Warlight

We continued through the dark, quiet waters of the river, feeling we owned it, as far as the estuary. We passed industrial buildings, their lights muted, faint as stars, as if we were in a time capsule of the war years when blackouts and curfews were in effect, when there was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river.

I see I'm not the only reader who was reminded of The English Patient by this book – the end of WWII setting, the mystery that unspools nonlinearly, characters' moral ambiguity – but what I most remember of that earlier Michael Ondaatje work was what a slog I found it to read (I will allow that I read it nearly thirty years ago, may not have been up to the challenge, and enjoyed the writing in later Ondaatje reads). By contrast, I found Warlight to have been a mostly fine read – with plenty of quirky details and challenging ideas – and while it was totally accessible, I don't know if it was terribly deep. It's hard to know who to recommend this book for: it's neither breezy historical fiction or a profound character study; neither fish nor fowl; I can't muster up a strong reaction to what I've just read.

In 1945, our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.

This is the opening line of Warlight and it sets up a lovely ironic vibe. Nathaniel is fourteen, his older sister is sixteen, and after the recent disruption of the war and the Blitz that sent the children off to their grandparents' in the countryside, they accept it rather stoically that Dad has a new job in Singapore and Mom is going to join him there for a year. The mysterious boarder in the attic, that the kids secretly call The Moth, is soon joined in the duty of watching over them by his friend The Pimlico Darter, and shortly the house is filled with a strange assortment of weird, but secretive, visitors. There are so many odd details in this first section – boys peeing in the sink of their boarding school dormitory's third floor bathroom because it has no toilet, smuggling greyhounds along the Thames for bet-tampering at illegal racetracks, toiling behind the scenes at posh hotels and restaurants – and the mysterious, ironic, and detail-rich atmosphere was completely engaging. But then the kids discover their mother's steamer trunk, which they had helped her pack for her year away, hidden in the basement and a darker vibe is introduced. Stuff and such happens, there is a DRAMATIC incident, and the second half of the book begins and Nathaniel is 28 and living in the Suffolk village in which his mother grew up. He spends this second half searching for the truth of his mother's story, and while the narrative still has plenty of singular and surprising incidents, it started to lose my interest. 

I used to sit on the top level of a slow moving bus and peer down at the empty streets. There were parts of the city where you saw no one, only a few children, walking solitary, listless as small ghosts. It was a time of war ghosts, the grey buildings unlit, even at night, their shattered windows still covered over with black material where glass had been. The city still felt wounded, uncertain of itself. It allowed one to be rule-less. Everything had already happened. Hadn't it?

This idea of “warlight” seems to chime with “fog of war” – circumstances in each case preventing one from seeing quite clearly – and while life valiantly carried on in a half-lit London after the war was officially over, those who had spent WWII as spies and undercover agents found they still had work to do in the shadows. Even those who thought their duties were fulfilled might discover that loose ends were now coming after them; how fitting that a long-flew knife was designed precisely for loose ends. It comes as a surprise to Nathaniel when the Home Office approaches him with the offer of a job (“cleaning up” its war time records), and in a too-good-to-be-true twist, he is literally given the keys to unlocking his mother's past.

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.

Much is made in Warlight of memory and map-making and music and codenames; when I get tired of seeing the same themes over and over, they feel pointlessly overused to me. The specifics of the history that Ondaatje writes about (and especially the morally queasy events in Italy and Yugoslavia) were all very interesting to me, but the efforts to elevate the literary aspects made the whole thing fall apart for me. I wish I liked this more, but it was just all right for me.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *