The Cat's Table

From Barnes & Noble

Michael Ondaatje's richly charactered new novel begins at "the cat's table" of the Oronsay, where 11-year narrator Michael and his divorced mother share meals and the company of others as they journey from Sri Lanka to England. As the ship cuts its path on the high seas, young Michael and his youthful mealtime friends plot freewheeling adventures onboard. In quieter moments, he seeks the counsel and company of his warm-hearted older cousin Emily. Only later, when he jolts forward into adulthood do all the implications of this adolescent journey play out on his personality. Another artful, nuanced novel by the author of Anil's Ghost and the Booker Award-winning novel The English Patient.

From the Publisher

“Wondrous. . . . A new form of literary magic.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

“Mesmerizing. . . . As he did in his great novel, The English Patient, Ondaatje conjures images that pull strangers into the vivid rooms of his imagination, their detail illumined by his words.” —The New York Times Book Review

 “Lithe and quietly profound: a tale about the magic of adolescence and the passing strangers who help tip us into adulthood in ways we don’t become aware of until much later.” —The Washington Post
 
“Enthralling and poignant. . . . A captivating reminder that it can take decades to comprehend the past, let alone to make amends with it.” —The Seattle Times

“To capture truly any moment of life is an achievement of art. To find captured, in a single work, such disparate experiences—of youth and age, of action and reflection, of innocence and experience—is a rare pleasure. If each of Ondaatje’s novels is like a new flower, then this one smells particularly sweet.” —Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books

“For my money, Michael Ondaatje is the greatest living writer in the English language. . . . The wide-eyed love of the world and its wonders, the kindness he offers to his characters and readers, the elegant lyricism of his sentences, the joy of storytelling—all that is great in his other books is fully present in The Cat’s Table. . . . Mr. Ondaatje restores belief in the beauty and power of literature and, by extension, of humanity. In this dark, terrible world, The Cat’s Table has healing powers.” —Aleksandar Hemon, WSJ.com

“Ondaatje teaches us that the most marvelous sights are those most often overlooked. It's a lesson that turns this supple story, like the meals at the cat's table, into a feast.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“A lovely, shimmering book. . . . Ondaatje succeeds so well in capturing the anticipation and inquisitiveness of boyhood.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
 
“A great master may have written his finest book in a long career of fine books.” —Alan Heathcock, Salon
 
“Ondaatje brings all his literary trademarks to The Cat’s Table, from luminous prose to an amazing sense of economy. He makes every character, image and line resonate like a tuning fork. . . . Elegant and elegiac, The Cat’s Table is the author’s most intimate work.” —The Miami Herald
 
“Michael Ondaatje has written some of the most inimitable works in the English language; The Cat's Table yet again dignifies literature in every important way possible. This novel is a completely original orchestration of a coming-of-age story, memoir, maritime adventure as powerful as Conrad or Stevenson. The lyricism of the prose is astonishing.” —Howard Norman, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“A gorgeous piece of writing. . . . Ondaatje has always been capable of conjuring up mesmerizing images to draw in a reader, but with The Cat’s Table he holds back just enough so the lyricism doesn’t overwhelm the story.” —The Christian Science Monitor
 
“A joy and a lark to read. . . . . The Cat’s Table expertly strums the cords of autobiography without overdoing it. As a result [the book] vibrates with the borrowed intimacy of real life.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Masterful. . . . Haunting and seductive.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Elegant and beautiful . . . As in Anil’s Ghost, The Cat’s Table employs a deceptively light touch, hiding a carefully constructed and tender hymn to the enigma of journey.” —The Independent (London)
 
“The Cat’s Table is just as skillfully wrought as Ondaatje’s magnum opus [The English Patient], but its picaresque childhood adventure gives it a special power and intimacy. . . . He is a master at creating characters, whom he chooses to present, memorably, as individuals. This choice is of a piece with the freshness and originality that are the hallmarks of The Cat’s Table.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Impressive. . . . Wonderful. . . . The beauty of Ondaatje’s writing is in its swift accuracy; it sings with the simple precision of the gaze. . . . Richly enjoyable, often very funny,and gleams like a really smart liner on a sunny day.” —Philip Hensher, The Daily Telegraph (London)
 
“Ondaajte couldn’t write a banal sentence if he tried. . . . . On its surface, The Cat’s Table may be a magically real reworking of a classic boy’s adventure tale. Deep down, it has the poignancy of a life’s summation.” —Pico Iyer, Time
 
“Mr. Ondaatje’s greatest talents lie in simply constructed, minimalist descriptions. His images are so meticulously created that the most obvious statements present themselves as sublime realizations. He doesn’t disappoint.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
“Ondaatje is justly recognized as a master of literary craft. . . . The novel tells of a journey from childhood to the adult world, as well as a passage from the homeland to another country, something of a Dantean experience.” —Annie Proulx, The Guardian (UK)
 
“Michael Ondaatje never writes the same book twice [though] what remains constant is precise, luminous language. . . . Ondaatje’s vision, though dark, is unfailingly generous and humane.” —The Oregonian
 
“Elegant, evocative. . . . Whatever its autobiographical roots, there’s a strong sense that this story—one with echoes of Conrad and Kipling—is a tale Michael Ondaatje someday was destined to tell. It’s a pleasure for us, his readers, to share in that telling.” —Bookreporter.com
 
“[Ondaatje’s] sentences have a sonorous capacity, a soft but urgent tone that coaxes rather than demands attention. Acrobatics are eschewed for a supple, precise flexibility. It's a gift shared by other English-language writers who spent significant time surrounded by diverse tongues: E.M. Forster, for example, and Graham Greene.” —The Denver Post

Liesl Schillinger

Ron Charles

Janet Maslin

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

The Barnes & Noble Review

"Who realizes how contented feral children are?"

