Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

What happens to the emotional life of young Nathaniel when his mother, due to the secret exigencies of war, must seek to protect him and his sister by leaving them and staying away, entrusting them to the care of strangers?

When in spite of maternal vigilance at a distance, the boy and his sister are grabbed and chloroformed, how does he react? This violent incident results in a reunion of sorts with his mother, but she gives no explanation for her absence. Does he then evolve into "someone not intent on knowing himself but preoccupied with others?"

His father's elaborately explained departure preceded his mother's going. During her absence, a mysterious woman ethnographer suggests that the individual story is "not the important one," and the self "is not the principal thing."

Meanwhile, he grows fond of The Darter, a man who uses Anderson shelters to stash his illegally imported and possibly stolen greyhounds to sell to racetracks. With his protector, Nathaniel travels through "warlight" on the dim backwaters of the Thames. The Darter also finds the boy a summer job, where he falls into his first love affair.

As a young man, Nathaniel attributes his invitation to apply for an intelligence post in the Foreign Office to class, nepotism, and "the possibly inherited quality of secrecy." Taking up his job, he discovers that "with the arrival of peace, a determined, almost apocalyptic censorship had taken place." This is exemplified by the runaway fire in the Baker Street Offices of the Special Operations Executive, presumably set by the "burning officers" who operated worldwide, incinerating all the documents governments wanted to forget.

His late mother, Nathaniel learns, was involved before D-Day in the creation of "Thirty-two aerodromes, along with decoy airfields to confuse the enemy...built almost overnight in Suffolk." These "would never exist on a map," and "would vanish by war's end." Recalling his teen years "living in two worlds as well as two eras," he broods on his youth, when he was buffeted by conflicting stories and experiences.

In his anonymous office in London, while the higher echelons with more knowledge and power are housed above his low floor, Rose's son uncovers as much of her vanished life as he can. He learns that the man who has recruited her, whom she's "tethered to," is someone she met in childhood. Once a young thatcher who fell from her family's roof and broke his hip, Marsh Felon transformed himself into a BBC nature broadcaster and a Gatherer who recruits talent for the secret service -- "among the semi-criminal world or among specialists."

Nathaniel then uses the bits he has gleaned about his mother to imagine her life. Firmly tied to Felon, Rose questions their role, opining that "we are little better than terrorists now." After a long-ago promise kept, and a long lunch of champagne and oysters, Rose slips Felon's leash in Paris to walk the city alone. Returning to the hotel, she reflects that though he has "shown her over the years the great vistas she desired...perhaps the truth of what is before you is clear only to those who lack certainty."

Like his mother after her retirement, Nathaniel finds himself "once more back in a small repeating universe that included few outsiders." Men who once protected him, The Moth and The Darter, have receded to the "ravine of childhood," and after being recruited "almost innocently," he has spent most of his adult life "in a government building, attempting to trace" his mother's career.

In the end, he observes, those who remain in the Service continue to abide "by the secrecy of their roles," even after the war. Years later, these loyal people receive no more than "a quiet sentence in an obituary" mentioning that they "had 'served with distinction in the Foreign Office.'"

In a final effort to redeem his missing past, Nathaniel seeks out the Darter, whom he had abandoned long ago. To his disappointment, he finds not answers, but something quite unexpected. Thinking of the time he has lived through, and recalling how he watched a girl he knew "loosen a ribbon from her hair in order to dive into a forest pool where bouncing bombs had once been conceived and tested," he feels himself to be implicated in "sutras of cause and effect."

"We order our lives," thinks Nathaniel, "with barely held stories," gathering the invisible and unspoken and "sewing it all together in order to survive." Our fates are intertwined like those of the sea pea: "on those mined beaches during the war," this endangered vegetable rebounded from near-extinction, "thanks to the lack of human traffic," to become a "happy vegetable of peace."

The subtle glimmer of ideas and the elusive liminal images suggested in this book will stay with me for a long time. As in earlier works, Michael Ondaatje's luminous prose reflects his poetic bent.