Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
“In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.”
This is the first sentence of the story, and it’s a marvellous one. It makes you wanting to read more.
It’s London just after the war, but it’s not exactly the end of the war. London seem to be still in wartime. It takes some time for the people to get used that the war is over, for some has not ended yet, so all the war austerity measures are still in place. It’s dark and foggy; the nightlights haven’t yet been taken down, London is still under warlight
Two children, a boy and a girl, have been abandoned by their parents, to be raised by some eccentric people who live a hasty life, and some of them may have been criminals. Nothing is normal for the two children, strange people fill their house, greyhound smugglers, opera singers, spies, and an ethnographer, a magical character that she knows everything and that "she is not only an ethnographer" . They don’t know where their parents are. They thought they are in Singapore, but then they discover the suitcase their mother was supposed to take with her, still full of her things.
If not with their father in Singapore, what could she is being doing, wonders Nathaniel, the young boy and the narrator of the story who is still young to understand that it is possible for his mother to have a life of her own.
The two children have been abandoned by their parents, but this abandonment brought them a great freedom and pleasure. It is perhaps this freedom and pleasure that allow them to misunderstand everything that happen around them. It is in the second part of the book that things fall into place and the weirdness and the surprises of the first parts turns into loneliness and melancholy. We see things from another perspective, Nathaniel now a young man, he goes back to where he spent his childhood trying to figure out what his mother was doing and what he discovers is that every weird, mysterious and dark person that has been involved in their lives, is an emissary of their mothers. The second part of a book is one of loss and sadness.
A strange, wonderful story, full of surprises, enjoyment and pleasure that develops into sorrow and loneliness. It's a novel that has a lot to offer. I think I will read it again.