In the Skin of a Lion By Michael Ondaatje

"Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become."
....The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: "Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human."


Such self-aggrandizing, pretentious proclamations make it difficult to even like this book. I loved Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, a story set amidst Sri Lanka's civil war in the early 80s, where he reveals pieces of his characters as if he is sharing a secret with you, sculpting out their inner demons with exquisite care. This book was a shadow of that one. With a jumble of characters stifled under poetic, often-beautiful passages that muffle their voices. Characters get picked up, and then thrown to the side only to be re-attached often awkwardly to another end of the story. At the heart of the novel, is a man named Patrick Lewis who describes himself as a mirror of other people's lives at one point. Set in Toronto, Canada, during the 1920s, Patrick Lewis's life is flashed to us in bits and pieces--foggy and surreal. Through it, we piece together that he fell in love with two women, and that he befriends two men who help him. Somewhere in there, Ondaatje is making an important statement about immigrants and worker rights, about men who work hard and long under terrible conditions. Whose work gets embedded into their souls, their bodies and often times, their clothes. The point being, it sucks to be a tunnel worker during the 1920s 'cuz people didn't care about workers' rights. For all his complicated prose, Ondaatje never fleshes out this issue beyond this. Instead it's merely the background to the turmoil-ridden inner lives of a handful of central characters.

About half way through it, I realized I had read this book before years ago. And never finished it. A book that left such little impression on me, that I would buy it years later and look forward to reading it once again only to be disappointed and irritated by the last page.

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire

Despite the absence of the enigmatic, and wonderfully re-written wicked witch of the west, the Son of the Witch is delightful and surprising. Following characters that he only touched on in Wicked, Maguire elaborates on the unresolved threads in his Munchkinland. A fairy tale (written for adults) it follows Liir--a self-depracating, doubtful character that tries to thaw out the coldness and lonliness that he inherited from his mother minus the determination and passion. He is no Elphaba, but the reader is eventually drawn into his struggles and victories. There is a needlessly elaborate love triangle towards the end that distracts more than anything. But mostly, it also delivers charming passages like the one below:

-"Don't carp. I don't deal well with conflict, " said the Lion. "Let's sing a song."
-"No," they all chorused.
-"What'll you do when you find yourself courageous--assuming the Wizard grants you what you wish?" asked the Scarecrow, to change the subject.
-"Invest in the market? Join a troupe of music hall buskers? How the hell do I know?," said the Lion. "Strike out on my own, anyway, and find a better class of associates. More simpatico."
-"You?" asked the Scarecrow of the Tin Woodman
-"What will I do if I find myself a heart?" scoffed the Tin Woodman. "Lose it constantly, I imagine."
They slopped on. Liir didn't think it was his place to continue the conversation, since he hadn't been present at their initial audience with the Wizard. When no one else spoke, though, he said, "Well, Scarecrow your turn. What'll you do with your brains?"
-"I'm thinking about it," he answered, and would not discuss it further.

Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins

Not long after the world cried out against the Holocaust, formed the International tribunals, established the UN and drafted the Genocide Convention, concentration camps of torture and killing were being set up all over Kenya in response to the Mau Mau rebellion. With the shameful, and especially barbaric history that British colonialism has in Africa, the story of the Kikuyu land people is an important piece of the past that has been lost in the shuffle of colonialism. It is easy to dismiss the distant past, cleansed by the sanitizing effect that time often has. After this book came out, the Kenyan government demanded an apology from the UK goverment. And this is what they received:

"But this took place 50 years ago. Kenya needs to look to future challenges like fighting corruption, fighting injustice and building a strong democracy," --spokesman from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office


This was a difficult book to read. Dry and tedious, despite the lurid and often fascinating descriptions of the Mau Mau rebellion. While the torture and killings were hard to digest, what made the book especially unpleasant was the needless redundancy found throughout. It was as if Caroline Elkins was convinced that no one would actually read the whole book page to page, so it's best to repeat herself every five pages or so. For example, the role of the Christian missionaries during the detention of the Kikuyu land people. This is in fact, a complicated and often contradictory story that Elkins manages to flatten out and reduce to sound bites and cliches.

The voice given to the silently suffering masses of the Kikuyu people is one thing that is especially touted by the press around this book. And for the most part, Elkins does scrupulously relate long quotes from the victims telling their story (and then other victims telling the same story). However, the reader never gets to know any one person beyond their identity as one of the tortured masses of Africans. For example, the potentially interesting tale of two sisters who were part of the Mau Mau rebellion, who were captured, tortured and who survived their ordeal. It was disappointing to have their stories melt into the landscape of the concentration camps.

I wish Elkins had described her own fascinating story--one of a graduate student doing work on her dissertation on the Mau Mau rebellion which instead unearthed a decade's worth of evidence against the British government. A story that she touches on in the preface, and which I found to be one of the most interesting parts of the book. It was almost as if once she had finished gathering her astonishing interviews, she could not wait long enough to edit it into a compelling book, before disseminating it to audiences.