Describing himself as "a modern mongrel," writer Michael Ondaatje addressed a large, enthusiastic audience at the Canadian embassy theatre last March 16. Ondaatje, visiting Tokyo upon the invitation of the Japan Foundation, explained that although he considered himself a Canadian, he had spent his childhood in Sri Lanka and was educated in Britain.

        The hair and beard on Ondaatje's broad, square head looked grey and wispy as the softspoken 57-year old novelist and poet stood at the podium in a jacket and tie and wearing a pair of reading glasses. "I'm not a pure product of any country," he anonounced, a trace of Sri Lankan and a British public school boy accent in his voice.

        He compared his position to that of Kazuo Ishigoro, the Japanese writer in England who examined Britain's class system in a powerful novel "The Remains of the Day." Ondaatje also named Joseph Conrad, a one-time Polish emigre who had mastered English at 40 and written such classics as "Lord Jim" and "The Heart of Darkness."

        As Ondaatje introduced several works to his audience, reading some of his poems and excerpts from his novel, it seemed a fitting comparison. Like the two other writers, his themes included the crafting of individual stories into a larger history of place, the conflict of different cultural values, the notion of statelessness and the power of language.

        In one of his ten books of poetry, "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid," the Governor General award winner for 1970, Ondaatje's cycle of poems depicts the perspectives of the psychopathic killer, William Bonney, members of his gang, and those of his observers. His poems are at times repellent in their bloody descriptions of shootings and murder yet alternately fascinating due to Ondaatje's fluid, lyrical style. In a method to which he would later return in his novels, Ondaatje reworked original accounts of Billy the Kid into poems exploring the violent reality of the American West. Published by Anansi, a small literary press that coincidentally printed poetry by Margaret Atwood and his friend, bp Nichol, the book signalled an artistic breakthrough. The first piece in the book is a prose poem underneath a box with a blank photograph. Apparently, Ondaatje had planned to illustrate the poem with a photograph of Billy the Kid when his friend, Bp Nichol convinced him to omit it, leaving the portrait to the reader's imagination. It was a lesson Ondaatje learned well. Ever since, his writing has been characterized by the same kind of invocation to the reader to join him in creating an exotic world and peopling it with wounded, desperate characters.

        With his 1982 memoir "Running in the Family," Ondaatje again conjoined fact with fiction. He revisited his native land and wrote of his childhood, adding the stories he was told about his family and of the generations of Ondaatjes who had lived in Sri Lanka. Through a concoction of anecdotes, poetry, and period photographs, he attempts to understand his father, apparently a manic depressive, who served as a major in the Ceylonese Light Infantry, commandeering trains with his revolver.

        Ondaatje took up the theme of the power of language in his 1987 book "In the Skin of a Lion." The backdrop is Toronto during the construction of the Bloor Street viaduct across the Don River, a feat of engineering completed in October 8, 1918. The book also describes the coming of age of Patrick Lewis, an artistic young man from rural Ontario who befriends several exploited Finns and Macedonians struggling to learn English through attending plays and movies and mimicking the actors. Through the tutelage of Patrick's anarchist lover, Alice Gull, an ex-nun, he turns against Toronto's ruling elite, and plans to destroy the city water works, a grandiose Depression-era project.

         In a June 1993 interview for the American Audio Prose Library, Ondaatje described the odd genesis of the novel. He explained that he writes to discover himself through his characters. With Billy the Kid, it was a question of how violent far he might become in that era. He began writing "In the Skin of a Lion" to explore the psychology of the real-life Toronto theatre magnate and multi-millionaire, Ambrose Small who vanished in the 1920s.

        "I began the book about Small and his disappearance. In fact, the first draft -- the first 150 pages I wrote was from his point of view -- it was a bit of a plodder," said Ondaatje. "Nothing was happening so I dropped it and approached the story from another angle."

