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.
posted by Themadi at 9:17 PM
4 Comments:
I wasn't able to get into this book either. But I very much enjoyed "The English Patient." Even though I had previously seen the movie, the book affected me in a much different way. You seem well read and I imagine there is a decent chance that you have already read it, but if not, you definitely need to give it a shot. It's a little heavy on finely-wrought passages that read as prose poems, but that also makes it a pretty good book to read in small spurts over time. Page-a-day style.
actually no; i haven't read the English Patient. I loved the movie, though. I think I'll have to give Ondaatjee a break after the lion:) But someday, definitely, it's on my list..
Sorry, I'm a total stranger who just stumbled onto your blog but, Wow. I had the exact opposite reaction to this book. It grabbed in the beginning with the story about saving the cow, and it never let go. Yes, some of the narrative looseness was a bit frustrating but I learned to read it like poetry. I have given this book to several friends simply because Ondaatje paints a picture with words better than any writer I know. Since he is a poet, I think it helps to read with that in mind. The English Patient is more traditional in it's structure, as is Anil's Ghost. But, in my mind, where he shines is in his ablility to illuminate these little snaphots taken from a journey, years ago. I'm not sure whether or not to suggest another book of his because your reaction to this was so strongly negative. But you might prefer Running in the Family, a memoir about his childhood in Sri Lanka. It is beautiful.
Lisa: Thank you for your comment. Don't worry, I haven't entirely given up on Ondaatje. In fact, I might even re-read Lion somewhere down the line. I don't necessarily agree that Anil's ghost (I havent' read English Patient) is more traditional. In fact, I think their structure is very similar. They both jump around quite a bit, and rely on a handful of loosely connected main characters to paint the whole picture. What I think Ondaatjee does better in Anil's Ghost, is that he never loses sight of his characters. In Skin, he's more interested in writing beautiful prose (which he succeeds in, I agree), but he never fully fleshes out the people that populate his story. And he only makes half-baked attempts at fleshing out the constructs of immigration, worker rights, socialism, culture and even parenthood and love--that he raises in the book.
I agree the scene with the cow was intriguing. As was the opening sequence of the bridge where we have a different rescue--the nun's.
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