Ondaatje’s latest is ‘finest’ novel to date
Like so many others, I am a huge admirer of the writing of Michael Ondaatje. That being said,tiffany outlet I find his writing difficult to love. While I count In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient among my favourite novels, I approach any new work from Ondaatje with a certain amount of caution. His novels are challenging, to say the least, characterized by a complexity of language and an intellectual rigour which is daunting and, at times, forbidding. I am confident enough in his abilities as a writer (and my own as a reader) to persevere, however. I know that I will grow to love these books — and almost invariably I do — but it cannot be denied: there is much work involved to get to that reward.
I also know that I’m not alone in this.
I wanted to state that, off the top, to underscore the significance of what I am about to say: The Cat’s Table is Ondaatje’s most accessible, most compelling novel to date. It may also be his finest.
The novel begins with an 11-year-old boy boarding the ocean liner Oronsay which will take him from Ceylon to England. It’s the early 1950s, and the boy has been living with his aunt and uncle. He is going to England to go to school, and to be reunited with his mother, who he hasn’t seen in several years.
Aboard the ship, the solo traveller is assigned to the titular Cat’s Table, “the least privileged place … far from the Captain’s Table, which was at the opposite end of the dining room.”
There the boy, quickly nicknamed Myna, meets two boys his own age, the wild and impetuous Cassius and the quiet Ramadhin, who is plagued with asthma and other health concerns.
The adults at the table, all solo travellers themselves, are a varied group, including Mr. Mazappa, a musician with the ship’s orchestra who regales the boys with obscene song lyrics and stories of the adult world; Mr. Nevil, a retired ship dismantler, who travels with blueprints of historical ships; and Miss Lasqueti, who they believe to be a spinster, travelling with a crew of pigeons to England, and in possession of a coat in which she can carry multiple birds in specially concealed pockets.
The boys take it upon themselves to do one forbidden thing every day, and the ship becomes a playground for the unaccompanied minors, from the lush, secret garden and murals featuring naked women in the hold to the upper decks, with their swimming pools, lifeboats (where the boys hide to spy and eat stolen food) and where, every night, a prisoner being transported to England is walked by his jailers.
The Cat’s Table takes on the physical and narrative tone and feeling of a sea voyage. Initially, it is a series of impressions of the ship, the people Myna encounters, scenes and moments seemingly disconnected, but unified by their slow, easy, carefree nature.
As the novel — and the voyage — progress, however, the people develop into more fully realized individuals, and their relationships shift and clarify, the narrative drawing together and unifying.
The world of the ship, and Myna’s journey, both physical and metaphorical, come into sharp focus, and the earlier scenes and incidents are given context and proportion. In this way, the reading experience — in which the reader enters the book uncertain, but gradually comes to understand the world of the book, its characters, its direction — mirrors the voyage itself, a perfect marriage of narrative and readerly response.
None of this, however, is heavy-handed or obscurist. The Cat’s Table reads with an ease and naturalism which readers (myself included) may not expect from Ondaatje. The reader is immersed in Myna’s world, and allowed to explore it. Which is not to say that it is a simplistic book: Ondaatje’s prose is, as always, stunning. He has a gift for images, and an eye for the perfect word, the perfect metaphor, but in The Cat’s Table, that beauty is understated, never forced, and the more powerful for it.
Threaded through the narrative of the journey, which is seen through the 11-year-old’s eyes, are commentary and perspectives from Michael, the boy himself, but some decades later. In-filling stories from later in his life, and offering adult accounts of the various people involved, the adult narrator places the voyage as central to his life as a whole.
“The three weeks of the sea journey,” the narrator recounts, “were placid. It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen through their eyes, even something significant in a life. A rite of passage.”
It is, indeed. The Cat’s Table is a breathtaking account not only of boyhood, but of its loss.
It is a novel filled with utterly unique characters and situations, but universal in its themes, heartbreakingly so, and a journey the reader will never forget.
Robert J. Wiersema is a writer and bookseller in Victoria. His new book, Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen, will be released in September.
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