectations. Until they met, “passion was an abstract thing, layered with hurdles and rules I did not yet know.” Agnes borrows keys to bombed-out properties from her brother, who worked as an estate agent. “There was a For Sale sign outside; inside there was no furniture, just carpeting.” He and Agnes would race around the place, shedding their clothes, accompanied on one astonishing episode by some of the Darter’s greyhounds. “It did not feel like a romance”.
The real romance is the attempt on Nathaniel’s life after he and Agnes are spotted emerging from their hideaway by a renegade Balkan, his reunion with his mother and the creation of the “family fable”. Like Pip in Great Expectations, Nathaniel is a “noticing boy”. He gradually pieces together her half-forgotten wartime exploits, much like the way in which the Caravaggio does the role of the Count in The English Patient.
I loved the mingling of esoteric fact with imaginative fiction, the characters’ unlikely but credible expertise and the play on names. Agnes is not Agnes but Sophie. She is called Agnes because the house in which she and Nathaniel discover sex is on Agnes Street. My mother’s real name was Kathleen but at the dance where my father first met her just before D Day, she was wearing her favourite combination of red and green. So, he called her Christmas and the name Chris stuck thereafter. I have always imagined half the population of Europe assuming Noms de Guerre as a way of making sense of the little joys war allowed them. Looking over the reviews in Goodreads, I’m not the only one to have deliberately paced my reading to delay the heartbreaking moment when I finished this
Sidna
Did you read it? What did you think? Personally, if you have not read it, I do not recommend it.
Hila Babin
it is a great read, it starts out slow but gains speed. His writing style is the same and the time frame is the same. It was an excellent book highly recommend it.
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