The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

The 11-year-old boy watching the nighttime Colombo streets pass by in the opening pages of The Cat’s Table is “as green as he could be about the world.” Driven to the harbour by shadowy adult figures, the boy, Michael, is about to embark on his first ocean voyage and his first trip away from Ceylon (Sri Lanka). He will travel to the almost mythical country of England, to meet his long-estranged mother.

Michael’s first glimpse of the docked passenger ship Oronsay lifts him from the daily round of a boy’s life: “It felt as if a city had been added to the coast, better lit than any town or village.” On board, Michael watches as a local pilot, drunk after guiding the ship to sea, has to be wrapped in fish netting to be safely lowered off board to a waiting skiff.

This combination of discordant but beautiful imagery and an adult “outsider” boisterously bucking convention lay the groundwork for an unmistakably Ondaatje-esque novel. Michael’s first extended stay in “close quarters with adults” and their arcane rituals of intimacy and propriety is, on one level, a coming-of-age novel at sea. It is also a meditative, even nostalgic revisiting of the key themes and obsessions that have animated Ondaatje’s work.

The titular Cat’s Table refers to the least desirable table in the ship’s dining room, where Michael is seated with two other wayward but adventurous boys, Ramadhin and Cassius. They are joined at dinner every night by various unmarried eccentrics who lack the prestige and connections to win a table near the Captain. As the Oronsay travels across the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and up the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, Michael finds himself enmeshed in various intrigues and romantic escapades, including an escape plot to spring a prisoner held in chains below deck.

Ondaatje has toned down the elevated consciousness and language that so permeated his last three novels (beginning with The English Patient). Fans will be glad to hear that the richly embroidered imagery of those works is still present, as well as the tantalizing Gothic tones of murder, lush sexuality and buried family secrets and curses.

The Oronsay itself does wonderful double duty as a Gothic castle stand-in, with its warren of hidden places within its layered, labyrinth structure and multiple decks — one of which contains an exotic garden of rare tropical plants in transport to England — deep in the ship’s hull.

Ondaatje slowly unravels a tapestry of images and dramatic (and exotic) tableaux as the ship cruises on. His technique, more reminiscent of a poet than a novelist, creates fascinating visual and sensual effects but makes the actual narrative of the voyage feel somewhat inert. This is probably intentional on Ondaatje’s part — he is using the Oronsay more as a point of meditation than momentum — although it does make the cinematic conclusion feel somewhat abrupt.

The novel also contains a few too many passages of ponderous dialogue: “I was so fond of his Sicilian manners,” she went on, “even the way he lit my cigarette, the long reach of his arm, as if igniting a fuse. Some thought he was a predator, but he was a delicate man. The panache was in his choice of words, and in the rhythm of them. I know masks and personas. I am a specialist in them.”

The problem is not so much that the speaker, an educated woman, couldn’t voice those words but that the style and cadence mimic the narrator’s own voice (and choice of similes). There is also no clue as to how seriously the reader should take this rather inane musing. As the self-romance of a coddled, somewhat pretentious European woman of her time? As gauche flirtation (the words are spoken to a male passenger)? The novel seems to want the reader to take such lines straight up, as it were.

Most of the dialogue is more naturalistic yet still adheres to the novel’s poetic tones and imagery. The children and adults speak with a touch of childish naivety and wonder that adds to the air of a Kipling travel romance.

Like almost all of Ondaatje’s characters, the Cat’s Table diners and other adults that move in Michael’s orbit are each a specialist of the arcane. One rhapsodizes over the minutiae of jazz great Sidney Bechet’s playing technique. One cultivates rare plants. Others master the game of bridge, or complex circus acrobatics (there is an actual circus troupe on board).

The novel’s theme of non-conformity realized through art, secret identities and self-creation would have been strengthened if readers were presented with more vivid representatives from a conformist social order. The passengers’ strict adherence to colour and class castes and the Captain’s incessant toadying to power (and his dismissive racism) certainly hint at soul-crushing adult hierarchies, but this conflict is only dramatized in the plot to spring the chained prisoner.

There is much to enjoy, though, in this short, episodic novel, even for readers who may have found Ondaatje’s later works overly dense or poetic. There is a clarity of vision here, plus a painful but not overwhelming nostalgia for times when consignment to the kiddie’s table was not such a bad thing. (Toronto Star)