Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje: book review

Part-autobiography, part-memoir, and part travelogue, Michael Ondaatje’s second novel, Running in the Family (1982) is also part-comic, part-tragic. Written after Coming through Slaughter (1976) set in New Orleans at the turn of the 20^th century, and before his Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient (1987) set in Italy during the Second World War, this novel is set in his birth country, Sri Lanka, from 1978 to 1980 during which time Ondaatje returned home twice, for a few months, after 25 years.

In his childhood, Sri Lanka was Ceylon, a colonial paradise, and life amongst the privileged class was easy. Recollections include the Governor’s Cup horse race, the tennis, Dutch forts, costume parties, church and the devout, houses once lived in, tropical gardens, the Ceylon Light Infantry, the Ceylon Railways, and tea estates. He begins in Jaffna, in north Sri Lanka, where he visits his Aunt Phyllis, and his subsequent few months of travels through Kandy, Kegalle, Kelaniya, and Colombo.

He tells of snakes and kabaragoyas and thalagoyas, commonly called sub-aquatic monitors – large lizards, as well as a myriad of foods and spices, from cinnamon to string hoppers, from fish curry to chutney, and from curry to egg rulang. Evocative in its story-telling, from the pages the reader can smell the frangipani, taste the gin, feel the cooling breeze, hear the sashay of a white flimsy dress, and see the sight of a female tea-plucker.

Pieced together through his current travels with his family and sister, but also through the recollections of relatives, newspapers, photographs, poetry, and research with the living friends of his parents, he evokes a rich life with exotic sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. It is not his life as such that his writes about, but that of grandparents and parents.

Ondaatje’s most poignant writing is about his maternal grandmother, Lalla, his mother, Doris, and his father, Mervyn. Lalla died in the floods, hitting a jacaranda tree – her “bloodline was considered eccentric” and her “great claim to fame was that she was the first woman in Ceylon to have a mastectomy.” His mother Doris, dynamic and theatrical, left for England in 1949 – “her grace and dancing caught everyone’s attention. His father Mervyn, private and gentle, a reader of books, but his bouts of heavy drinking left him a sad and tragic figure … “his fantasies were awful. Paranoia took over during his downward swings … he personally shattered three hundred eggs.”

The heartbreaking description of his naked father in a railway tunnel, his mother’s response, and his grandmother’s death are distressing but tender. In 14 years, his parents went “from being the products of two of the best known and wealthiest families in Ceylon” to one where “my father now owning only a chicken farm in Rock Hill, my mother working in a hotel.”

The author’s brother advises him that, in telling his family history, he has to “get this book right” and in recreating the era of his parents, he has. For anyone who left their homeland at the age of 11 and experienced a parental divorce, telling the family story is challenging, but Ondaatje’s ‘research journey’ home is raw and honest, sad and emotional, yet also whimsical and light.

I read this at the end of a month in Sri Lanka, and it is best read with one’s own memories of the country, or in anticipation of those to come.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).