The Cat’s Table

Michael Ondaatje

Jonathan Cape

Otago Daily Times, September 17th 2011

One far-distant day in 1954, an 11 year-old Tamil boy called Michael boards the ocean liner Oronsay and finds his berth in a narrow cabin beneath the waterline.  Behind him is Ceylon and everything he knows, ahead of him England and a mother he barely remembers, and between them stretches the voyage that comes to define his life. The following three weeks in the self-enclosed universe of the ship divide past and future and form the core of The Cat’s Table.

In the absence of any formal adult supervision, – a situation almost unimaginable in today’s hyper-vigilant society – Michael and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, burst through the self-enclosed universe of the ship ‘like freed mercury’. Determined to do at least one thing every day that is forbidden, they steal their way from the First Class Lounge to the armoury, from the ceiling of the ballroom to the deepest recesses of the hold.

Their days and nights are spent learning the routines of the ship and observing its inhabitants, from the Australian girl who skates the upper decks before dawn to the prisoner whose guarded midnight walks reinforce the rumours of his dangerousness.  They are equally fascinated by the passengers with whom they share the ‘Cats Table’ (the diametric opposite of the Captain’s Table), a cast including a retired ship dismantler, a botanist who maintains a fully functional garden in the bowels of the ship, a pianist with a highly suspect past and a woman whom they come to suspect may be a spy. In return this eccentric collection of adults acts, albeit in gestalt fashion, in loco parentis; providing advice, commentary and, on occasion, intervention in the boys adventures.

The narrative careers from place to place just as the children do, in a series of scenes that are linked as much by association as temporal linearity in a manner reminiscent of memory or oral storytelling. Stories exist within stories, events are foreshadowed in the Michael’s memory as he looks back on events from the remove of years “a blurred dive into the swimming pool, a white-sheeted body dropping through the air into the sea, a boy searching for himself in a mirror”, and events from his adult present are interposed with those of his childhood.

What begins with a third person description of a boy the narrator does not know, a “green grasshopper or little cricket…smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future”, gives way to a first-person account that ties these disparate events together with the poignant regret of hindsight. “This journey was to be an innocent story within the small parameter of my youth” he tells us, but in reality it is much more; a boys own adventure story, replete with danger, mystery and death, a reflection on the ways in which parental attention or inattention can damage children. It is also a story of immigration and identity, with the adult Michael as alone after years in England as the moment he stepped off he docks in Colombo half a lifetime before.

Despite assertions to the contrary, it is tempting to believe the narrator is the author himself. Ondaatje, who made the same voyage to England in the 1950s as his namesake does in the story, has admitted that events detailed in his memoir Running in the Family as ‘unreliable’. This trait is mirrored in the fictional Michael who also grows up to be a writer of books in which fictional incidents can, according to his cousin Emma, be put together with the original drama. He describes his shipboard nickname, Mynah, as a recognition of something he would grow into: “an unofficial bird and unreliable, it’s voice not fully trustworthy in spite of the range”.

Similar questions arise throughout the story. In one such example, Cassius grows up to be an artist whose show Michael attends late in the book. Although the characters are described in an author’s note as fictional, the note Michael scrawls in the Visitor’s Book is ascribed in the credits to Warren Zevon. Somewhere, it is implied, the inspiration (if not the person) of Cassius must exist. So much of art is drawn from life, and Ondaatje seems to revel in blurring distinction between fact and fantasy. Such ambiguity adds yet another level to a powerful, compelling, and haunting story, making it a novel that will require more than one reading to do it justice.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/compelling-if-ambiguous-boys-own-tale