Divisadero

Michael Ondaatje

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Review

As its title suggests, this is a divided book.  It falls into two halves like a carefully broken egg.  Each half contains another egg to be divided, and these contain further eggs, and so on.  Anna, the primary narrator, also informs us that divisadero ‘might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze from a distance’,’  and the reader’s sense of the author’s distance from his narratives will govern their response to his novel.

The first story is set in Northern California and concerns Anna, her foster-sister Claire (orphaned at birth) and Coop, the farmhand who was taken in by the girls’ father (a widower) when he was four, after his family was ‘killed by a hired hand who beat them to death with a wooden board.’  Anna’s big separation comes at the age of sixteen when her father discovers her ‘trembling’ in Coop’s arms.  In violently separating them, he also separates his daughter from her past (she runs away) and Coop from his adoptive home.  The narrative follows Coop as he becomes a professional gambler, living in hotels and offering the author abundant opportunities for reflections about chance.  His only subsequent encounter with his past occurs at a chance meeting with Claire during a further turning-point of his own.

Anna’s flight, we gather, was followed by a total transformation: she turns up in France as an academic studying the life and work of a once-famous writer called Lucien Segura (‘secure’, we are reminded).  Lucien’s multiple separations include the early loss of his father, one of his eyes, the woman he loves (who has losses of her own, but that’s another story); and he abandons his wife and daughters (who aren’t what they seem, either) in favour of rural solitude and the company of some gypsies.  Having cut himself off from his losses, he no longer desires to write.  Anna, however, still preoccupied with her own loss – and the gypsy’s son – quotes at us (twice) Nietzsche’s dictum ‘We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth’ and achieves some reconciliation with herself by writing about Lucien’s divided self.

If this sounds schematic, it is redeemed from being irritating by Ondaatje’s clear eye and his precise, solemn prose.  Yet the author never allows us to forget him.  In a passage about Coop we read, ‘How we are almost nothing.  We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident… with little choice or determination on our part.’  This is Ondaatje’s voice, not Coop’s . Similarly, ‘There is a great history of people being given the wrong book…’  Thanks, Mr O.  Or, in a passage about Claire which is written in the third person, ‘That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differ in our own realities from how we are seen by others.’  Such intrusions – and there are many - weaken similar aperçus written in Anna’s voice, such as ‘We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.’

The most consistent thing, in fact, about the narrative voices, is the pervasive sense of the author’s presence.  It is made more acute by the lack of speech marks, which prevents us from hearing the characters’ voices directly and has the effect of rendering all speech as the idea of speech, a convenient vehicle for the author instead of something with a life of its own.  The feeling of being steered and manoeuvred is made all the more powerful because the novel appears to be so broken backed: he obviously has a purpose which is served by precisely the elements that make his narratives seem unsatisfactory.

Ondaatje has pulled this off before but, despite many similarities to The English Patient, Divisadero has fewer seductive qualities.  It drifts away into Lucien’s story and the link with the first half of the book is cursory.  While this may provide activity for cohorts of academics and acolytes eager to put the royal egg together again, other readers are liable to judge that the real action of this novel lies in Mr Ondaatje’s head, and feel somewhat abandoned.  But when I read the book again with this thought in mind, I increasingly found myself thinking that the inside of his head was an interesting place to be, and enjoyed it better.

Review in the ‘Literary Review’ - review by Johnny de Falbe