Recommended Read: Warlight

Warlight: Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s seventh novel, Warlight, is a work of reflection, of finding and constructing a version of the past from fleeting and often incomplete memories. It is an undertaking that the novel’s narrator, Nathaniel, a twenty-eight year old archivist within the Foreign Office of the British intelligence service, cannot help but commit himself to. His objective is simple: he wishes to ‘discover’ (146) who his elusive mother really was. From the age of fourteen, Nathaniel, alongside his older sister, Rachel, live within an ‘orphan state’ (135); there is a void from a single-event which, throughout their lives, comes to shape the pair: at the age of fourteen and sixteen, respectively, their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Williams, leave for an open-ended trip to Singapore. The reasons behind their parents’ journey remain undisclosed to the children for years, as Nathaniel and Rachel attempt to lead their lives in the wake of their parents’ departure.

In the indeterminable stead of their parents, a colleague of the Williams’, The Moth — with a sobriquet bequeathed to the stranger by the teenagers —, assumes, rather loosely, the paternal duties. To discuss the Williams’ would be to disclose the central mystery of the novel, and The Moth himself concurs; he is defined as ‘a private man who loved classical music, and who drifted through the house mostly in silences’ (23), and, in keeping with his appellation, he is furtively ‘moth-like’ in his shadowed movements. He holds a ‘reliable stolidness’ (61), and so his past with the Williams’ is never fully disclosed by the man himself.

Alongside The Moth, and proliferating Nathaniel’s childhood, are a cast of peripheral guardians, outcasts all, who invade Nathaniel and Rachel’s home in order to, it seems, hold court with one another and to seek advice over often illegal schemes. It is only later, as an adult, that Nathaniel discerns that the nefarious set may have had rather nobler intentions. Distinguished from The Moth’s assortment of ‘friends’ are Norman Marshall, also known as The Pimlico Darter, and Arthur McCash: two men whose tutelage and protectorship of the adolescent Nathaniel come to define the youth as his life is forever altered following his meetings with these two ‘guardians’ (123). It is through these acquaintances that Nathaniel gradually constructs a semblance of order to his and his mother’s disparate pasts:

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance”, you realise, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine (135)

But beyond his search to find the ‘rhyme’ (135), the history, of his mother, Nathaniel comes to hone his ‘interest in “characters”’ to instead, in a rather searingly honest undertaking, seek to understand the effect of an individual’s actions, or ‘what they do to others’ (274). This transference is present in Nathaniel’s gradual understanding of The Moth, The Darter and Arthur McCash, all guardians who, during the boy’s adolescence, are initially mere characters within ‘a book’ (123) only to then become, ultimately, the only family he truly understood.

Part One of the novel follows the orphaned Nathaniel through his adolescence, a period indelibly marked under the tutelage of The Darter, a man who is embedded within the criminal underclass of London as a transporter of illegally imported greyhounds. Nathaniel’s vocational studies under The Darter prove to be a lure that the young teen cannot refuse. While begrudgingly attending boarding school, Nathaniel begins to work at the Criterion performing menial tasks as a ‘lift jockey’ and then as a ‘dish washer’, before leaving and starting work in a ‘fast-paced restaurant in World’s End’ (64). These two positions are the only ‘legal’ jobs that Nathaniel is employed under as a teenager; instead his living comes from the ‘intriguing work’ (93) aboard The Darter’s Morris and then a borrowed mussel boat. Little is known of the taciturn Darter, and Ondaatje, replicating the nature of teenagers, begins with Nathaniel comparing the stranger to the only other adult within his life, The Moth:

Unlike The Moth, The Darter was dedicated to quickness. He appeared most at ease in a limited space. After all, he had found early success as The Pimlico Darter, crouching in the modest square of a boxing ring, and we believed, unfairly, that at some point he may have spent a few months of his life in the similarly restricted nine by six feet of a prison cell. (38-39)

From this excerpt alone, two defining characteristics of The Darter are established: the first being his movements, and the quick pace with which the Darter lives his life by, and that his history, while purely speculative, ‘unfairly’ so, is one entwined with criminality and the possible experience of arrest. However, the acumen and ‘ease’ of The Darter does not result in his or his accomplice’s capture, but rather a ‘sophisticated’ (88) and lucrative operation. Ultimately, Ondaatje makes little reference to the monetary benefits of The Darter’s operation; rather, the boon for Nathaniel is simply his tutor’s tuition:

