![]() ![]() Perhaps all this has something to do with Ondaatje’s less well-known life as a poet (he has published nearly twice as many collections of poetry as he has novels). I’m thinking of the lurking crime drama and love drama that remain in the background of his shipboard story The Cat’s Table, for instance or the absences, stoppages and indirections that prevent Anil’s Ghost – set in war-torn Sri Lanka – from becoming a straightforward war story. Hence, too, the procedures of his other novels, in which similarly striking narrative potential is mostly kept in check, or actually stifled. Hence the tactics of his best-known novel The English Patient, joint winner of the 1992 Booker prize, in which a potentially very dramatic set of circumstances is generally delivered to the reader by means of hint and indirection: scenes are habitually softened by half-lights, and all action and most reflection are slowed by rich (some would say overwritten) prose. ![]() Michael Ondaatje likes writing about uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, not quite with the Keatsian ambition of resisting “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, but because he relishes the idea of thoughts being fluid and characters essentially unknowable.
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