In Michael Ondaatje's seventh novel, three boys run unsupervised through paradise, as attracted to evil as it is to them. Hannah Arendt's insight notwithstanding, the evil they encounter turns out to be exotic, not banal. However, because The Cat's Table recounts a 1954 voyage to London from the island formerly known as Ceylon, in an era when an English ship's upper echelons wouldn't have begun to acknowledge cruelties inflicted by racial and social class prejudice, it's hard for the narrator to see that evil exists in any form but that of the institutional: wealthy white passengers and the ship's officers who do their bidding. The title refers to Table 76, where eleven-year-old Michael is assigned to eat, along with two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin; a washed-up jazz piano player; a botanist transporting poisonous and medicinal plants; a retired ship dismantler; a silent tailor; and Miss Lasqueti, pale, peculiar, in possession of a laugh "that hinted it had rolled around...in mud."

The Cat's Table is the inverse of the Captain's Table, "the least privileged place." Cassius, who is instinctively democratic -- "I never saw him side with anyone in power" -- embraces the invisibility lack of status endows. No one notices the boys unless they're swimming in the First Class pool or have lashed themselves to the deck to witness a storm and require rescue. So they inhabit shadows and "see through the layers of authority." Secrets unveil themselves. Michael's cousin Emily trysts with a Singhalese magician. A shackled prisoner exercises by moonlight: "He is said to have killed a judge." Even Miss Lasqueti, skeptical about justice as it applies to Ceylon, warns Michael not to romanticize the prisoner: "He's probably not the sweetest chocolate in the box."

These details describe just the frame of the novel. The Cat's Table tells two stories. One is Michael's linear coming-of-age story, which reads, by itself, like a renovated version of "Billy Budd." Embedded within this narrative are scenes that report, in collage fashion, what's happened in London and Canada years after the end of the journey. Many novels contain both a framing story and embedded story, and they generally use separate genre conventions for each -- for instance, the framing story might be subtly realistic and the embedded story mythic, fabulous. The structure of The Cat's Table is unusual, though, in that that both the story about the childhood voyage as well as the story about the adults' later lives in London and Canada are mostly realistic, until the very last pages, when both stories suddenly produce old-fashioned climaxes and revelations.

This sense of realism is more pronounced because Ondaatje's methods blur the line between fiction and memoir. The novel's narrator shares a name with the author, who was raised in Ceylon, and the adult Michael, like the author, lives in Canada and publishes books. Moreover, the prologue begins in the novelistic third person ("[H]e climbed aboard the first and only ship of his life..." ) but abandons this for the more autobiographical first person ("I wonder who he was, this boy...this green grasshopper") and finally narrates in first person from such a temporal distance that the novel reads like one of those memoirs written by a retired British peer ("It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my children to describe this voyage...").

And most of the novel mimics life's lack of plot, too. Character sketches seem to accrue in a merely serial way. In life, we travel expecting to meet fellow passengers and part unchanged, and yet we read novels expecting the protagonist to meet fellow passengers and find his future altered by them. The bulk of The Cat's Table avoids this familiar arc. Pending its long-delayed finale, it records charming, ostensibly random scraps of eavesdropping: "I asked him, 'How can it be an aphrodisiac and a laxative?' And he said, 'Well, it's all in the timing.' " Like a classic modernist novel, then, most of The Cat's Table works at resembling the disorderliness of experience, life's accidents and caprices, shunning plot's patterns and purpose. Slow and stately, it seems to sail to a stop, not to fruition. Then the final pages kick in, employing plot contrivances at breakneck speed: thematic accords and previously concealed character interidentities that rival those found in Dickens, and a (melo)dramatic cloak-and-dagger climax achieved by sleight of hand, as well as a potent concoction that induces hypnotized obedience followed by amnesia -- effects as conveniently sequenced as those produced by an aphrodisiac that later works as a laxative.

Old-fashioned plot machinations not only produce a tidy, yet manic climax for the childhood story but for the contemporary story, too, where they strain credulity less elegantly. Ayurvedic medicine can't justify the startling discoveries that take place in London and Canada, or the arrival of an especially implausible letter from a long-lost shipboard acquaintance, a letter so detailed it reads like an excerpt from a Victorian novel. In the final scenes, Michael and Emily hash out the what-must- have-happened like a detective and sidekick, or perhaps a therapist and patient exploring recovered memories.

Quibbles aside, The Cat's Table is a wildly ambitious novel that bravely depicts not just the prosaic, institutionalized version of evil- colonial privilege-but also the moral blindness that sometimes came in its wake, lapses of judgment originating in sympathetic identification with fellow insignificants, the least privileged and most maligned. In fairy tales, captors are evil and victims are virtuous. In life, however, victims have often been schooled in terror, so they're sometimes amoral, willing to sacrifice innocents. Or perhaps any cross-section of humanity includes its portion of sadists. Ondaatje give us a portrait of prejudice -- and a portrait of fatally careless reactions to prejudice, too. He also gives us two sets of storytelling conventions: the most modern and least enchanted storytelling conventions, and the most ancient and magical. If the seam between these modes of storytelling is ragged, even glaringly conspicuous, the seam between a mid-twentieth-century childhood lived in the fragrant garden of Boralesgamuwa and an adult life lived afterward in England and Canada is glaringly conspicuous, as well, a seam closing over a gap between cultures so incompatible that a ship's passage across it isn't a journey leading toward adventure but diminishment. The adult Michael reflects: "Grandeur had not been added to my life...but taken away."

Debra Monroe, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award, is the author of four books of fiction and one memoir, On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain. Reviewer: Debra Monroe