The Writings of Michael Ondaatje

                                              -from poetryfoundation.org

Canadian poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje dissolves the lines between prose and poetry through the breadth of his works in both genres. "Moving in and out of imagined landscape, portrait and documentary, anecdote or legend, Ondaatje writes for the eye and the ear simultaneously," noted Diane Wakoski in Contemporary Poets. Whether reshaping recollections of friends and family from his childhood in old Ceylon in Running in the Family, or retelling an American myth in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje "focuses on the internal lives of his multigenerational characters and exhibits a fascination with extraordinary personality types," as observed by a Contemporary Literary Criticism essayist, utilizing a writing style that is "whimisical and imaginative . . . marked by vivid detail . . . startling juxtapositions, and a preoccupation with intense experiences." In addition to writing novels, plays, and poetry collections, Ondaatje has edited several books, including The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories, praised as a "landmark" by reviewer Christine Bold in Times Literary Supplement for its representation of "Canadian voices accented by native, black, French, Caribbean, Indian, Japanese and Anglo-Saxon origins."

Ondaatje's poetry is seen by critics as continually changing, evolving as the author experiments with the shape and sound of words. Although his poetic forms may differ, his works focus on the myths that root deep in common cultural experience. As a poet, he recreates their intellectual expression in depicting the affinity between the art of legend and the world at large. "He cares more about the relationship between art and nature than any other poet since the Romantics," stated Liz Rosenberg in New York Times Book Review, "and more than most contemporary poets care about any ideas at all." Some of Ondaatje's verse has approached the fragmentary, as in Secular Love, a collection of poems he published in 1985.

New York Times Book Review contributor Adam Kirsch found the poems in Handwriting to be "richly sensual images, which are drawn largely from the history, mythology, and landscape of India and China." " Handwriting takes one to Ondaatje's Sri Lankan past," wrote Sen Sudeep in World Literature Today, "a past that is very much present in his life, one that informs and colors his broader palette, scope, and vision. The fact that he can present Sri Lanka realistically and unexotically lends a believable and even magical edge to his text. His observations are sharp and wry, but at the same time considered, wise, and pragmatic."

Reviewing Handwriting in Poetry, Henry Taylor wrote that Ondaatje's verses "have sometimes struck me as labored in their seriousness—easier to admire than to like. This new book, in fact, is a deep pleasure to read most of the time, once one has become accustomed to its fragmentary style. This style is singularly appropriate to the themes and subjects of the book, which arise from mixed heritage and the loss of cultural identity." Library Journal reviewer Barbara Hoffert called Ondaatje's poetry "deeply evocative and suffused—but never overburdened—with sensuous imagery."

"Concerned always to focus on the human, the private, and the 'real' over the theoretical and the ideological," in his novels and short fiction "Ondaatje examines the internal workings of characters who struggle against and burst through that which renders people passive," noted Diane Watson in Contemporary Novelists, "and which renders human experience programmatic and static." The novel In the Skin of a Lion focuses on a man raised in rural Canada who, at the age of twenty-one, comes to the growing city of Toronto and lives among the immigrants inhabiting its working-class neighborhoods. Physical actions and inner challenges define Ondaatje's characters as individuals, creators within their own lives, and give both purpose to their existence and redemption to their inner reality. In this work a historical epoch is seen as the struggle of the individual to break free of the confines of his culture rather than simply a collection of social and political goals. As Michael Hulse described In the Skin of a Lion in Times Literary Supplement, it "maps high society and the sub culture of the underprivileged in Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s. . . . But it is also . . . about communication, about men 'utterly alone' who are waiting (in Ondaatje's terms) to break through a chrysalis."

In Coming through Slaughter, a novel well-grounded in the history of early-twentieth-century New Orleans, Ondaatje creates a possible life of the late jazz musician Buddy Bolden, remembered as a brilliant cornetist whose performances were never recorded due to a tragic mental collapse at an early age. Mixing interviews with those who remember Bolden, historical fact, and his richly imagined conception of the musician's inner thoughts on his way to madness, Ondaatje fashions what Watson termed a "fractured narrative . . . [tracing] the personal anarchy of . . . Bolden and the perspectives on him of those who knew him best."

