Ondaatje’s new novel is a voyage of discovery
Michael Ondaatje’s marvellous new novel is a portrait of the artist as an 11-year-old boy. The boy is Michael, nicknamed Mynah,tiffany outlet and the novel is set in 1954 on a great ship, the Oronsay, sailing from Colombo to London, where he will reunite with his mother.
A lonely, anxious boy who has led “a precarious youth,” Michael wonders how his mother, whom he has not seen in years, could know when he will arrive. “And if she would be there.”
He has packed an empty school examination booklet, a pencil, a pencil sharpener and a traced map of the world. Already a writer, he jots down some of what he hears on-board; in England, he will go to the school Ondaatje himself attended. The Cat’s Table is fictional, an author’s note tells us, even though it sometimes uses “the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography.”
Assigned to a table far from the captain’s table, Michael is seated with eight other passengers. One, a Miss Lasqueti, calls theirs “the cat’s table” because it is “the least privileged place” in the dining room. It seems fortuitous to Michael to keep the company of others of no social importance; what is interesting and important happens mostly “in places where there is no power.”
The ribald musician Max Mazappa “had so many songs and lives under his belt that truth and fiction merged too closely for us to distinguish one from the other.” Botanist Larry Daniel is transporting a garden of exotic plants that are growing under lights in the bowels of the ship. Mr. Gunesekera remains silent for most of the voyage until revealed as an undercover agent. Mr. Nevil, a retired ship’s dismantler returning to England, reassures a worried Michael that the ship is safe. The mysterious Miss Lasqueti has pigeons caged on-board and sometimes wears a jacket that has pockets for them. “It would always be strangers like them, at the various Cat’s Tables of my life, who would alter me.”
There are two other boys at the table, Ramadhin and Cassius. Their friendship grows quickly as they get into trouble, imagine complex plots and stories, and watch the nightly walks of a shackled prisoner being taken to England to stand trial for murder. Freed from school, from family, from everything he has ever known, Michael reinvents himself over the course of the 21-day voyage.
Out of the “seemingly imaginary world” of the ship, Ondaatje here fashions an entire world that includes danger, intimacy, magic, hurt, sexuality, art, literature, love and a cyclone, which together awaken Michael to his own future as a writer.
Is there a novelist who writes more compellingly about tenderness than Ondaatje? The description of intimate moments between Michael and his older cousin Emily, who happens to be on-board, and later between Michael and Ramadhin’s sister Massi are breathtaking.
If Ondaatje delights in finding words for the most delicate of feelings, he makes sure we are aware, too, of brutality and racism both on board and in England, where slights, insults and embarrassments await many of the passengers. He is not the kind of writer who would declare that “the empire writes back,” as Salman Rushdie did in 1982 of the writers from former British colonies. In any event, the empire is far from ready to write back in 1954. The Oronsay is preparing the way, though, by forming Michael as a writer born in what was then Ceylon.
The Cat’s Table is a voyage of discovery for the reader as well as for its narrator. I loved the book, was dazzled by its language, and looked forward to turning each page to learn what would happen next. As Michael himself is transformed, the novel transforms itself from what seems at first a fictionalized memoir into a fully realized work of the imagination. Many chapters are scarcely more than a page long, and the writing throughout is of such beguiling simplicity that complexities accumulate quietly until exploding into action with a plot to free the prisoner.
As in all great novels, there is sadness here, too. We have to wait until near the end to find out some – still only a part – of Miss Lasqueti’s story, which she writes down in the hope that her own experience with a sexual predator may help steer Emily away from danger. The letter comes too late to help Emily, as an older Michael learns when he visits his cousin after a writer’s event in Vancouver.
Emily waves goodbye to Michael as the passengers disembark at Tilbury Docks. Michael isn’t sure he will recognize his mother, or she him. He is wearing his first pair of long trousers, and he has put on socks, but his cotton shirt is thin. “You must be cold, Michael,” his mother says, moving forward to hold him tighter against herself.
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