Warlight

Warlight
Author Michael Ondaatje
Language English
Genre Literary fiction, coming-of-age
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf sold by Random House LLC
Publication date
 May 8, 2018
Media type Hardcover, paperback, Kindle, audiobook
Pages 304
ISBN 978-0-525-52119-8
Preceded by The Cat's Table
Website http://www.barclayagency.com/site/speaker/michael-ondaatje

Warlight is a 2018 novel by Canadian author Michael Ondaatje.

Synopsis

In London near the end of World War II, 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister Rachel are left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth, their parents having moved to Singapore.[1][2] The Moth affiliates with a motley group of eccentric, mysterious, and in some ways nefarious characters who dominate the children's experience early in the postwar period.[2]

When Nathaniel is in his late twenties, he begins to piece together what happened during those early years in what has been called "a journey through reality, recollection, and imagination",[1] and "an adult looking back at traumatic childhood events and trying to work out how far they formed (or deformed) him into the person he has become".[3] The novel has been called "a lyrical journey into the past, illuminating, as its title implies, both the traumas and the possibilities of rebuilding a life after war".[4]

Interpretation

Penelope Lively wrote in The New York Times that the "signature theme" of the novel is that “the past never remains in the past”, its "paramount subject matter" being that "the present reconstructs the past".[2] As the title's term warlight is thought to refer, literally, to the blackouts of World War II, Lively wrote that the novel's narrative is likewise "devious and opaque" and proceeds "by way of hints and revelations", that its characters are elusive and evasive, and that the novel has an "intricate and clever construction" requiring a close reading.[2]

As background, Alex Preston wrote in The Guardian that much of Ondaatje’s literary career has been driven by the perception that "memory is the construct of the older self looking back".[5] Calling Ondaatje "a memory artist", Preston wrote that the author "summons images with an acuity that makes the reader experience them with the force of something familiar, intimate and truthful".[5]

“I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth.”

Nathaniel Williams,
narrator in Warlight [6]

A.S.H. Smyth wrote in The Spectator that Ondaatje is "at his best when writing about awkward, quiet types, and ‘those at a precarious tilt’, and characters, especially narrators, with dodgy memories", Smyth noting that the novel's narrator Nathaniel said that he "knows how to fill in a story from a grain of sand".[7]

Writing in The New Republic, Andrew Lanham noted the significance of Nathaniel's postwar job working for British Intelligence as a historian reviewing after-action reports, Lanham implying that the novel articulated the "need to probe the archives for what really happened: In our cultural memory of the wars of the past, only the rereading counts".[4] In this context, Lanham wrote that Ondaatje’s literary career has echoed Nathaniel’s task, with several of Ondaatje's novels "circling around war and the challenge of remembering and recovering from war".[4]

On August 19, 2018, former U.S. President Barack Obama included Warlight in his summer reading list, describing the novel as "a meditation on the lingering effects of war on family".[8]

Critical response and reviews

Warlight reached The New York Times Best Seller list within the month of its publication,[9] and in July 2018 was longlisted among thirteen novels for the Man Booker Prize.[10]

Penelope Lively wrote in The New York Times that Warlight is rich with detail, having meticulous background research that brings alive a time and a place, Lively summarizing the novel as "intricate and absorbing".[2] Similarly, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst wrote in The Times that most of the novel's movements are "measured and catlike" with "writing that is prepared to take its time", concluding that Warlight is a novel of "shadowy brilliance".[3]

Anthony Domestico wrote in The Boston Globe that "Ondaatje’s is an aesthetic of the fragment", his novels "constructed, with intricate beauty, from images and scenes that don’t so much flow together as cling together in vibrating, tensile fashion. ... built more from juxtaposition and apposition than from clean narrative progression".[6] Likewise crediting Warlight as "a series of sharply perceived images", Alex Preston wrote in The Guardian that the novel "sucked me in deeper than any novel I can remember; when I looked up from it, I was surprised to find the 21st century still going on about me."[5]

Indicating that Warlight would not disappoint "lovers of intrigue, betrayal, war-torn cities and score-settling", A.S.H. Smyth described in The Spectator how the novel did not glorify war and concluded that "it’s hard not to think of Warlight as an adroit and unromantic B-side to (Ondaatje's 1992 novel) The English Patient.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 "Warlight by Michael Ondaatje". Goodreads. 2018. Archived from the original on June 25, 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Lively, Penelope (June 7, 2018). "Wartime Acts, Postwar Retribution: A Mother's Risky Legacy". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 17, 2018.
  3. 1 2 Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert (June 2, 2018). "Review: Warlight by Michael Ondaatje — this requires English patience". The Times. Archived from the original on June 26, 2018.
  4. 1 2 3 Lanham, Andrew (June 8, 2018). "Michael Ondaatje's Haunting Pasts". New Republic. Archived from the original on June 25, 2018.
  5. 1 2 3 Preston, Alex (June 5, 2018). "Warlight by Michael Ondaatje review – magic from a past master". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 11, 2018.
  6. 1 2 Domestico, Anthony (May 2, 2018). "Michael Ondaatje crafts a superb wartime mystery". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on June 26, 2018.
  7. 1 2 Smyth, A. S. H. (June 9, 2018). "The B-side of The English Patient? Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, reviewed". The Spectator. Archived from the original on June 25, 2018.
  8. ↑ Haltiwanger, John (August 20, 2018). "5 books Obama says he's read this summer and is recommending you read, too". Business Insider. Archived from the original on August 21, 2018.
  9. ↑ "Books / Best Sellers / Hardcover Fiction". The New York Times. June 10, 2018. Archived from the original on June 24, 2018. Third week on the hardcover nonfiction list was June 10, 2018.
  10. ↑ "Man Booker prize 2018 longlist – in pictures". The Guardian. July 23, 2018. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on July 24, 2018. Retrieved 2018-07-24.
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