        At the embassy event, Ondaatje read a description of "Kip," a Skih who is a British army sapper in his most celebrated novel, the 1992 Booker Prize winner, "The English Patient." "All I had to begin with was the image of a patient and a nurse and I just investigated that," he said. Ultimately, in the final draft, a mysterious, burned patient dying of his injuries, claims to be "English" - which, with the predominance of the English language and culture in the 20th century, is like claiming to be a sort of "every man."

        Hannah, the grown-up daughter of Patrick Lewis from the previous book, tends for the English patient in a ruined Italian villa, liberated by the Canadians in the latter part of 1943 who used it as a hospital, then abandoned it. Like Scheharazade in "The Arabian Nights," she entertains her charge with stories, in this case, reading from Herodotus' "Histories." But every trip Hannah makes to the villa library is potentially deadly as the Germans have booby-trapped the building. She knows this yet distraught at the wartime loss of her father and of friends, she accepts the risk.

        It turns out that Hannah's charge is not an Englishman, but a Hungarian, Count Almasy, an archeologist who had been exploring the desert to find the lost oasis settlement of Zerzura, thousands of years old. He has secretly disclosed a pass through the desert to the German Afrika Corps for a safe conduct through their lines to his love, Katherine Clifton. At the villa, he retreats into his memories of the love affair that destroyed him. He rejects the narrow nationalism that led to war and champions the borderless desert, at one point maintaining: "We die, containing a richness of lovers and tribes -- the fears we have hidden in as of caves. I believe in such cartography...we are communal historians, communal books."

        "One of the images in my mind when I started that book was a plane crash in the desert where someone walks out of it and the Bedouin of the region kind of walk toward him," explained Ondaatje. "That was all I had and it kept recurring so that I decided to investigate it."

        "The English Patient" also demonstrated how far Ondaatje goes in fictionalizing historical figures. The novel opens with an account of the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in London describing the tragic death of Geoffrey Clifton and the disappearance of his wife. According to Janet Osen in the June issue of London Magazine in 1997, Ondaatje based this on the demise of a real life husband-and-wife team of explorers, the Clayton-East-Claytons who had mounted a joint expedition to find Zerzura with a Count Almasy. Onsen argues that far from being a romantic hero, the real Almasy was an opportunist, openly homosexual and a Nazi sympathizer eager to guide German spies behind the British lines. Ondaatje transformed their story into one of a jealous husband who crashed his plane while trying to kill his wife's lover, Almasy.

        As in all of Ondaatje's writing, the prose is dense with an almost hallucinatory imagery bound in a third person narrative that relates the story in a fragmentary, episodic manner as if through shifting camera angles. Often, the story-telling is non-chronological. Even as early as "the Collected Works of Billy the Kid," the cycle of poems doesn't end with the Kid's death. That occurs mid-way in the text.

        For that matter, "The English Patient" doesn't end with the patient's death or with the Allied victory as in the movie adaptation but with news of the atomic bomb. Kip who had been defusing bombs to save lives, angrily repudiates European civilization and returns to India to become a country doctor and to imagine Hannah's future life.

        "After 'The English Patient,' I felt I had to return to poetry," said Ondaatje at the embassy event. He subsequently read from his 1997 selected poetry, "The Cinnamon Peeler" in which a Sri Lankan man spice maker becomes a metaphor for a poet.

        Ondaatje also read from his latest book, which some say may become known as his greatest, "Anil's Ghost." The story concerns Anil Tissera, A Sri Lankan emigrant who returns to her homeland years later as part of an international human rights fact-finding mission on the vicious Tamil guerrilla war and finds herself caught in a atmosphere of terror, paranoia and tragedy.

        Finally, the event ended with Ondaatje handling questions from the audience. The reading had been a little dry for some in the theatre and with the give and take of the questions, a different Ondaatje emerged - that of the teacher, in his case, a popular lecturer at Glendon College, York University. Although few of the questions showed that much perception of his work, he responded graciously and with humour. The event ended with warm applause for him. Ondaatje left the impression of one steadily developing his craft, the quiet, serious artist underneath the more flamboyant aspect of his personality. He observed at one point, "To be an actor must be like writing on sand."

Back to the top of this page.