Libby Edwards, Mary Lib Sovick, Mary Sanz, Paige Noon, Margie Karuzas, Annie Sjoberg, Sheri Linnell, Maddy Weisz, Joan Ritchie, Saran Twombly
Ten of us gathered virtually, via Zoom, to discuss Michael Ondaatje’s most recent book, Warlight. Here is a distillation of our thoughts and impressions.
Warlight tells the haunting and mysterious efforts of a young man to understand his past – and therefore his present – life. Ondaatje weaves together a complex web of time, memory, and fact. A few themes hold these together: people are not who or where we think they are; we order our lives with barely held stories; no one knows who the truth bearer is; and we never know more than the surface of any relationship. Nothing lasts. The book may be spare in emotion, but it is replete with events, relationships, and fabulous characters. It is intensely atmospheric.
The atmosphere that Ondaatje creates is amplified by the story’s setting in post-war London, an atmosphere of darkness, of uncertainty, and of danger. The fog of war, strange characters and antics, mysterious roles, responsibilities, and relationships, the need to survive. The war is over, but it is not really over. No one was who he or she appeared to be. The characters we meet are consumed by making do. Secrecy persists as does revenge. Mahler’s use of schwer to indicate difficult or heavy passages is co-opted as a warning that nothing was safe. The story that emerges links the vicissitudes of war with a young man’s coming of age. It is a story of relationships and memories, acknowledging that memories don’t last and that we never know more that the surface of relationships. It is a mystery that is not fully resolved.
Ondaatje is a consummate storyteller – a brilliant writer who prompts his readers with hints, people, events, and connections to build a story from diverse fragments. He takes us through a looking glass of sorts, from a mad-cap beginning to a series of incidents and people that shift and evolve, intricately connected, to provide Nathaniel the pieces of his story. We agreed that the book deserves multiple readings, each of which may change our interpretations. A few of the group – Libby, Joan, and Saran – read the book at least twice and found it richer with each reading. Does Nathaniel complete the story of his past, or will fragments continue to merge and memories continue to change?
Maps reappear as stable points throughout the book, for military intelligence as well as for those searching for where they are and where they have been. This figurative and literal reference to maps is effective; it provides another link among disconnected events and people.
How reliable is memory? Is it formed more by feelings than by details or facts? Many of us experienced childhood events that made no sense at all at the outset, gaining meaning only with time. Is it possible to piece together a life from memories, questionable facts, and unconnected fragments? In these questions, Ondaatje’s rendering is deeply imaginative and, for me, deeply emotional.
Some of us did not find much in Warlight that addressed emotions and the mental states of each player. Nathaniel is a compelling protagonist, but a few found him detached from his own feelings as well as from those of others (Agnes, for example). This perceived absence of character development made it hard for some to engage with the story or to care about the characters. Rose provided a prime example of our differing interpretations. Maddy found her awful while she was Annie’s favorite character. I found the book deeply emotional; others didn’t. Several of us left with a feeling of great sadness for Nathaniel.
What about the true damage of war? Can we find amidst this damage emotion that is not necessarily explicit? We meet two young kids who are profoundly deceived by their parents. Their mother, Rose, risks her life for her county but must leave her children in care of an eclectic group of individuals with similarly divided allegiances. Did Rose have a choice, sitting in her rural home listening to bombs drop on the English countryside? Nathaniel and Agnes escape surrounding madness to unoccupied houses where they are lovers, yet Agnes must then make do when she finds she is pregnant. We meet a talented gatherer who recruits the best agents but never suffers the consequences. Most importantly, how painful must it be to search for reasons behind betrayal, forced to piece together parts of a puzzle that don’t easily fit?
I found deep emotion everywhere – sometimes just a word, sometimes an unexpected connection, sometimes a startling awareness. Each step of his search reminded Nathaniel that memories of the past were not what really happened. How much disillusion and pain result from constant efforts to separate fact (or apparent fact) from memory, events from deception, people from nicknames and hidden identities? By the end of the book I felt profound sadness for Nathaniel because, in fact, nothing lasts.
