The Cat's Table

by Michael Ondaatje

I have heard that people either love or hate Ondaatje.  I am in the "love him" category to some degree.  I loved The English Patient and I liked The Skin of the Lion, and I thought Anil's Ghost was okay.

I enjoyed this, his newest book, it had, on the one hand, a fascinating story of a young boy's 21 day trip from Sri Lanka to England, leaving behind the country he knew and loved to join a mother he was not sure he would even recognize.

The first part of the story describes the voyage and the cast of unusual characters on the ship.  Michael the main character makes friends with two other boys his age and they explore the ship and engage in hijinks, one act of which proves deadly to one of the characters.  The boys prowl around the ship exploring all its recesses and often hide out in the lifeboats.  They have the opportunity to observe and overhear things from this post. Another part of the story involves a criminal, being transported on the ship and only allowed on deck at night.

The people the boys meet, the things they observe, and the tragedies that occur on the ship change the boys and also Michael's cousin, who is also a passenger on the ship.  They move from boyhood rather abruptly as a result of their experiences but are also haunted by what occurred, however, the main character seems to dismiss the events for a good part of his life and only seems to realize their importance later in life.  The book leaves a lot of the aspects of what happened on the ship unclear, for e.g. did the pigeon lady actually shoot the police officer and if so why?  Did the prisoner and his daughter survive their leap into the water?  Did the cousin kill the undercover officer or was she tricked into thinking she did?

The second aspect of the story involves looking back on things that happended in the past to try to understand how they made you the person you have become.  Even small things, that seem insignificant at the time, can have an impact or later be recognized as turning points in one's life.

I appreciated the book both for the story of the voyage and also for raising the issues that sometimes we long to reconnect with people who have touched our lives, if only briefly, to confirm our understanding of events and that people can come to a better understanding of themselves through pondering moments and encounters in the past and the influence they have had.