A story from a grain of sand

In 1945, on a Putney side street, in a city full of darkness and half in rubble from the Blitz, the 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister are abandoned by their parents into the care of men they think may well be criminals.

Their father is still troubled as a result of the war; their mother close to stories from the present. Left to his own devices, Nathaniel sees the world in terms of shipping routes, and learns London’s geography (or an earlier form of it) by barging on the Thames with smuggled greyhounds. In a house full of odd comings and goings, and ‘dangerous with secrets’, his new confrères include an Aramaicist ethnographer, a lusty St Lucian pot-washer and a girl whom Nathaniel names, out of necessity, after the street on which they first met. ‘I found myself,’ he says, ‘within a confabulist pattern.’

It’s no great shock to learn that Nathaniel’s mother is a spy, at large in the ‘unauthorised and still violent war’ that echoed on until 1947 around the edges of the map (Trieste is mentioned). And so, a decade or more later, Nathaniel finds himself recruited to the Service, where he is officially tasked with some ‘correction’ of the wartime records. And naturally he tries to retrace his parents’ footsteps.

Michael Ondaatje is at his best when writing about awkward, quiet types, and ‘those at a precarious tilt’, and characters — especially narrators, — with dodgy memories. (M.O.’s m.o. — if you will pardon it — does well out of the fragmentary narrative). As Nathaniel’s work unfolds, however, ‘now and then there would be days in the archives when I’d come across information from distant events that overlapped’ — not unlike, one might think, the work of a historically interested novelist.