Why have I never read Michael Ondaatje before? I kind of thought I had, but in fact my only knowledge of his work was the movie adaptation of his 1992 Booker prizewinning novel The English Patient, which I've probably seen twice. I had vaguely taken on board the fact that Warlight was long listed for the Booker last year, but I'm not an avid devourer of long or short lists, and somehow the title didn't particularly grab me. All that changed a week or two ago when I read a review of the novel on Ali's blog. I've been in a curious state of not really knowing what to read, and on the strength of the review I made my way straight to Amazon where I read the first pages of the novel on that very useful tool they call 'Look Inside' and bought it immediately. And how glad I am that I got it as it has given me many hours of intense pleasure.
Warlight is narrated by Nathaniel, who is fourteen years old when the story begins, not long after the end of WW2. He and his older sister Rachel have been living a fairly uneventful life with their parents in a large house in Putney. One day his father announces that he has to move to Singapore to run an office there. Rose, the children's mother, will join him there soon afterwards. The two teenagers are put in the care of their mysterious lodger, whose name is Walter but is always referred to as The Moth. The children think at first that he is a criminal but that gets revised after a while. It's been arranged that the children will attend boarding schools but that doesn't last very long - they both run away and manage to persuade the Moth that they can start going back to day school again. Their supposed guardian doesn't keep a tight control on them, and they tend to wander the streets a lot, eating street food from stalls. There's a lot of uncertainty in their lives, amplified considerably when they discover that their mother's carefully packed trunk, supposedly sent to Singapore, is actually stored away in the basement of the house.
Rachel and Nathaniel have always been close, but as time goes on they begin to lead very separate lives. Nathaniel doesn't actually know what Rachel does with her time, though she appears to be attending school. He, on the other hand, is missing school a great deal. Instead he has started hanging out with an associate of the Moth's, a retired boxing champion known as the Pimlico Darter. The Darter has a business of sorts, though he never gives a name to it - initially it consists of moving illicitly imported greyhounds across London in a mussel boat through a series of little used canals, and delivering them to mysterious men who will dispose of them elsewhere. Later the dogs are replaced by large numbers of cardboard boxes, the contents of which are unknown, but are probably some form of munitions. Nathaniel starts accompanying the Darter on his trips, but he also has a job as a washer-up in the Criterion Hotel kitchens. It is here that he encounters a teenage waitress, known to him only by a pseudonym, Agnes Street, so called after the location of the first empty house where the two meet for passionate sexual encounters - there are a series of these houses, to which Agnes gets the keys from her brother, an estate agent. He and Agnes become close - he meets her parents, a quiet couple in a council flat, and introduces her to the Darter, who she initially believes to be his father. Other lodgers and visitors come and go in the house - Nathaniel particularly likes a young woman called Olive Lawrence, who is an ethnographer and briefly the Darter's girlfriend. Then there's a tall young man named Arthur whose role is never defined, but who visits the house regularly every few days. Nathaniel wonders where his mother is, and one evening in a Bromley nightclub with Agnes is almost sure that he spots her briefly in the crowd. So life continues in an intense but almost dreamlike fashion until suddenly everything changes - there is an attempted kidnapping, people are injured or killed, and Rose finally reappears to announce that she and Nathaniel are moving to a cottage in Suffolk.
So ends the first part of the novel. The second part moves forward twelve years - Nathaniel is now twenty eight and has been recruited by the intelligence services for a rather lowly job sifting information for either publication or destruction. It has become clear by now that Rose was working as a spy during and after the war, having been recruited by a childhood friend called Marsh Felon. March is a fascinating character - the youngest son of a local Suffolk thatcher, he fell from a roof aged sixteen and ended up recovering from a broken hip in Rose's parents' house. He becomes close to the eight year old Rose, and their friendship continues through his new life, as he attends Trinity College Cambridge and becomes a regular BBC broadcaster specialising in nature programmes. But his true life is really in Intelligence and he becomes what is known as a Gatherer - one who recruits people - hence his recruitment of Rose. All this and much more is slowly uncovered by Nathaniel, whose job allows him to gain access to secret files on the activities of these people. Indeed the main focus of his life becomes the uncovering of the secret life of his largely unknown mother, who by now has died in somewhat mysterious circumstances. Gradually some enduring mysteries do get solved, but Nathaniel will never know the answers to everything he is seeking.
This has been a most glorious read, fascinating and totally immersive. It plays with the concept of memory and the fact that we can never truly understand the truth of the lives of even those who are closest to us. I've already got another of Ondaatje's novels to read on my iPad and look forward to more happy weeks in his company. So many thanks to Ali for the tip off!
