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.

nice belt

What did 0 say to 8?
Nice belt.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

What was it that made me resist reading Silas Marner thirty years ago? Perhaps it was that the title, or a whiff of the plot, sounded a bit grim.  And who needs grim.  Or perhaps I thought myself such a Modern, I had no time for that which was Old.

Silas Marner is a delightful book, gently moving and quietly philosophical.  It makes you happy just to be reading it.  The neat 1965 Harper Perennial Classic hardback edition from Gertrude & Alice Bookstore in Bondi added to my pleasure at reading.

George Eliot wrote Silas Marner in 1861, between The Mill On The Floss and Middlemarch.  She subtitled the book The Weaver of Raveloe, and indeed Marner's occupation and claim on the village were well chosen.  Marner is an outsider, both by his almost alchemical working of yarn into linen, and by being a migrant from another part of England.  "He was simply a pallid young man, with prominent short-sighted eyes, whose appearance would have had nothing strange for people of average culture and experience, but for the villages near whom he came to settle it had mysterious peculiarities which compounded with the exceptional nature of his occupation, and his advent from an unknown region call North'ard."

Marner comes to Raveloe a silent, self-contained man, whose past we know but the villagers do not.  He lives for fifteen years in the village without becoming part of its community.  Eliot deftly introduces the villagers in their own words, standing back from caricature or judgement.  She lets them speak, and thus reveal themselves.  The Great of the area are represented in Squire Cass and his family, including the weak-willed heir Godfrey and the troublesome second son Dunstan.

Eliot will use Godfrey as a foil for Silas.  We are invited to compare the two men, in their characters, their material possessions and habits, and their dealings with other people. She opens their innermost thoughts to us in a startling and intimate way.

The story is a simple one.  Marner, solitary by turn of fortune, skilled at his work, amasses a pile of gold which becomes the focus of his life.  One night, the gold is stolen from him, and so he thinks the entire meaning of his life is gone.  But as if to replace false gold with real, an orphaned girl with golden curls toddles in his open door one night, and the redemption of Marner through the love and care toward another human creature begins.  Thus ends Part One.

A brief Part Two picks up sixteen years later, swiftly catches up with all the characters' lives, before driving to the extended climax of the book, the revelation of secrets.  What binds Marner, Godfrey Cass and the child-now-grown Eppie together?  "Everything comes to light sooner or later ... Our secrets are found out."

Perhaps 'climax' is too excitable a word for the steady revelation of the story and final unfolding of the characters.  There is a wonderful sense of inevitability about Part Two of Silas Marner.  Eliot has done all that was needful in Part One, and now, in the most natural way in the world, the story comes to a beautifully satisfying end.  And not without a pleasurable tear in the eye of the reader.

The gentle moral of the story is voiced by Godfrey: "There's debts that we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by."

Don't wait to read Silas Marner.  There are such joys within these pages. Such joys.