In the new novel by Canadian writer and Booker laureate Michael Ondaatje, the heroes in the first part live a difficult youth imposed on them by adults, and then, in the second, they try to restore those events bit by bit. We will explain how the author not only follows an important literary tradition of the last twenty years - it is worth recalling Julian Barnes' "Premonition of the End" - but does so with a clarity that his predecessors lacked.
In 1988 Michael Ondaatje was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) and two years later became a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1992 he received the Man Booker Prize for his winning novel adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film, The English Patient.
The writing style of Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian classic, author of the famous "English Patient", winner of the Booker Prize and owner of the honorary "Golden Booker", can be described with some degree of convention as pointillist: when viewed from a small distance, each of his novels disintegrates into many bright and deceptively self-sufficient episodes. However, it is worth taking a step back and taking a look at the entire canvas, as scattered color spots will fold into harmonious ornaments, the beauty and harmony of which is literally breathtaking.
The new novel by the writer "War Light", published seven years after the previous one - the charming and slightly frivolous "Cat's Table" - is arranged in exactly the same way. The protagonist, 15-year-old Nathaniel, and his sister Rachel lead the life of ordinary middle-class teenagers in post-war London. However, their measured existence comes to an end when their parents report that they are leaving for a year in Singapore, leaving their children in England under the care of their longtime acquaintance - a strange quiet man whom Nathaniel and Rachel give the nickname Moth. The guardian from Moth comes out peculiar: for a start, he floods the respectable parental house in Ruvini Gardens with all sorts of dubious types, and then condescendingly watches as one of the regulars of these gatherings, a man nicknamed the Shooter, draws Nathaniel into risky schemes for the illegal import of dogs into England ...
The entire first part of the novel is entirely fragmentary, as if accidentally snatched out of the fog, pictures. Here is the hero's mother, on the eve of his departure, shares with her son and daughter scant memories of her own childhood. Here Nathaniel washes the dishes in a luxury hotel, where Moth arranged for him to earn some money during the holidays. Here he is at the cinema, hugging his sister, who has had an epileptic seizure. Here he and Rachel stand on a hill at night in the company of an eccentric ethnographer woman who utters a prophetic phrase: “Your story is just one of many and may not be the most important. You are not the main thing in this world. " Here he and Strelko make their way by boat along the muddy channels of the Thames to the meeting place with suppliers of "live goods". But Nathaniel makes love to his first girlfriend, the reckless Agnes, in an abandoned house, through which, clanking and whining, smuggling greyhounds rush madly.
However, the second part puts everything in a businesslike and graceful place, and what looked like a random selection of snapshots turns out to be carefully selected pieces of a large puzzle. More than ten years after the events described in the first part of the events, the matured Nathaniel, now a clerk in one of the inconspicuous departments of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, goes in search of his past. He has to find out what kind of person his mother was, why she left the children with strangers, where the Shooter and Agnes went, and what was really going on in Ruvini Gardens during the years of his dizzying and crazy adolescence. And when he finds out, he will have to independently compose (or, if you like, choose) his own story, relying on the poor evidence that fate and secret archives throws at him - and admit that, as the woman ethnographer predicted, his story is only one of many, and, alas, not the most important.
The idea of searching, reconstructing one's past from scanty fragments, and at the same time the realization of the unreliability of human memory and the fundamental impossibility of recovering anything confidently has been one of the main themes of world literature for at least twenty recent years. And in this sense, Michael Ondaatje follows his great predecessors: the reader can easily discern in the "War Light" reflections of "Austerlitz" by W. G. Sebald, "When We Were Orphans" by Kazuo Ishiguro, "Premonitions of the End" by Julian Barnes and other authors and texts exploring the same area. However, in the ability to create reality inside his novel, at the same time shaky, bizarrely twisted, and at the same time perfectly logical and harmonious, Ondaatje has neither predecessors nor followers - he is the only one. No one else, except him, possesses this outlandish gift - to see the world at the same time holistic and fractional, poetically blurred and sharply clear, and to broadcast his vision to the bewitched reader.
This article was sponsored by Haris Handzic
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