The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel In The Skin of A Lion still resonates with me these many years since I first read it.  It is a luminous account of migrant workers in Toronto, who were essential to building that city, while remaining always outside the mainstream.

Holding The Cat’s Table before opening its pages, I experienced that thrill of hope mixed with dread we feel when the author of a beloved book gives us a new one.

The Cat’s Table is as vivid and moving as In The Skin of A Lion, and yet deliciously different.  Set in the early 1950s, we are taken into the confidence of 11-year-old Michael, leaving his relations in Colombo to travel on the ocean liner Oronsay to England via the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean.  In England, his mother awaits him; a mother he is not sure he will recognise.

Though unaccompanied on the voyage, an elderly relative in Upper Class keeps a distant eye on him. His luscious cousin provides a warmer presence.  He is seated at the Cat’s Table for dinner, the furthest place from the far-off prize of the Captain’s Table, where he meets the other misfits and eccentrics on the voyage.  Among them are two other boys, the reckless Cassius and the thoughtful Ramadhin.  Their youthful association will affect each of them for the rest of their lives.

Not yet grown, they move invisibly through the worlds of the adults around them, grasping and failing to grasp the intricate dances of class, sexuality, commerce and criminal enterprise bursting the flanks of the ship.

Ondaatje’s prose whispers inside your head.  This is a storytelling master at work, as the dark night in the Suez Canal with secrets glimpsed on the shadowy banks beyond the railings gives way to a glimpse of Michael’s future.  The mystery of the shackled prisoner the boys spy on during his nightly guarded walks on deck, flows to the future lives of Cassius and Ramadhim, the promise of their youth informing the men they become.

The grown Michael, a successful writer, harks back to the Cat’s Table and those he encountered there, the place and the comrades he never left behind.

The Cat’s Table is a novel, but this vibrant and poignant work seems coloured by memoir.  This is fiction with the mess, tang and wonder of reality.