What Book to Read?

This is Ondaatje’s most recent book, published in 2011, nearly twenty years after his Booker Prize winning The English Patient. I enjoyed that book very much. There are also things to enjoy in this one, but there is something about the way the story is told that doesn’t completely work for me.

Michael, the narrator, is looking back on experiences he had in 1954 when he was eleven, and travelling alone on the Oronsay from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to meet his mother in England. The journey takes three weeks, and the story is primarily about his adventures on the ship. Though there are a family friend and a distant cousin on board, he is essentially unsupervised. He makes friends with two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, who sit at the same table for dinner. This is the ‘cat’s table’, the one furthest away from the captain’s table in distance and prestige. They make an agreement that every day they will do at least one forbidden thing, and they find plenty of opportunities for causing chaos. They also find mysteries, and observe dramas being played out among other passengers, some of whom are not what they seem. Michael also tells the reader a little of what later happens to him and his two friends. It’s an interesting and subtle narrative.

This is a coming of age story, where the journey is obviously a rite of passage. Michael understands this looking back, though he says he was not conscious it of at the time. ‘It is only now,’ he writes, ‘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’. But the younger Michael knows that he is undergoing some change; at one significant point he recognises that ‘Whatever small props of necessary defence I’d surrounded myself with, which contained and protected me, and which had marked the outline of me, were no longer there.’ And later, he acknowledges the newly understood impact of the world on his self-absorbed perspective: ‘we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.’ There are other references to changes in him, as in: ‘I thought I was being loved because I was being altered’ or ‘It would always be strangers like them, at the various Cat’s Tables of my life, who would alter me.’ But these changes don’t add up to a Michael who is clearly different at the end of the voyage. Indeed, even after everything that has happened, the older Michael down plays the importance of the journey: ‘For years I barely remembered it.’ I find this ambivalence confusing.

This question of the two voices – Michael as an eleven year old and Michael looking back – lies at the heart of my problem with this book. Most of the story is narrated by the young Michael, but the older Michael frequently intrudes with knowledge of the future, as in ‘I would always remember’, ‘we were not aware of its irony’, or ‘but we knew none of this back then’. Ondaatje says at the beginning that the young Michael was ‘green as he could be about the world’. But he also says: ‘A boy of eleven, like any experienced dog, can read the gestures of those around him, can see the power in a relationship drift back and forth’. Really? Ondaatje needs Michael to have this capacity, so he can comment on the action. But this leads to observations that don’t seem appropriate to a ‘green’ eleven year old, such as ‘There was something extraterrestrial and indelible about the verse’, or ‘We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie’. Or should we always assume that it is the adult speaking?

The book reads like autobiography, though Ondaatje assures us it isn’t. ‘Although the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography,’ he writes, ‘The Cat’s Table is fictional – from the captain and the crew and all its passengers on the boat down to the narrator.’ So it’s a fictional autobiography. These days it’s fashionable to say that the sifting and selection of fact and recollection, and the unreliability of memory itself mean that autobiography is in a sense fiction. So why am I not comfortable with a genuinely fictional one? I can only say that I find it a bit mannered and self-conscious. How can Michael remember so clearly what he saw and thought on the ship, especially if for years he didn’t think about it? Easy. The author made it up.

You can read a little more about Michael Ondaatje – and check any biographical similarities – here. And here’s a rather more glowing review.