Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje
New York:
Knopf, 2018
List of
main characters:
Nathaniel
Williams (Stitch)
Rachel
Williams (Wren)
Rose
Williams
Walter
(The Moth)
Norman
Marshall (The Pimlico Darter)
Olive
Lawrence
Arthur
McCash
Warlight was such a joy to read that I
finished it in three days. The narrative is filled with many of the emotions of
noir: betrayal, suspicion, uncertainty, ambiguity, distrust. The story starts with
Nathaniel Williams’s childhood memories of his life during World War II in and
around London. Part One describes what Nathaniel remembers, and it opens with a section called “A Table Full of
Strangers.” The first line of the book is this:
In 1945
our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been
criminals. . . . (page 3)
Nathaniel Williams
doesn’t understand much about his parents. He doesn’t understand why they leave
him and his sister behind in the care and company of people he considers
complete strangers. Both he and readers come to understand that his parents
were drawn into espionage because of the exigencies of war. Great Britain was
under direct attack; German spies and sympathizers were plotting to bring down
the British government. Still, Nathaniel’s mother Rose seemed more dedicated
and more suited to the work of espionage than most others. She continues her
espionage activities after the official declaration of the end of hostilities
because peace must still be negotiated and because many want revenge as a
result of their wartime experiences. The declaration of peace doesn’t
necessarily mean an end to hostilities.
Part Two
begins with a section called “Inheritance.” As an
adult, Nathaniel begins to wonder if he has inherited some of the traits that
made his parents, his mother, so difficult to know, so good at keeping secrets. In Part Two, Nathaniel is now a young man. He
buys a house in his mother’s childhood village; he interviews for a government
job:
A decade
after my mother’s death, I received an invitation to apply to the Foreign
Office. My recruitment for such a post seemed initially strange. I participated
in several interviews on my first day. One conversation was with an
“intelligence collection body,” another with an “intelligence assessment
outfit”; both, I was informed, were separate bodies seated at the high table of
British Intelligence. No one told me why I had been approached, and there was
no one I knew among those who questioned me intricately but seemingly casually.
My earlier spotted academic record did not cause them as much concern as I had
expected. I assumed that nepotism and my bloodline must have been considered a
reliable entrance into a profession that trusted lineage and the possible
inherited quality of secrecy. . . . (page 130)
Part Two describes
Nathaniel’s early adulthood self trying to make sense out of childhood traumas
and more recent sorrows. His memories prompt him, as an adult, to try to
reconstruct facts out of unreliability. Nathaniel is able to piece together
more than most people can about their childhood and their memories. He is hired
to work in a department reviewing war archives, which he sees as a chance to
piece together more than just the history of Britain at war. He hopes to learn
more about his own personal history and about his mother in particular:
It sounded like drudge work. But accepting a job that
included sifting through the details of the war might, I thought, be a way of
discovering what my mother had been doing during the period she left us under
the guardianship of The Moth. We knew only the stories of her radio broadcasts
from the Bird’s Nest on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel during the early
stages of the war, or of a night drive to the coast, when she was kept awake by
chocolate and the cold night air. We had known no more than that. Perhaps there
was now a chance of discovering that missing sequence in her life. It was the
possibility of an inheritance. . . . (page 131)
The work does bring
some new and tantalizing facts to light for Nathaniel, but the more he learns,
the more questions he seems to have, and the more questions he has about his
mother’s role in all of it:
We were in fact the second wave of “correction.” I
discovered that during the closing stages of the war and with the arrival of
peace, a determined, almost apocalyptic censorship had taken place. There had
been, after all, myriad operations it was wiser the public never know about,
and so the most compromising evidence was, as far as possible, swiftly
destroyed—in both Allied and Axis Intelligence headquarters around the globe. .
. . (page 133)
Without originally
intending to, Nathaniel is now involved in covert work, in keeping more
secrets. And he finds that he can only go so far: Facts he can find, but how
does one interpret them in the present? Can the past ever be repaired? Can
going back repair what is the present?
The opening of the
book, which I quoted above, certainly sets the tone for the rest of the book.
But just a little bit later in the narrative, another character, Olive
Lawrence, underscores the tone in a conversation with Nathaniel and his sister
Rachel:
“Half the life of cities occurs at night,” Olive
Lawrence warned us [Nathaniel and Rachel Williams]. “There’s a more uncertain
morality then. At night there are those who eat flesh by necessity—they might
eat a bird, a small dog.” When Olive Lawrence spoke it was more like a private
shuffling of her thoughts, a soliloquy from somewhere in the shadows of her
knowledge, an idea she was still unsure about. One evening she insisted we
catch a bus with her to Streatham Common and walk its slow rise of land to the
Rookery. Rachel felt uncertain in that open darkness, wished to go home, said
it was cold. But the three of us kept moving forward, until we were eventually
in the trees and the city had evaporated behind us. (page 56)
Nathaniel felt safe
with Olive Lawrence, but his sister wasn’t quite so convinced. And even a
person (possibly) representing safety gives the children a speech that is a
warning as much as it describes an adventure.
The title of the
novel—Warlight—is an inspiration. It
suggests darkness, with just enough light to see that danger is lurking. It
suggests that everything about a childhood is remembered through a prism that
changes events just enough. It suggests that everything about wartime is
cloaked in secrecy and, if necessary, denial, and that nothing is as it seems,
even while it is happening.
