“We live,” Michael Ondaatje declares in the structurally lopsided but lyrical and alluring Divisadero, “with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives ... We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”
But Ondaatje is not as much a storyteller — “I don't really begin a novel ... with any sure sense of what's happening or even what's going to happen,” he admits — as much as he is a novelistic cartographer or archaeologist, his books legends and tools that help map out subtleties in character and theme while they unearth full explication from the strata of multi-layered meaning.
“As a writer, one is busy with archaeology," Ondaatje once maintained in an interview, "It's what the writer does with any character. On one level you're moving forward, but in the other, you're revealing the past." It’s a consequent give-and-take in narrative that finds an echo in Ondaatje’s previous novel, 2000’s Anil’s Ghost, in which the main action — the investigation into suspected mass political murders on Sri Lanka — is propelled by the efforts of a forensic anthropologist and an archaeologist.
In charting that sequence of events, as intuitive a process as that my be for Ondaatje, the author's references to destination and direction tend to be as personal as they are latitudinal. In his memoir Running in the Family from 1982, the Toronto-based poet and novelist tells of journeying back, spreading maps on the floor to seek out possible routes back to Ceylon and his family in the endeavor to “touch them into words.”
Furthermore, Ondaatje explores his Dutch-Ceylonese genealogy, and recalls homemade maps on the walls of his brother’s apartment and their close mental and metaphorical associations. They are, he explains, "the result of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations ... growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy ... The maps reveal rumours of topography, routes for invasion and trade, and the dark mad mind of travellers’ tales [that] appears throughout Arab and Chinese medieval records.”
"I believe in such cartography,” reflects the titular character in Ondaatje’s 1992 Booker Prize winning The English Patient, “to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books." In indelibly mapping out the lives of four occupants of an Italian villa at the end of World War II, the author creates a geography, a landscape for the novel, with the disparity between the villa and the surrounding countryside, and the boundary between the two, evoking the inner lives of the domicile’s inhabitants.
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