IT has taken Michael Ondaatje seven years to write his new novel Divisadero. It took him eight to write his last one, Anil’s Ghost, having been made famous by the one before that, The English Patient, which won the Booker prize and then several Oscars when Anthony Minghella adapted it into an auspicious motion picture. The long delays between novels may partly be caused by Ondaatje finding other things to write and do in the meantime. They can’t properly be called distractions, because they all find their way into his fiction. He is preoccupied enough by cinema that his most recent publication, The Conversations (2002), was a book of interviews with the American master film editor Walter Murch, whose technique Ondaatje sometimes seems to emulate in prose, cutting his novels together out of elliptical scenes and set-pieces.
The prose itself is also clearly the work of a poet, which is what Ondaatje was when he started writing in the late 1960s, and what he obviously still is even a decade after his last collection, Handwriting (1998) the lightness, exactness and gorgeousness of his language being a product of the same discipline and deliberation that makes him so damn slow.
Much of his fiction is, in fact, given over to poeticised job descriptions and artistic renderings of other professions. When Ondaatje took a post as writer-in-residence at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, it was as much to learn as teach, indulging a lifelong fascination for the process of what he called “rescuing and healing”, then transferring it back into his own practice through the character of a Sri Lankan civil war doctor in Anil’s Ghost.
“A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel,” he has said. The author himself was born in Sri Lanka, when it was still known as Ceylon, into a burgher family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese origin, and raised amid that privileged minority community of sailors, clerks, hotel-owners and lawyers, all subject to their own system of feuds and adulteries. His father, though brilliant, gambled and drank and pulled a gun on occasion, as Ondaatje recounted in his 1982 memoir Running In The Family, which was at least as exotic as his fictions and continues to suggest itself as a sort of code-book for ideas and images that recur in them.
His mother took him away to England, then Toronto, where he got the liberal education that led him first to academia, then to literature, with the result that he became very far removed from whatever drama or adventure his boyhood may have promised him. But, as one of his characters puts it in Divisadero, quoting Lucian Freud: “Everything is biography.” Her name is Anna, and she narrates the novel’s first-person passages, the earliest of which recall the past and the family she has run from. She has since become a scholar, and her musing voice is so difficult to distinguish from the author’s that it seems possible she is also behind those parts written in the third person, considering her own life through the study of her chosen subject Lucien Segura, an imaginary French poet and novelist who comes to occupy the second half of the book.
“What we make, ” she continues, “why it is made . . . who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.” There is always a refusal, among Ondaatje’s characters, to be confined by history and nationality Pico Iyer declared him an exemplar of a “new mongrel literature” in his own book The Global Soul, which Ondaatje took for the compliment it was and also a tension between words and action, writing and doing.
His protagonists are sometimes actively heroic, and his first proper novel In The Skin Of A Lion (1987) opened with a falling nun being caught and saved in mid-air by an immigrant bridge-builder. The act itself seemed no more or less supernaturally assured than Ondaatje’s description of it, but the beauty of the sequence was grounded in physics. From the gunfights of his breakthrough verse narrative The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid (1970) to the pioneering jazz players and photographers detailed in Coming Through Slaughter (1976), to the desert mapmakers and wartime bomb-sappers in The English Patient (1992), he has focused less on the abstracts and ethics of courage or daring than on the tools and skills required to demonstrate them. And it need not be a matter of life and death for Ondaatje to fixate on it.
In Divisadero, the young writer Segura watches his stepfather expertly repair a village clock. “They are a strange breed, clockmakers, some surly and insensitive to all save the machine about to whir to life, some uncertain as poets about their gift . . . I learned the cautious and also incautious habit of my own work from him.” The difference, though, is noted: “The skill of writing offers little to a viewer. There is only this five-centimetre relationship between your eyes and the pen. Any skill in the divining or dreaming is invisible . . . ”
Reviewing the novel in The New Yorker, Louis Menand made pejorative reference to Ondaatje’s “aestheticisation of work”, but this may explain the painstaking finish of his books, each of which is a negotiation between its own vividness and the imperceptible labours required to produce it.
“How do I write this book?” Ondaatje has asked aloud in the past. “That’s always the question.” The short answer, by his own account, is that he begins with a single mental picture in this case, it was apparently “a wild horse in a barn” then “follows clues” to find others, until he has assembled something that is more a symbol than a novel. For that reason, perhaps, Divisadero has not been nominated for the forthcoming Man Booker prize. Giles Foden, one of this year’s judges, both praised and dismissed it as “brilliant in parts” without acknowledging that parts are the point.
Ondaatje has called himself a “cubist” and Divisadero bears him out. The wild horse that he first envisioned belongs to a farmer and widower in 1970s California, who has raised a taciturn orphan boy alongside his own two daughters, and responds with a resounding act of violence when the boy and his eldest, Anna, grow up to be lovers. The family is irreparably fragmented, and the novel structured, such as it is, on the broken pieces. This, you could argue, is the story of our lives, although Louis Menand argued that Ondaatje is not telling stories at all. “He is using elements of storytelling to gesture in the direction of a constellation of moods, themes, and images.”
If this is true, it can be read as a positive. It could even be the essential quality of his writing, which charts the space between the world as it works and the way we imagine it. The posters for the film of The English Patient advertised its theme with the aphoristic tag-line “In memory, love lives forever”, a statement more romantic and resolved than anything Ondaatje or his characters would ever say. His books and their lives are dictated by remembering, and this affects how they linger, making them indelible, but also insoluble.
“With memory, ” he writes in Divisadero, “with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can.”
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