Book Review: The Cat's Table

Book cover of The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje. Photo / Supplied

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape $34.99

In the opening pages of Michael Ondaatje's new novel, a young boy named Michael sets out for England on a passenger liner. It's the early 1950s. The bulk of the novel is narrated by an older Michael, who has become, we quickly gather, an internationally renowned novelist, living in Canada.

If you happen not to know that the author is indeed an internationally renowned novelist named Michael who lives in Canada and who travelled to England by sea as a boy in the early 1950s, let me save you the bother of googling. This is fiction pretending to be creative non-fiction - unless, of course, it's the opposite. I kept waiting for our narrator to reveal that he was making up some, but not all, of his purported life history so we could dive into literary-theoretical analysis.

I'm sorry, do I sound sardonic? I enjoyed parts of The Cat's Table very much. The title refers to young Michael's table assignment in the ship's mess: the place furthest from the Captain's Table, occupied by the motliest of crews, the passengers of no importance or influence whatsoever. Two other unaccompanied boys seated there become Michael's friends and companions for the voyage, and the adults at the table slowly emerge from their initial obscurity and acquire fascinating, half-understood stories. The book gains a great deal of richness from the interplay between Michael's 11-year-old perceptions and his adult attempts to interpret them.

That richness is complicated and amplified by the ambiguous sense that we're being allowed inside the real Ondaatje's memories. We're not; this is labelled "a novel". And yet we are, the historical and geographical territory of the book is precisely that of Ondaatje's life. However fictional the details, the sense of an old man perceiving the shadows and depths hidden within a child's experience is unmistakeably authentic.

My difficulty with the book is not at all that Ondaatje plays this teasing metafictional game with us. It's that he doesn't play it to the end. As the ship makes its way from Sri Lanka to the Suez Canal and on towards London - the locations throughout are evoked beautifully and almost subliminally, through the tiniest of details - Michael and his friends keep busy exploring and ferreting out secrets. They're fascinated by their nightly glimpses of a prisoner, kept below decks all day and allowed out for exercise only at midnight. At first this seems just another random aspect of their floating city, one of the many pungent memories that, lacking any explanatory context, will drift in and out of Michael's late night reflections for the rest of his life. But towards the end of the book, threads abruptly start plaiting together, and, in the most implausible of ways, the prisoner erupts into prominence as the key to half the stories on the ship.

The emergence of this capital-P Plot from the book's delicate autumnal haze burns away the ambiguous semi- distinction between narrator and author. We're not only in an artificially con-structed story, we're in one that wants its artifice underlined, circled, and multiple- exclamation-marked. It counts as intellectual honesty, I suppose. As I read the final few dozen pages, I was struggling not to yawn.

David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.