Perhaps Ontaadje's most well-known novel, The English Patient tells the story of a Canadian nurse who stays behind in the bombed remains of a villa near the World War II battlefields of northern Italy to tend to an English soldier who has been severely burned. After the couple are joined by two other soldiers, relationships form that parallel, as Cressida Connolly noted in Spectator, "those of a small and faded Eden." Ranking the author among such contemporary novelists as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, Connolly praised the poetic quality of Ondaatje's fiction. "The writing is so heady that you have to keep putting the book down between passages so as not to reel from the sheer force and beauty of it," the reviewer exclaimed, adding that "when I finished the book I felt as dazed as if I'd just awoken from a powerful dream."

Anil's Ghost is a novel set in the present that documents the nearly twenty-year Sri Lankan conflict that began in the 1980s and resulted in the deaths and disappearances of nearly twenty thousand. Anil is a native of Sri Lanka who studied medicine abroad, specializing in forensic pathology, and she has come home as part of a mission to examine the remains of victims to determine possible war crimes. Anil is assisted by Sarath, a government-selected archaeologist, and together they find four skeletons they name Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Sailor, the last of which Anil feels will provide the evidence they are seeking. "This narrow examination broadens to involve the wider conflict as Sri Lanka's history and present achieve a simultaneous, terrible maturity," wrote Rebecca J. Davies in Lancet. "The earth is oily with wasted blood. Severed heads sit atop stakes. Drivers are crucified on the roadside. Bodies succumb to frail fractures sustained in their dive from helicopters. Even babies and three-year-olds are not immune to the bullets. And yet amid this bloody chaos Ondaatje painstakingly captures the normality of interrupted lives."

New York Times Book Review contributor Janet Maslin compared Anil's Ghost to The English Patient, writing that it "is a novel more in name than in essence. . . . Ondaatje brings an oblique poetic sensibility to unraveling the mysteries at work here. Layers peel away from both Anil and Sarath, with a past full of ghosts for each of them and assorted vignettes and memories scattered across the book's fertile landscape." Maslin went on to say that "the book's real strengths lie in its profound sense of outrage, the shimmering intensity of its descriptive language and the mysterious beauty of its geography, with so many discrete passages that present the artificer in Mr. Ondaatje so well." America's John Breslin noted that the novel "ends with three pages of acknowledgments to dozens of doctors, lawyers, civil rights workers, Asian scholars, and fellow poets, plus a bibliography that would make any researcher proud. A lot of homework and legwork have gone into this novel."

In addition to poetry and fiction, Ondaatje's interest in filmmaking, fueled perhaps by his involvement in the film adaptation of his novel The English Patient, inspired the nonfiction work The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing. Highly praised by reviewers, The Conversations examines Murch's life and career as a three-time Oscar winner and collaborator with noted directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas in Zoetrope studios. The creative process is also discussed, as writer and film editor talk about the task of revealing hidden themes and patterns in existing creative works. As Ondaatje noted in an interview with a Maclean's contributor, editing—whether of film or one's written work, is "the only place where you're on your own. Where you can be one person and govern it. The only time you control making a movie is in the editing stage." In Booklist Carlos Orellana praised The Conversations for permitting "readers a peek behind the curtain to reveal a man as mysterious as his art," while in Publishers Weekly a reviewer noted: "Through [Murch's] . . . eyes, and Ondaatje's remarkably insightful questions and comments, readers see how intricate the process is, and understand Murch when he says, 'The editor is the only one who has time to deal with the whole jigsaw. The director simply doesn't.'"

Born in Sri Lanka and living in England as a young teen, Ondaatje immigrated to Canada at age eighteen, determined to make a mark as a poet, and gradually moved to fiction. Running in the Family, a heartfelt memoir honoring his family and his heritage, blends together family stories with poems, photographs, and personal anecdotes. As his family history follows a path leading from the genteel innocence of the Ceylonese privileged class as the sun set on the British Empire to the harsh glare of the modern age, so Ondaatje's narrative seeks the inner character of his father, a man of whom the author writes, "My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult." As Anton Mueller in the Washington Post Book World wrote, "In reality, this is a mythology exaggerated and edited by the survivors. Seduced by the wealth and luxury of its imaginative reality, Ondaatje enters the myth without disturbing it. With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of his subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure."

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