Michael Ondaatje, _Warlight_

I WAS ABOUT to begin by noting that I had not read any of Ondaatje's novels, but on looking at the list of books beside the title page of Warlight, I see Coming Through Slaughter is listed under "Prose," along with The English Patient, Anil's Ghost, and so on, so perhaps it counts as a novel. At the time, I thought it was a lot like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (the other Ondaatje book I have read), that is, a fantasia in lyrical prose about a historical figure, but that volume is listed under "Poetry." So--

--let's just say I have not read the novel that made Ondaatje famous nor any of its successors. Way back when, I thought about picking up The English Patient, but unfortunately I saw the movie first and thought, enhh. I must have scratched Ondaatje off my list at that point. When our book club picked this one, I was not at all keen.

Turns out it's excellent, which makes me wonder if I should go back to English Patient and the others after all.

It's a first-person novel; soon after the close of World War II, our narrator, a London teenager named Nathaniel, and his sister are inexplicably abandoned by their parents and looked after by an odd but fascinating collection of folks (including "The Moth" and "The Darter"), who eventually begin including Nathaniel and sister in nocturnal activities of obscure purpose, until near-catastrophe strikes and the siblings have to be rescued from the deadly attentions of special agents from somewhere.

Pretty cool, eh? That's just the first part. Nathaniel's sister, Rachel, harbors a long-lasting grudge against their parents, especially their mother, for the abandonment, but Nathaniel recalls it as dazzling, mysterious initiation into adulthood, including his introduction to sex, with a young woman on a moonlit night in an old house full of dogs.

About a decade on, Nathaniel gets a job in the British intelligence service and takes advantage of his access to secret files to find out exactly what his mother was up to. His father, it turns out, was just plain skipping out, a bit of a ne'er-do-well, but his mother was actually a hero, performing not only extremely valuable service in the war but also extremely dangerous service in the early days of the cold war, and doing everything possible at the same time (appearances notwithstanding) for her children, even while under constant threat of assassination (a threat eventually fulfilled).

The narration in the second half of the book thus gradually unfolds the story that was within and underneath the story of the first half of the book; while Nathaniel's emancipatory adolescent adventure was going on, his mother was in a life-and-death, Balkans version of the Great Game.

An unstated moral seems to be wafting through the final pages, something about how unrealizable, how unknowable the lives of those who fought the Second World War had to be for their children, growing up in the prosperity and opportunities of the 1950s and 1960s. The moral is subtly introduced, but it's there, and it bears pondering.