JUNE 2018| The Australian Women’s Weekly 187
REVIEW BYJULIET RIEDEN.ILLUSTRATION BY LIZ ROWLAND @ILLUSTRATIONROOM.COM.AU.
Reading
room
THE
Warlight
ByMichael Ondaatje,Jonathan Cape“Books do not begin with
inspiration or ideas, at least not
for me,” author Michael Ondaatje
tellsThe Weekly. “They begin with a
fragment of a situation ... in the case
ofWarlight, it is the moment when
two children are left behind by their
parents to be looked after by two
possible criminals – almost a fairytale
beginning. And it happens at the end
of a war. So how do they live their
lives? How do they survive?”
This is indeed the fragment that
kickstarts his latest novel and at irst
it feels as if we’re in a Dickensian
London, albeit post-WWII, but
with all the dark alleys, enigmatic
characters and nefarious goings on
you might ind inGreat Expectations.
But hang on, there’s so much more to
come in this thrilling ride, which lits
between 1945 and more than a dozen
years later as narrator Nathaniel
unpicks his extraordinary family.
In Part One we meet the
questionable characters who are
nominated guardians to 14-year-old
Nathaniel and his sister Rachel, nearly
16, while their parents sail off to
Singapore for a year. There’s the shy,
big-framed lodger they call The Moth,
his shady, wiry companion The
Pimlico Darter, who seems to be
involved with the transportation of
dodgy greyhounds, and a cast of other
extraordinary men and women who
drift in and out of their twilight
existence. But as soon as Nathanielgrasps one new world order, the sands
shift again and where, oh where, is
their mother, who by the way didn’t
get on that boat! The prose is
haunting and vivid with a truly
shocking crescendo to the irst section.
Part Two opens in 1959 with
Nathaniel buying a home with a
walled garden in rural England. And
now we move from social drama to
spy thriller as the revelations build
thick and fast and so engrossingly
that before you know it, darkness
has fallen and you’re reading by
moonlight to reach a denouement
with all the power we’ve come to
expect from this accomplished writer.
“I invent the characters as I go
along,” the author says. “They
become more complex and interesting
(hopefully) as the book progresses,
the way we get to know people in real
life.” Getting to know these characters
is fascinating. Now for the movie....Abouttheauthor
Michael Ondaatje’s
1992 Booker
Prize-winning
novelThe English
Patientbecame a
movie, snaring nine
Oscars. The Booker “gave
me more freedom to write what
I really wanted to,” he says. Born
in Sri Lanka, moving to England
age 10 and then to Canada in
1962, Michael, 74, says he
“recreated a version of my
childhood inRunning in the Family
andThe Cat’s Table– where the
boy Michael leaves Sri Lanka and
goes to England by ship. Both
books are fictional as much
as factual ... but that is how I
imagined my youth.” It was “quite
late in the day” after university,
when he became a writer. He’s
now one of the world’s finest.EDITEDby JULIET RIEDEN