But I now discovered The Darter was an easy man to learn from. He cared less about you than The Moth did, but told you precisely what he needed you to do, as well as what about him was to be kept from others. “Breast your cards, Nathaniel,” he’d say, “always breast your cards.” What he needed, it turned out, was someone like me, a semi-reliable person to help him gather greyhounds two or three times a week from one of those silent European vessels, and so he persuaded me to leave my job at the restaurant and instead help him transport them in darkness on the mussel boat to various locations where a van would then spirit his living cargo further away. We managed about twenty of those shy travellers on each boat ride. They sat shivering on deck during our journeys, which sometimes lasted as late as midnight, and were spooked easily by a loud noise or the searchlight of a launch suddenly alongside us. The Darter worried about what he called “preventative men”, and it meant I had to nuzzle my way into their midst under the blankets and calm them in the fetid dog air as the river police slid by. “They’re after more serious things,” The Darter announced, justifying his low-level criminality (78)

The nature of The Darter is one omitted of superfluity. Even his compassion and care of Nathaniel is elided, here, to a brief aphoristic imperative, ‘breast your cards’, or into an indifferent note of passivity, ‘they’re after more serious things’, as a means to either ‘justify’ his and his sidekick’s enterprise, or to pacify his young partner’s fears of arrest. However, his skill as a teacher stems from one simple point: he dictates to ‘you precisely what he needed you to do’ (78). While at once his ‘teacher’ (272), The Darter, alongside The Moth are a family unit to Nathaniel and Rachel Williams: to begin with, not only is it possible to read the moniker of The Moth as a truncated form of ‘mother’, but, in his stalwart devotion to his wards, The Moth, especially to Rachel, is the only parent to the children. Nathaniel’s reading of The Moth, that his care was no more than a ‘spell’ (149), is shown to be ignorant of The Moth’s affection. In one of Nathaniel’s recollections of his and his sister’s youth he recalls standing at the shore of The Serpentine Lake, in Hyde Park, observing The Moth in a state of ‘permanent concern’ (155) as Rachel submerges herself within the lake’s waters. His stare’s intensity is ‘protective’ (155), which itself is an adjective continuously attributed to The Moth, or to Walter once his nickname is discarded. In place of an inherited surname, the forename of Walter itself becomes a patronym of the family in homage to their guardian, to the man who was ‘protecting’ (149) them and to Rachel’s ‘true father’ (258).

As for The Darter, he assumes the role of Nathaniel’s father in order to placate a prying Agnes, Nathaniel’s spirited girlfriend, and by doing so he then, in contrast to his flippant and carefree (78) nature, plays his ‘patriarchal role’ (108) with a ‘protective and avuncular air’ (108). The position is somewhat fleeting, but, nevertheless, Nathaniel’s bond with The Darter is known by those around him. Towards the end of the novel, Nathaniel identifies his teacher as ‘my Darter’ (268) and even Rachel labels him ‘your friend The Darter’ (151) to her brother (emphasis added). With the possessive pronouns of ‘my’ and ‘your’ there is a degree of ownership, but more so a degree of endearment. Over time, Norman Marshall is discovered by Nathaniel to be a ‘smuggler, a minor criminal’ (265) who may have ‘been a hero of sorts’ (265), but such titles will always be characteristically ‘waved’ (271) away by The Darter, after all he is the man who prided himself upon the police having ‘absolutely no idea’ (88) who he was. Such anonymity, however, extends beyond the simple pride of eluding the authorities. The Darter’s desire to remain anonymous is shown most clearly during Nathaniel’s final meeting with him. For The Darter the past is not to be returned to, it is instead to be kept tucked away from his isolated ‘solitary life’ and, as it is revealed, it is to be done so for more than just his own benefit. To remain separate from the past means Marshall may remain ‘independent’ (278) from it, but, like his role as Nathaniel’s father, he again, after thirteen years, assumes yet another position within a family in order to ensure the safety of a child at the centre of it; again, he offers ‘a safe path out of [a] closing world’ (278) for someone else’s abandoned child.

Indeed, this point, of leaving the past buried, is the principle hurdle to Nathaniel’s attempt to both scour the ‘ravine of [his] childhood’ (265) and to ‘trace the career’ of his mother (264). Essentially, Nathaniel’s objective, of delineating truth from fiction in order to construct a lineal narrative from his piecemeal memories, is wholly dependent upon sources, of individuals who lived alongside him. This point is most clearly portrayed through Nathaniel’s bond with Arthur McCash, the intermediate between the two spheres of his mother’s disparate lives. Through McCash’s introduction, Ondaatje’s skill at showing Nathaniel’s youthful guess-work, of his suspicions and assertions, are most clear. Nathaniel’s initial assessment while drawn to McCash’s mien, gradually comes to encompass the man’s attributes and distinct nature:

