Warlight – Michael Ondaatje (2018)

Sometimes it is difficult to properly convey the beautiful nature of a book, however,  Warlight captivated me from the first page – and never let me go. It’s a gloriously literary novel – but one full of intrigue and captivating characters, exploring tenderly the question of memory.

I can’t remember when it was, I read The English Patient – it must have been more than twenty years ago though – oh my goodness I loved it. I went on to see the film a couple of times. I think I have remembered almost all that novel ever since – (seeing the film will have helped my memory, I know) it simply has a very special quality about it. In his 1992 Booker prize winning novel Ondaatje’s characters take on an almost legendary quality.  De Almásy a Hungarian count, declared to be an Englishman, a Sikh sapper, a Canadian thief called Caravaggio – a tragic love story in a world gone mad. I read Anil’s Ghost too – but I can’t remember anything about that one at all.

Warlight has a similar quality to The English Patient – the stories are very different, but again we have characters so brilliantly drawn, that they too could take on a similar legendary status. Here we have the Moth and the Pimlico Darter – men who live in the shadows, two abandoned teenagers, and a thatcher who later reinvents himself as a BBC naturalist and who gathers young men and women to work in the secret service. They feel very much like the kind of characters only Ondaatje could have created.

1945 the war has ended, and the London landscape is changed almost beyond recognition. In Putney fifteen year old Nathanial and his sister Rachel have been abandoned by their parents and left in the family home in the care of a couple of strange guardians. Initially the bemused siblings rather assume their guardians are criminals of some sort – though in time, they worry about this far less than one might imagine.

“Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “ ‘Schwer,’ ” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.” 

The Moth and the Darter are a couple of shadowy characters who smuggle munitions across London and greyhounds from France using the extensive network of rivers and canals. Having run away from their new boarding schools, Nathanial and Rachel now living full time with the eccentric pair are drawn into this oddly attractive lifestyle. The portrayal of those canal trips with the Darter and some French Greyhounds are extraordinarily vivid and memorable – the atmosphere of the night-time canals perfectly captured by Ondaatje.

Throughout the novel the point of view is entirely that of Nathanial who is the first person narrator – Rachel is viewed only by her brother. Nathanial and Rachel become used to the collection of people who move in and out of their family home, and on some level realise that all these people are there to protect them. One of the Darter’s girlfriends is Olive Lawrence a woman who Nathanial is particularly drawn to – something about her reminding him a little of his mother who has so completely disappeared from his life. From time to time the teenagers wonder at their parents whereabouts – they had been told they were going to Singapore – but one day the two discover the trunk they had watched their mother pack for Singapore hidden away in the house.

“We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here.” 

During this time of adventurous escapades, part-time jobs and first love Nathanial is far too occupied to notice the first signs of danger. Suddenly he and Rachel are thrust into a world of peril.

Twelve years later Nathanial buys a cottage in Suffolk near to where he once lived briefly with his mother. From here Nathanial uses his recollections to help uncover all that he didn’t understand at the time. In time he gets to know the woman his mother really was, what she did to protect him and Rachel and what part those people who surrounded him during his adolescence played.

I absolutely loved this novel – every bit of it – I can understand those who say they preferred the first part of the novel – it is the most memorable. Though I loved the later section just as much for different reasons.

“You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.” 

 I loved the way Ondaatje played with memory and investigation, gradually revealing parts of the backstory. Warlight is a captivating novel – and like The English Patient before it, it would make a wonderful film.