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In The Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaatje, is a novel so filled with beautiful imagery and effortless poetry, I would have enjoyed it for those reasons alone. The storytelling is overwhelmingly visual, sometimes tricking the mind's eye into following a striking image rather than the plot element. But in the end, the seemingly random images are the symbols of the unknown interconnectivity of life. No one lives in their own story all alone. It is this sense of having a view that includes too many details to follow that makes the book seem both mysterious and realistic. How often in our own real-life stories do we only pay attention to the pertinent and important facts? And how often does hindsight tell us that the facts were born of chance occurrences we couldn't have known about at the time?
The novel begins with a curious and intimate remembrance of childhood obsessions and embedded images. And like the memories of a child, the story that unfolds doesn't tell us all the expected facts in a linear fashion. Therein lies an aspect of this story that I found deeply interesting: the idea that the experiences of childhood can foreshadow the running themes of a person's life. The concept of fate is blurred with the concept of repeating the familiar in ever widening circles of variation. The buried details--the dream images of the seemingly forgotten past --are what manipulate the present dramas like unseen directors.
Patrick Lewis leaves the Canadian wilderness for Toronto in the 1920's. He seems to have no specific course for his life and wanders among the city's working class like an Englishman exploring the Amazon jungle. He immerses himself in the life of each tribe he comes to until something propels him to move on. This is a mythic and stylized version of Canadian history, as if working class revolutionaries had really won their struggles, becoming the conquering heroes who chose what version of their stories went into the history books. The attention lavished on the details of various trades--bridge builders, leather tanners--doesn't seem unusual in this context. The laborers are noble and exotic: a thief is a shaman, the baker, a hero.
The characters in this story are passionately and intimately drawn, but not laid bare and overanalyzed. You are allowed to get to know people who seem to walk briefly through and are never seen again, yet main characters are sometimes maddeningly distant and protective of their secrets. One has to learn about them through the experiences of other characters. The love felt between people is implied by what they do, and what they can't do. And again, this reflects actual life. Sometimes the people who are important in our stories are more present by effect than they are by physical proximity. And however much we may wish to hear the words directly from them, we are only given secondhand impressions to fondle.
In The Skin of a Lion is a beautifully written book. Its lack of a traditional three act structure kept me alert and curious to see what would develop, instead of anticipating the next stage. Romance was not confined to relationships between lovers, nor sensuality to love scenes--though the love scenes are sensual in unexpected ways and satisfyingly intimate. The metaphors and many unique vignette-like images from the story have followed me, and sometimes play out in my mind like fragments of my own dreams.
Michael Ondaatje has also written other novels, such as The English Patient, and Coming Through Slaughter, as well as collections of poetry. His latest novel, Anil's Ghost is forthcoming this April.
--Pamila Payne