A man named Arthur McCash slipped into our house the next day, The Moth announcing he was a friend he had invited for dinner. He was tall and skeletal. Spectacles. A shock of brown hair. One could tell he would always have the presence of a boy in his last year at college. A bit too frail for group sports. Squash perhaps. But this first image of him was inaccurate. I remember he was the only person at the table that first night able to unscrew the cap off an old bottle of mustard. He torqued it open casually and left it on the table. With his sleeves rolled up, I saw the powerful string of muscles along his arms. […] In retrospect it feels almost believable—he did seem part of another era, one of those Englishmen who are happier in desert climates. Unlike other guests, McCash was quiet and modest. He somehow always positioned himself alongside whoever was arguing loudly—it meant he was not expected to intercede at all. He nodded over a questionable joke, though he never told any—save for a surprising night when, possibly intoxicated, he recited a limerick that involved Alfred Lunt and Noël Coward, which startled the room. It was never quite remembered properly even the next day by those who had been near him [100-101]

As is evidenced here, Ondaatje is adroitly economical in his detailing of the countenances of his characters: The Moth is said to have ‘thick black horizontal eyebrows. A large though friendly stomach. His big honker’ (21) and The Darter is known only as ‘tall and slim’ (54) with a ‘furtive walk’ (38). Such brief descriptions read like elided profiles, as though, as Nathaniel is doing, hastily recalling and distilling the appearance of the individual from memory. Defining points are referenced: for McCash it is that ‘he was tall and skeletal. Spectacles. A shock of brown hair’. This asyndetic listing reads as though Nathaniel is plucking McCash’s features from the past; he remembers points of the individual’s appearance, rather than the whole picture. McCash, like Rose Williams, is elusive, phantomic in his intermittent appearances within the novel. In Part Two, in which Nathaniel attempts to uncover the truth of his mother’s past, McCash, while capable of reciting passages of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventure The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891), is defined by his attribute of ‘silence’ (153), of his ‘English Nervous’ (154) movements, and his ‘dismissive’ gesturing when asked a searching question. Beautifully, the obstacles facing Nathaniel’s story-writing is the lack of cooperation from his sources; however, Nathaniel notes that McCash’s obtuseness is not out of a discourteousness towards him and his endeavour, but is rather out of the simple attribute of McCash’s: ‘he was a dutiful official and lived by the rules’ (154). While McCash is loquacious, a performer, even, in a ‘role scripted for him’ (155), his guardianship over Nathaniel and Rachel elevates him from a ‘minor character’ (155) and into one of the few tethers linking Nathaniel to his childhood. McCash’s profession, however, does not permit him to return to those post-war years. He, like he gestures to a then fifteen-year old Nathaniel, must keep his lips sealed (104).

Of Nathaniel’s development, beyond his understanding of his mother’s other life, he comes to realise that his skill of discernment is not as developed as he once, as a teenager, believed it to be. Ondaatje shows Nathaniel to be a gifted storyteller, capable of completing ‘a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth’ (275) — in essence this excerpt is the novel summarised: piecing truth from incomplete stories; but, rather ironically, his judgment of people is often shown to be misled or ignorant. If anything, while the novel’s attention is centred upon distilling the truth of memory from the inaccuracies of remembering it, it is also concerned with the perception and comprehension of understanding the intentions of others, and how people may become more than ‘characters’ within a story. Take, for instance, all three guardians discussed above; Nathaniel’s initial reading of each man is shown to be wrong and inaccurate: The Moth’s affection is seen as threatening spell; The Darter’s ‘static’ (271) existence, being calm and content, is not ‘sad’, but rather an altruistic necessity; and Nathaniel even professes to have misread Arthur McCash as feeble and meek, correcting himself after catching sight of the ‘powerful string of muscles along his arms’ (100) while The Moth’s ’quiet and modest’ (101) guest sits at their dinner table. Ultimately, the question of what do we ever really ‘know or discover’ (100) about someone is integral to Nathaniel’s search; what may he ever delineate from his memories other than a series of ‘barely held stories’ (284) is his principle plight. Ondaatje’s novel draws these ‘barely held stories’ into a semblance of order, of truths and fabrications. Nathaniel’s three guardians are, despite Nathaniel’s efforts, silent to the idea of disclosing the truth: these men were, during the war, a radio-broadcast receiver, a smuggler and a spy. Their silences were integral to their professions.

Ondaatje summarizes Nathaniel’s perspective upon their silences: ‘our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves’ (268). Ultimately, Nathaniel’s acceptance of this transition from education to protection, of these people teaching and then distancing themselves from their war efforts, allows Nathaniel to ‘fill in’ periods of his mother’s history, and the history of those around him. When dividing the compound title of the novel into separate nouns, the guardians are intrinsically linked to ‘war’ through their services, while Nathaniel wishes to bring ‘light’ to their shadowed past: the flicker and dance of the flame, however, as Nathaniel notes, does not permit him to see ‘what is taking place in the dark beyond the movement’ (32) of his writing. For some, it is how the past should remain: dark and away from the light.