Warlight Ondaatje

' Warlight sucked me in deeper than any novel I can remember. Fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself' - Alex Preston, The Observer'Ondaatje's first novel in seven years mesmerizes from start to finish. A violent event pivots the narrative into thriller territory, simultaneously revealing an intricate puzzle of a love story.' - Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday' The English Patient author Michael Ondaatje weaves another tale of love, loss and memory against a backdrop of World War II. Warlight revolves around the shadowy nature of memory. The mysteries come together through a complex, non-linear narrative that revisits and revises each development with careful scrutiny.' Flipping death wikipedia.

'Our book of the year - and maybe of Ondaatje's career.'. Daily Telegraph.Books of the Year. 'Michael Ondaatje's Warlight is a rare and beautiful thing - a deeply retrospective novel about war secrets that feels neither overstated nor overly ethereal.

- Lucy Brooks, Culture Whisper' Warlight is so cunningly assembled. Leaner than The English Patient and its focus is tighter, a searchlight's focus.' - Anna Mundow, The Washington Post'Ondaatje is such a thrilling writer.

I loved Warlight.' - Johanna Thomas-Corr, Evening Standard'Skilfully navigating espionage, betrayal and deception, Warlight.

Takes Ondaatje deep into John le Carre territory. A lyrical but sinister mosaic of a hidden world.' - Boyd Tonkin, The Economist'Warlight is Ondaatje's most haunting novel after The English Patient. Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times'Ondaatje's spare and evocative prose perfectly captures the crumbled austerity of post-war London. This is easily his most satisfying and seductive novel in years' - Richard Strachan, Herald Scotland.

Warlight isn't a word. You'll find it nowhere in the OED. And it appears only once, late in the text of Michael Ondaatje's first novel in half a dozen years, as the narrator describes how nitroglycerine used to be transported across wartime London at night:'This had continued even during the Blitz, when there was just warlight, the river dark save for one dimmed orange light on bridges to mark the working arch for winter traffic, a quiet signal in the midst of the bombing, and the barges ablaze, and shrapnel frapping across the water while on the blacked-out roads the secret lorries crossed the cities three or four times a night.'

There's a lot of the flavour of the book in that sentence. Look at the casual, looping cadence sustained over length; at a scene and an atmosphere collaged from disconnected images; at the rhymes of sound and light, river and road; and the little felicities – that slight flick of style in the transferred epithet 'secret lorries'; the unexpectedness and aptness of 'frapping'?And 'warlight' – the light that war casts, and that it suppresses – is a guiding metaphor in this expertly wrought piece of work, one at once dense with detail and drifting, riddling, elliptical. Its first half tells the story, in retrospect, of a 14-year-old boy, Nathaniel, and his slightly older sister Rachel. Shortly after the end of the war their parents announce that they will be going to Singapore for a year; their father leaving first, and then their mother. Nathaniel picks over the patchily remembered, half-understood history of his adolescence. In memory, these episodes and characters have a dreamlike indistinctness. Where, he comes to wonder after her elaborately packed trunk is found still in the house, is his mother?

How come he can't remember the Moth – who claims to have looked after him when he was much younger? We come to suspect spies, disguises, hidden plots. There's something here of the unheimlich flavour of Kazuo Ishiguro's.' The house felt. like a night-zoo, with moles and jackdaws and shambling beasts who happened to be chess-players, a gardener, a possible greyhound thief, a slow-moving opera singer.

If I attempt now to recall the activities of one or two of them, what emerges are surreal, non-chronological moments.' Rachel drifts away from her brother towards the theatre. Nathaniel is recruited as an assistant to the Darter, running imported greyhounds illegally up the Thames on boats. He has his sentimental education with 'Agnes' (another pseudonym), a girl with whom he makes assignations at empty houses loaned by an estate agent relative of hers. Scenes and incidents are vivid, but the whole design is tenebrous. And then – foreshadowed by a couple of mysterious incidents; a man following them on the bus; a narrow escape from thieves in a lift – there's a sudden and shocking eruption of violence.

And all at once the siblings are going 'into another life'. In the second half of the book, we learn more about the adult Nathaniel. He is working in a junior capacity in the secret service archives helping expunge what needs to be expunged from the records of wartime and postwar operations. And he, too, is a sort of spy – furtively searching for traces of his mysterious mother in the files. Her story starts to come to the fore as he retreats – and the 'wisps of stories' he remembers from childhood cohere and change aspect in the shifting light of what he learns later. The central relationship here is between Rose and her recruiter/handler Marsh Felon (which sounds like a nickname but isn't).

It reaches us mediated through Nathaniel (Stitch is stitching things together) but with an imaginative fullness that makes him something like an omniscient narrator. Obelisk restaurant. He's a spy-writer and a spy/writer. But that story, too, is a family story. Ondaatje brilliantly threads the mysteries and disguises and tangled loyalties and personal yearnings of childhood memory with the mysteries and disguises and tangled loyalties and personal yearnings of the secret world.Is Warlight an international spy mystery, or a coming-of-age novel?

It's both, and the correspondences are explicit, yet organic enough in their development that they seldom feel schematic. It's amazing what you can get away with if you write with as sure a touch as Ondaatje. Recurring images that ought to be clunky – maps, chess games (no, really), musical themes – somehow avoid being so; and plot twists and coincidences that belong in melodrama are made to feel naturalistic.