Corners of light and half-light

Raaja Bhasin

For all the analysis conducted down the decades, we really don’t know how memory works. What remains suppressed, what emerges; what triggers off reactions as varied as love or hate or despair; how selective phases of our lives are blotted out and others constantly stare us in the face. Since Freud, there has been an endless array of analyses. What we do know is that memory does not return to us in the shape of a large block of consecutive and consistent experience. We do not relive it in its entirety. It returns as a gentle tap on the shoulder or a hard punch in the stomach as a moment, a fragment of the past relived. It also has the capacity to alter itself from the original; a past moving away from the original or deeper into that time gone by. 

At times, our own memory also comprises the memory of others. Not as a collective social, but as a sharp individual story that splices itself into our own; something of a slipstream that takes over; a double helical that swims, dances and giddily swirls along (and into) our own lives. How in the hands of strangers we try to recognise ourselves. Then hold the stranger’s reflection to see ourselves. 

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is a book that moves the way memory does. Mysteriously. The title comes from the dim ‘war-lights’ of London — a city that couched itself in darkness during the Blitz when wave after wave of German bombers pounded it. As the book unfolds and as racing dogs are smuggled — at night and along silent rivers, canals and docks — there is suspense but sometimes the answer, if there is one, is the suspense itself . Though sluice gates, one passage opens to another while yet another shuts itself out. 

The story begins in 1945, at the end of the Second World War. In bombed and ravaged London, one day, the 14-year-old Nathaniel and his slightly older sister, Rachel are suddenly abandoned by their parents. The father supposedly works for Unilever and leaves for Singapore. Their mother packs with great visibility — showing what she is putting in and what she isn’t — to ostensibly join him; not long after her departure, the children find that carefully packed trunk still in the house. They may have been abandoned, but they are not alone. 

There is the Moth who steps quietly into their parents’ shoes. If The Moth lurks, and occasionally makes soup, the other ‘caretaker,’ the Darter, has a somewhat murkier world of racing dogs that he opens to Nathaniel. Then there is Agnes of whom we do not know enough, except that Nathaniel has met her with no assistance from his archangels. In empty houses waiting to be sold, Nathaniel and Agnes find nights and companionship till she silently exits. The sister, Rachel, finds her world in the make-believe world of theatre. All is supposedly quieter when we return to the pages in the 1950s. Not really. Nathaniel learns from his job at the Foreign Office that his parents were spies. War has not ended, it has simply shifted. As we are told: “Wars don’t end. They never remain in the past. Seville to wound, Cordoba to die in.”

When I first read Ondaatje several years ago, I did not want the book to end. I wanted to savour every sentence. I was sure that after writing something like The English Patient, no one could do better; this had made him a joint winner of the prestigious Booker Prize. Like his other books (and unlike his poetry), there is nothing straightforward about Warlight. For all the pared prose in this one, the sentences are exquisite; they have an almost heart wrenching beauty. Yet, they are veils of mystery that curtain the story. Words conceal or at best suggest more than they reveal. 

For every book that Michael Ondaatje has written after the first, we may well say he is at the height of his powers; Warlight is the eighth. These are powers that seem to shift and move higher with every book. It is not for nothing that many consider him the greatest living writer in the English language.