A Goodreads user asked this question about
Warlight:
Need one good reason as to why I should read Warlight. What is the comparison to "The English Patient" about?
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…moreMichael 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 (less)
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 (less)
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