Patterns from the past

Michael Ondaatje’s legion of admirers will not expect a novel constructed around a linear narrative, or even cohering in the developing consciousness of a central character. ‘Everything is collage,’ he tells us in Divisadero, a novel which is perhaps over-full of self-referential pointers. The work, we are led to infer, is like a ‘helicoidal’

spiralling belfry, or ‘like a villanelle … the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development’. It is like a ‘triptych’, offering parallel panels. ‘We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell,’ says one character (it hardly matters which).

Narrative in Divisadero splinters, and shards of glass duly become a recurrent motif. The novel starts in 20th-century California, where a farmer works the land with the help of his daughters. One is adopted: Claire is an orphan brought back from hospital at the same time as his own motherless child, Anna. The fourth member of the household, Coop, a boy a few years older than the sisters, is also an orphan: his parents were brutally murdered when he was four by their hired hand. Coop’s ‘easy minimal effort towards whatever was around him’ entrances the girls: ‘As sisters we reflected each other, competed with each other, and our shared idol was Coop.’

This is the strong, well-evoked and apparently simple premise for a story, squaring up for a well-flagged tragedy, which will ‘set fire to the rest of their lives’. Coop is caught in flagrante with Anna by her father, who smashes Coop’s face with a stool and is stabbed by his daughter with a symbolic shard of glass, all in a symbolic storm. After this, the family, and the narrative, disintegrate.