The Cat's Table
by Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape
Most of The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje's seventh novel, takes place on board the Oronsay, a luxury passenger ship taking 11-year-old Michael from his home in Sri Lanka to England, where he is to be reunited with his mother before being sent to school.
The vivid, fragmentary and frequently lyrical account of this journey in the mid-1950s is punctuated by episodes from Michael's later life. There are hints of success as a writer, a swift mention of children, a longer account of failed marriages, allusions to life in Canada and occasional updates of the people he met on board half a century before.
But for most of the novel's 286 pages, Michael's present plays second fiddle to his past. It's as if those 21 days at sea, evoked in Technicolor and surround sound, made everything else seem monochrome, muted and flat, at least for as long as the memories hold sway. The Oronsay, Michael realises many years later, was a visionary exception to the rules of his everyday life: 'There was the chance to escape all order. And I reinvented myself in this seemingly imaginary world.'
It is tempting to read The Cat's Table as autobiography. Like Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and J.M. Coetzee, Ondaatje teases us with personal details only to smack us on the nose for daring to read the story as his life. A brief afterword makes it clear that although parts of the novel 'use the colouring and locations of memoir, The Cat's Table is fictional'.
As if to underline the point, Ondaatje begins in the third person, describing Michael from a safe distance: 'I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk.' But the next chapter plunges us into Michael's consciousness, as if Ondaatje is having a novelistic inner-body experience.