Too much poetry for a novel, but perfect for Wes Anderson

 

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje


Apologies to the author, but I'm afraid that by the end, I found this novel annoying and pretentious. It starts well, with some vivid descriptions of boyhood in the Canadian backwoods around the start of the twentieth century. Then the story describes the construction of major pieces of infrastructure in Toronto. I thought I might learn something about the city's history.

But Ondaatje's spare style, which, I'm guessing, is supposed to give his scenes a poetic clarity, soon begins to tire. It's like Hemingway written by T.S.Eliot. And why not just use quotation marks like everyone else instead of indenting paragraphs after dashes to indicate that someone is speaking?

You have to keep your wits about you to know which of several men living on the fringes of society or the women they manage to have fall in love with them (with unusual ease) we are dealing with. That's because the chronology is artfully muddled, leaving readers to reassemble events for themselves - admittedly from not too many pieces, but it's a task I felt was left to us rather inconsiderately by the writer.

In my edition of the book, there is an introduction by the poet Anne Enright, explaining its greatness. Could it be that someone was worried that otherwise more readers might feel the same as me?

Enright remembers first reading the book when she was on a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. She now warns her writing students that the book is "full of things that Michael Ondaatje can do, but that you probably can't do, or can't do yet". Later, she notes "how deeply I have absorbed the book" - to the point where "it makes me think you can progress through time like a poet" or, more bluntly, "you can do whatever the hell you like with time". (Frankly, I wish I'd chosen to do something else with mine.)

And what about the ending? As I said, the tough men in this book do a lot of seducing - even, for instance, when concealed horizontally on a large tray for growing mushrooms. The unlikely echo of Bond becomes more obvious in the final set piece which involves boats, swimming through pipes, dynamite and a one-to-one confrontation with a villain - albeit an evil capitalist rather than a proper Bond villain.

It would be a strange and very visual movie: could Wes Anderson be persuaded?

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