Warlight by Michael Ondaatje: book review

Warlight (2019) is set in London in 1945 after World War II.

The narrator Nathaniel Williams is fourteen years old, and his sister Rachel is sixteen, when their parents tell them that they are moving to Singapore for a year, without them. Their father has a job and their mother will join him a few weeks later. Their parents go to Singapore and leave their children in the family home in London in the care of Walter, whom Nathaniel calls The Moth. The Moth is joined by another man called The Darter. Both ‘may have been criminals.’

The Moth and Darter, with their many unusual friends, do their best to look after the two teenagers. After their mother departs, Nathaniel and Rachel find her suitcase in the basement. So where is their mother? Did she go to Singapore or not?

Nathaniel gets a part-time job in the summer holidays. He is ‘about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood.’ He calls this year of abandonment, his ‘other life.’

Fourteen years later, Nathaniel is twenty-eight years old, with a new job in the Foreign Office to review war and post-war archives. Here he begins to discover the truth about his mother and his ‘shadowy’ father.

The novel has an interesting beginning and ending, but moves slowly in the middle. Nevertheless, it is worth reading for its historical events and times.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), 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).

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