Besides his memoir, "Running in the Family", with "In the Skin of Lion", I've now read four of Ondaatje's novels - ( am set to reread "The English Patient" next year, given its more than fifteen years since I read that book, and then followed up by watching the movie, plus it is kind of a sequel to this.) - and with each novel, am more and more impressed with the poetic scenes he paints with his words. In "In the Skin of a Lion", Ondaatje writes about Toronto, about the people who build it - largely the unnamed, and taken for granted immigrant community, who gave their best years, and at times their lives, to see the materializing of the dreams of those who dreamed grand plans for the city of Toronto. Ondaatje, from his research mentions not only millionaires like Ambrose Small ( and fictionalizes his post disappearance life), but Rowland Harris, the Architect of the City and The Comissioner of Works for Toronto for 33 years, a character present across the decades presented in book, as well as in the climax of the fiction. But it is not only the likes of Small and Harris that Ondaatje gives room to in his novel, but also others - from Harris' hired photographer Arthur Gross to Nicholas Temelcoff - a fictionalized character, although records confirm of a Macedonian immigrant of that name. The part of the narration where the protagonist (yes, we do have a protagonist in Patrick Lewis - who to me was the thread that wove through the story of Toronto, and was hence a useful tool ) befriends the Macedonians through his involvement with the Leftist Artiste/Actress Alice has an attraction, that makes one glad.
"They approved of his Finnish suit. Po modata eleganten! which meant stylish! stylish! He was handed a Macedonian cake. And suddenly Patrick, surrounded by friendship, concern, was smiling, feeling the tears on his face falling towards his stern Macedonian-style moustache. Elena, the great Elena who had sold him vetch for over a year, unpinned the white scarf around her neck and passed it to him. He looked up and saw the men and women who could not know why he wept now among these strangers who in the past had seemed to him like dark blinds on his street, their street, for he was their alien.
Suddenly formal, beginning with Elena. The women shook his hand, the men embraced and kissed him, and each time he said Patrick. Patrick. Patrick. Knowing he must now remember every single person. And now, because it was noon, the King Street Russian Mission Brass Band fifty yards down the road, they invited him to lunch which was set up on tables beside the stalls and crates. He was guest of honour. Elena on one side of him, Emil on the other, and a table of new friends."
Through this focus of the Macedonian community, who had largely passed as Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, or Serbians, Ondaatje turns the narration from the dreams of the likes Harris, the love struggles of our Protagonist to the grievances of the labour immigrant community, where the focus is, on the latter part of the narration.
 |
| On the Left, Rowland Harris - Photo taken by Arthur Gross |
 |
| Bookmark Plaque for the book |
Needless to say, it takes considerable skill to make part
of the narration that detail just sufficiently the structural
engineering sensible to a lay reader. But there is more than that here
clearly. It is in a sense a tribute to those unnamed thankless immigrant
labour community, without ever sounding propagandist. It reads like
cinematic experience as the author doesn't bother to bridge all gaps, as
he jumps from scene to scene - for example we do not whether Clara
Dickens finally stays with Patrick or not - in fact the 'novel happens'
by way of a narration to Hana, whom we will meet again in The English
Patient.
The other novels I've read of Ondaatje are, 'Coming Through Slaughter', 'Warlight', and of course 'The English Patient'. There's no weak novel among these, and truly leaves me glad that I still have "Anil's Ghost", "Divisadero", and "Cat's Table" for me to read.
Rating: ****
( All photographs, other than of the book covers, by courtesy of the Internet)
