As The Cat’s Table is by the Booker Prize winning author of The English Patient Michael Ondaatje, and as I hadn’t read anything by said author previously, I expected it to be a magnified epic. I didn’t have any linguistic expectations. And as I read, my ideas of Ondaatje’s plotting were slowly assured, while my ideas about his language were slowly established. The plot and the language, while at odds during my thoughts about this book, were decidedly not on the page.
I kept thinking about the plot because it’s so interesting, and not only that, it’s totally up my alley: a young boy boards a steamboat and embarks on a journey from Ceylon to England, leaving his former life behind to join his mother in the new land. I loved the inversion of the exotic through perspective. To young Michael, he doesn’t know what he’ll encouter in England, and his homeland beckons with the familiarity of sight and scent. What was comforting and homey to Michael was mysterious to me, like the scent of burning hemp. Ondaatje is able to evoke this flip in my mind effortlessly, and throughout the book I couldn’t help but want to visit both Michael’s home, be on a steamboat, and stop at the ports along the way.
And he can do this because of his sentences. The language is brief, declarative, and yet descriptive. The Cat’s Table read quickly for this reason, but it didn’t feel fluffy; the simplicity of Ondaatje’s prose belies its depth.
The power behind this book is its mysterious foray into memory as fiction. Michael/Mynah/Ondaatje have a shared experience and it seems obvious that Ondaatje’s consciousness is what shapes the book. But as I delved deeper into that consciousness, the mind of Mynah’s character seems to become singular, and mystical, along with his experiences. The almost tinge of fairy tale surrounding THE CAT’S TABLE makes you wonder, “Could that have really happened? It didn’t happen.” And you flip to the back cover, see the author photo and wonder what’s actually shared and what’s imagined, fiction. The author’s trip to England on a steamer inspired his work, especially when he found himself realizing that the passage, alone as an eleven-year-old, was actually an adventure. I went to see Ondaatje read from THE CAT’S TABLE, and he said, “All I remember about that trip was playing a lot of ping pong.”
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