The pull of solitude

 

 

Michael Ondaatje is a compulsively exotic writer - selecting far-flung worlds, creating exceptionally poetic characters, and connecting them through the aesthetics of chance. Everything resonates in an Ondaatjean landscape. Drawn as he is to the exotic, he does not exoticise, instead entering so deeply into individual lives and hidden sentiment that milieu more or less vanishes and we are left with thoughts and movements against carefully painted backdrops.

Ondaatje’s novels have always been beautiful and intricate constructions meant to be viewed from the outside as much as entered and occupied. Form is crucial; Divisadero’s suggests that history is a kind of nostalgia.

Divisadero is about three children with a unique bond growing up on a farm in Northern California in the 1970s, in a landscape formed out of the gold rush from more than a century ago and the “many headed civilisation” that came with it. A violent incident flings them apart; the trajectories of two intersect many years later: Claire – orphan, horse rider and lawyer’s assistant, and Cooper – also, like Claire adopted by the family, now a gambler and a wanderer, living out of hotels and playing poker for a living in small Californian towns. The third child, Anna, is a historian, researching the life of little-known, early 20th century French writer Lucien Segura. She lives for a while in the last house the writer inhabited in the Gers region of Southern France and relives his time there, falling in love with a man called Rafael who knew the writer as a boy. The last section of the novel belongs to Segura himself and we witness his relationship with Marie-Neige, the wife of a poor farmer, his marriage to another woman, and his final abandonment of his family to live alone in the house in Dému that Anna comes to.

Segura is the artist for whom “writing was the place of emergency” and who knows no other way. In another sense, all Ondaatje’s characters are artists – solitary, brooding figures who come alive most vividly in communion with the natural world. Rafael on a journey through the French countryside feels it breaking “his heart again and again with happiness.” Claire is truly herself only when riding her horse in the hills she escapes to every weekend. Anna traces French history through landscape – she imagines how Richard the LionHeart on his way to a Crusade may have inhaled the scent of the same lily she is sniffing.

But despite this pull towards the solitariness of nature, it is in the connections between people that the novel gets written, Ondaatje appears to suggest. This Forsterian idea – that the only hope lies in connecting – acquires relevance against the larger idea that the world has irrevocably fragmented. He can show us riveting glimpses of, say, life in early 20th century France, but the awareness that some chapters earlier we were reading about the ploys of cardsharks in a Las Vegas casino reminds us not to fall into a reverie and forget ourselves. As readers we reclaim a sense of wholeness in the face of the disintegration brought on by events such as the two Gulf wars, both of which make brief appearances. At the end of the Divisadero one wonders if he has not, as always, given too generous a poetic license to his characters. On the other hand he lays bare “those familiar moments of emotion” so rigorously that just for this we are reluctant, when the time comes, to leave the house of Ondaatje’s spare and sensuous prose.