Books
The hidden presence
by Elspeth Sandys
Only one word can describe Michael Ondaatje at his best – enchantment.
There are, I’m reliably informed, readers who did not fall under the spell of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I am not one of them. Although I can see how Ondaatje’s convoluted storytelling – his pushing at the boundaries of meaning and connection – might irritate some readers, for me there has only ever been one word to describe what happens when reading a novel by this brilliant and spellbinding writer, and that is enchantment.
With the single exception of the disappointing Anil’s Ghost, which preceded Divisadero, everything I have read by Ondaatje has left me wanting more. I am an addict, not of his prose style – seductive though it is – but of his stories. “We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell,” Claire, one of the two female protagonists of Divisadero, tells us. “It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past … circling … those familiar moments of emotion.” I cannot think of a better way to describe what makes the work of Michael Ondaatje so hauntingly particular.
The word divisadero comes from the Spanish and means, obviously, “division”. But it carries another meaning – “to gaze at something from a distance”. The division at the heart of Divisadero is between the sisters, Claire and Anna, and the boy, Coop, who grows up alongside them on their father’s Californian farm. Claire is not Anna’s blood sister, nor is Coop any relation, but that does not prevent the three motherless children from forming a bond stronger and more intense than if they had been conventional siblings. As the stories of their lives unfold, each returns in his/her mind to the farm, and the single, violent event that separated them.
“We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe,” Coop reflects, “but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw.” That Coop decides to take up gambling as a career comes as no surprise.
Coop’s distinctly unfashionable view of human destiny colours the novel. It is, I suspect, also the view of the author, a suspicion strengthened by the arrival on the scene, late in the story, of the French poet Lucien Segura. Anna has come to the south of France to research the dead poet, an action that results in the slow closing of the “circling” of emotion that links her to Claire and to Coop.
As for the second meaning of divisadero, this, too, is central to the novel’s purpose. Anna’s need to “hide in a stranger’s landscape so that she can look back on the tumult of her youth” is what brings her to France, to the house where Segura died. In danger of falling in love with a ghost (another perennial Ondaatje theme), she meets Rafael, son of a gypsy mother, and begins a love affair, which at times mirrors events in the poet’s life so closely as to seem like two sides of the same coin.
That Segura speaks for the author seems to me a given. His views on art, on celebrity, on the primacy of the natural world, resonate with what we know of Ondaatje. If at times the rapidly shifting points of view seem confusing, it is the author’s voice that guides us through the maze.
“Sometimes we enter Art to hide within it,” the author, hiding behind Anna’s voice, tells us. “It is where we go to save ourselves, where a third person voice protects us.” Art, Ondaatje reminds us, quoting Nietzsche, exists so that we “shall not be destroyed by the Truth”.
Along with his sense of the absolute importance of the past (“If you do not plunder the past the absence feeds on you”), his fascination with thieves (“Ah, the grace of the great thief”), his sense of the mystery of the natural world (“there was no distinction between himself and what was beyond – a tree’s sigh … It could have been generated by his own body”), and his persistent belief in connection (“There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known only briefly”), it is Ondaatje’s faith in Art, in its necessity to Life, that drives his stories, and accounts for their lingering enchantment.
DIVISADERO, by Michael Ondaatje (Bloomsbury, $49.99).
