6/1/2023 0 Comments Warlight by michael ondaatjeWe come to understand that the book is not about him or, rather, he morphs into the kind of withdrawn and occluded narrator that Philip Roth employs so masterfully in Nemesis. ![]() The novel’s second half sees Nathaniel, now in his late 20s, in “a distant village, a walled garden”. Everything in this world seems both promising and enigmatic, like the clue to a vast adult conspiracy, but then, that is what life is like for most children. ![]() He begins to work at weekends among the “mostly immigrant staff” whom the Moth oversees at the Criterion hotel he falls in with the Darter, a shady greyhound smuggler he meets Agnes, whose estate agent brother lets the two of them into a series of empty homes. He suffers a brief spell, like Ondaatje, as a boarder at Dulwich college then, as a day boy, he is initiated by the Moth into a series of secret societies. The first half of Warlight shows us Nathaniel’s sentimental education in parentless, postwar London. Both books in turn look back to what remains, for me, Ondaatje’s masterpiece, the exquisite, semi-fictional memoir Running in the Family (1982), in which the author strives, through writing, to retrieve a childhood that has been lost to him. ![]() Nathaniel is a few years older than Mynah, the narrator of Ondaatje’s last novel, The Cat’s Table (2011), but the voice and quality of perception are familiar.
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