Warlight
As seen:
By Michael Ondaatje
avg rating
3 reviews
‘Our book of the year – and maybe of Ondaatje’s career’ Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018
- FINALIST FOR THE 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE**
An elegiac, dreamlike novel set in post-WW2 London about memory, family secrets and lies, from the internationally acclaimed author of The English Patient
‘The past never remains in the past…’
London, 1945. The capital is still reeling from the war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents who leave the country on business, and are left in the dubious care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. Nathaniel is introduced to The Moth’s band of criminal misfits and is caught up in a series of teenage misadventures, from smuggling greyhounds for illegal dog racing to lovers’ trysts in abandoned buildings at night.
But is this eccentric crew really what and who they claim to be? And most importantly, what happened to Nathaniel’s mother? Was her purported reason for leaving true? What secrets did she hide in her past? Years later Nathaniel, now an adult, begins to slowly piece together using the files of intelligence agencies – and through reality, recollection and imagination – the startling truths of puzzles formed decades earlier.
‘A novel of shadowy brilliance’ The Times
‘Fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory’ Observer
‘Ondaatje brilliantly threads the mysteries and disguises and tangled loyalties and personal yearnings of the secret world…and has constructed something of real emotional and psychological heft, delicate melancholy and yet, frequently, page-turning plottiness. I haven’t read a better novel this year.’ Telegraph
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Read with Gloucester Book Club, Booker Prize shortlisted novel, Warlight is beautifully written. Set in the years after WWII, when people’s lives were still disrupted, it tells the story of Daniel, a 14 year old, who’s trying to make sense of why his parents left him and lied to him. His search leads him to discover the true nature of his parents’ post-wartime activities, but can he ever really forgive them for abandoning him and his sister? It’s a coming of age novel, which sees Daniel exposed to the shadowy world of post-war London. In later years, when working at the Foreign Office, Nathaniel eventually pieces together what he thinks are the reasons for his mother’s disappearance, but even then there is uncertainty and confusion about what may have happened except it has something to do with the war. This should perhaps give the reader some sense of closure, but unfortunately for me, it left me with more questions than answers.
I was gripped from the very first sentence of this perfectly crafted novel that manages to be both quietly understated and totally compelling. Narrated by a young man whose parents apparently abandoned him and his sister to two men they barely knew it is a beautifully and gently told story of gradually revealed post-WW2 mystery and intrigue. Highly recommended.
Moments of brilliance in the descriptive passages but overall a frustratingly weak plot. I am interested in the period of the book, i.e. London around the time of the second world war and the immediate aftermath, but I found the lack of flow in the plot stopped me from being hooked. I did enjoy the exciting and unusual lives of some of the main female characters (like the mother who abandons her children for her job as a spy) but they somehow seemed to fall short of being really rounded and believable characters. Despite all the intrigue and adventure going on around him, the narrator (i.e. the son of the spy) seemed aimless and two dimensional. There were though, lots of flashes of vivid scenes and great attention to visual detail which I loved. I also liked some of the observations about human nature. One of the most enlightening and memorable being '...perhaps the truth of what is before you is clear only to those who lack certainty'.
