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‘English Patient’ author Michael Ondaatje brings latest novel ‘Warlight’ to Free Library

His latest novel takes us to the bombed-out streets of postwar London — and, in Ondaatje fashion, to a peculiar education, a spy story, and a family mystery.

Michael Ondaatje, author of "Warlight."
Michael Ondaatje, author of "Warlight."Read moreLeft: Daniel Mordzinski

Like his poetry and novels, Michael Ondaatje speaks softly but stays with you. You hear the quiet, potentially explosive narrator’s voice, the playfulness, the taste for the unexpected. It’s also the voice of a poet, a person who enjoys the precise word found, the fine turn discovered.

Ondaatje brings his novel Warlight to the Free Library on Thursday, May 9. It’s a true Ondaatje creation: Two children in the bombed-out London of 1945 grow up in the care of questionable characters. It’s a world where no one is what he or she seems.

Ondaatje is best known for The English Patient, the popular 1992 postmodern novel that won the 1992 Man Booker Prize, millions of readers, the 1996 best picture Oscar for the haunting film version, and, last year, the Golden Man Booker Prize for the best work of fiction in the award’s first 50 years.

But he has entranced readers with much else. He began as a poet, with acclaimed collections like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems (1970). His nonfiction includes plays, a 1970 book on Leonard Cohen, and a memorable memoir, Running in the Family (1982). When he took up novels, he attracted readers with his exotic locales; disjunctive tale-telling; themes of displacement, the impact of history and identity; and dashes of romance and mystery. All these are on display in Anil’s Ghost (2000), Divisadero (2007), and Cat’s Table (2011).

Of Dutch, Tamil, and Sinhalese descent, Odaatje, 75, was born in Sri Lanka, educated in Britain, and has lived in Canada since 1962. He spoke to The Inquirer by phone from Toronto about Warlight, the after-effects of war, and why it’s better to tell a tale crooked.

The first question below reflects the heinous Easter bombings in Sri Lanka that killed more than 250 people; it had just taken place at the time of the interview.

I hate to begin this way, but part of you must be suffering today.

Yes. I have family there.

And they are all right?

Yes. But, really, the mood is awful. Especially now, because they seem to think that some people knew about this happening beforehand.

That suggests a disconnect that runs very deep in government.

You have a president and a prime minister, and they’re not exactly crazy about each other. What makes this doubly painful is that there’s no connection between this, of course, and the [1983-2009] civil war in Sri Lanka, which ended very brutally. This is something different. If you don’t mind, it’s very difficult to talk about this right now.

War and violence seem ever-present in your novels, whether center stage or in the wings. People carry its effects with them.

That’s always true, especially in 1945, the setting of Warlight. It’s that barrier between war and peace: War ends, and suddenly a peace treaty is signed. But that doesn’t end the war: There’s a continual after-effect. You always get that. Even peace treaties have consequences that last for years, often not peaceful. And definitely, again as in Warlight, there’s the after-effect of war on the young.

In Warlight, there’s this Dickensian thing happening, in which two young people are surrounded by a bunch of folks we innocent readers take for thugs — and the thugs become their educators.

I’m prone to writing about such things. What the two young people have, having been sort of abandoned by their parents, are these shady figures who are supposed to be taking care of them, and through these people, they are led into a much more exciting world. This gives them a fuller life in some strange way. I once heard of a filmmaker in Germany who gave cameras out to some students with the assignment of making a film during the day. “You have 12 hours to make the movie interesting,” he tells them. “So what do you do?” And one student says, “First, get rid of the parents.” That in a sense is what happens to Nathaniel and Rachel. Their parents are gone, and here they are. They’re bound to learn differently about the world.

In your novels, there is often a mystery with one of the main characters. We have the badly burned man in The English Patient and the skeleton named Soldier in Anil’s Ghost.

In many of these books, there’s a mystery to solve. It was there in my very first novel, the book about jazz [Coming Through Slaughter, 1976], in the historical figure of Buddy Bolden. He is often said to have been the founder of jazz, but there’s no recording of it, very little direct evidence, just a scratchy recording of [trumpeter] Bunk Johnson, whistling the way he said Buddy used to play. So who was this supposed founder? We have to piece it together. And in Warlight, we have the whole idea of what really happened to the children’s mother.

Sometimes people say, “Well, he’s more of a poet than a novelist” or “more of a novelist than a poet.” Does such talk ever irritate you?

I don’t mind. I began as a poet, and I never thought I’d ever be writing a novel. When I did start to write novels, I started using what I thought were the advantages of poetry. People think poetry is flowery, but it actually lets you be more precise. And it lets you leave things unsaid. I don’t say everything. There’s a way that poetry, in not saying everything, allows the reader to become more directly involved. There is a mutual sense of discovery between reader and writer as the story goes on, a sense that we are discovering what is really happening together.

A certain kind of reader sometimes feels insecure when reading your books because they don’t get all the supports of traditional narration.

I suppose that’s true. But I prefer that to being led by the hand and making the reader feel too comfortable. It’s not an intentional effort to make anyone feel uncomfortable. But I prefer the tension in the story that results when you go indirectly, or don’t give up everything a reader expects.

Kind of an immersive approach?

Sure. I much prefer theater where I’m caught up in the complexity of it, as opposed to watching it from a distance where everything is signposted.

Are you working on a new one now?

Not at the moment. It’s very nice. I’m still in recovery from having written this one.

AUTHOR APPEARANCE

Michael Ondaatje, Warlight: A Novel

7:30 p.m., Thursday, May 9. Central Library, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St. Tickets: $25 (includes a copy of Warlight). Information: 215-567-4341, libwww.freelibrary.org.