Books: The Cat's Table

Michael Ondaatje, author of the new memoir/fiction/travelogue/coming of age story, "The Cat's Table", is also a prolific poet and non-fiction writer. He also wrote The English Patient, winner of the 1992 Man Booker Prize and the inspiration for one of my favourite Seinfeld moments:

While The Cat's Table may not suffer from the same interminable length (or passion, depending on who you ask), it does have a tone that seems to drag time out. In this case it's three weeks spent on a cruise ship, the Oronsay, in the middle of the 20th century. The narrator is eleven year old Michael, who is being relocated from Sri Lanka (previously Ceylon, as it's called here), to England. At book's end the author specifies that The Cat's Table is not autobiography.  At points you can see why he did this; the novel often feels like a nostalgic meander through time, with a few dramatic moments grafted on top.

Time is not only slowed for these three weeks, but stretched out over an entire lifetime. Adding to the books already calm tone is the fact that the author is recounting the story from the safe remove of, say, forty years. From England he relocates to Canada - again, much like the author himself. This has the effect of removing any sense of tension in the novel. The young Michael comes from a broken home; he is being relocated to England, where he will his mother who may or may not even be there to greet him; he is traveling unaccompanied into world he's never been before, leaving his school and friends behind. Not once does he look back in anger, as they stay. He doesn't have a tantrum. He doesn't even cry about it. It's all a bit of the classic "British Upper Lip", albeit a bit more relaxed, like a holiday-version of emotional disconnect.

On to the dramas, if you could call them that. Most of the chapters are two to three pages in length, reading more like vignettes than anything else. In them we meet the cast of The Cat's Table, and the various stories they have to tell. They're not all sunshine. There's stories of seduction, self-harm, imprisonment, and death. In the tradition of Agatha Christie, there's even a murder on board. In another novel it would have served as the novel's core, the dark star around which everything turns. In The Cat's Table it's treated almost like an afterthought. There are very few ramifications for anyone, aside from the writer and possible murderer, who, years later, chat about it over a cup of tea.

Ondaatje's novel tries to be several things at once but just comes off as, well, weird. Much like the inhabitants of it's own table. In fact, aside from the bloodshed I pictured it as a Wes Anderson movie. It certainly has the emotional remoteness to match. There's no doubt the author can write, and write beautifully, but in The Cat's Table he tries too hard to put a pretty face over something that's ugly, or rather add a little bit of weight to something that's meant to be light.