Poetic champion, composed

Michael Ondaatje looks exactly like you’d expect a master craftsman to look: stately, white-haired and avuncular, if occasionally prone to contemplative silences while he ruminates over the interviewer’s questions. The 64-year-old Sri Lankan-Canadian writer is in Dublin to promote his latest novel Divisadero, an uneven but often extraordinarily written book that, true to its title and theme, has divided the critics. No two reviewers can seem to agree on its merits or demerits, some hailing it as a masterpiece, others claiming it borders on incoherent.
If anything, Divisadero reads less like a full-length novel than a series of interconnected novellas. The book begins in Steinbeck country, moves into Auster-esque metaphysical noir, shifts to a pastoral French romance and concludes with a WWI tour de force. Only a writer of Ondaatje’s virtuosity could get away with ending a novel with the back-story, and if Divisadero is not his most unequivocally successful book, there’s no denying its considerable architectural skill.
“I’m glad you said architectural, ’cos I always think in terms of a book that way,” he says as he pours us both a cup of coffee in the Clarence Hotel lounge. “For me the editing stage is as important as the writing stage in some way, reflecting back on moments and echoing curves and stuff like that. Part of me thinks I’ll never know my book as well as when I was rewriting and rewriting it and reading it again and again. But what we’re talking about is very different from what people usually ask me: ‘Why wasn’t this guy…?’ There’s usually confusion. And the response has been a lot of confusion or irritation. So that doesn’t help me.”
A recurring criticism is that one of the novel’s most boldly drawn characters, the poker hustler Coop, disappears halfway through the book.
“Yeah, I know” Ondaatje sighs, his mood somewhere between exasperated and sanguine.
“People have missed Coop,” he says. “I miss Coop! It’s about missing, that’s my only excuse! A kind of joyous reunion would have been a disaster.”
But there’s a thing: in an age of online Order-to-Spec, there’s an increasingly prevalent notion that the writer or artist should comply with the consumer’s needs, as though the reader has the right to exert influence over the shaping of the material. You can see it on bands’ message boards, where even devout fans want the next album specifically tailored to their preferences.
“I know! That’s so true, yeah. Someone would say (about Divisadero), ‘Well, he lost his way halfway through…’ What the fuck?!! (Laughs) I’m not going to lose my way for five years! I can go this way or that way, and I decided to go this way. It was the same with Anil’s Ghost: I lost my way! Come on! One does have a choice what to do.
“But you’re right, it’s as if there is this democratic right everyone has. Especially the critics. Not all critics, but some critics. Plus they have to kind of explain the book, and that reduces it to a plot summary in some cases. I mean, it’s really interesting to see how a reader responds to a book. There’s an emotional response you want as a writer.”
And Divisadero certainly provokes an emotional response. There are parts of the book’s final section where the text seems to dissolve and the writer communicates almost by telepathy. It’s something Denis Johnson managed to achieve with Jesus’ Son: pure thought conveyed with such skill that the words become invisible, as though the writer has brought us to a place beyond language.
“Lifting off the ground somehow,” Ondaatje says. “I think those are the passages that I feel closest to. There’s so much rewriting in those scenes, but essentially… there are books where that happens, other books, where it’s just incredible. Small little corners that I cling to! It’s almost like when you do a reading, you want to do just those little bits!”
The main argument in favour of Divisadero’s unorthodox construction is that the form matches the content. Ondaatje eschews chronological storytelling in favour of an elliptical structure that mirrors the mind’s compulsion to forever replay key experiences, circling the central event, revisiting it and reshaping it in an attempt to make sense of something that can’t be changed. Traditional narrative, Ondaatje suggests, doesn’t reflect the obsessive and manipulative nature of memory.
“People will say, ‘Why are you trying to destroy the novel?’ and I say, ‘My god, I love the novel, why would I want to destroy it?!’ I was re-reading Nevil Shute recently, who’s the most traditional writer you can think of, but quite wonderful in an old fashioned way. I take great pleasure in stories like that. And they’re quirky, those early stories, but they haven’t gone quirky enough for me. It’s like seeing westerns: they always have a traditional pattern, and you know that behind us weird things are happening, and you want to go into those rooms.”
One of the better westerns of recent times, John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, written by Nick Cave, was all the richer because its characters were riddled with ambiguities. Coincidentally enough, the film had its roots in Hillcoat’s love of Ondaatje’s 1970 poetic-prose masterpiece The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.
“Well, I met Nick Cave actually, in Iceland of all places, and I knew he liked Billy the Kid,” Ondaatje says. “It’s a great film. A guy with a dog in his sleeping bag, chatting away.” (chuckles)
Michael Ondaatje came to prose by way of poetry. In fact, in the early ’70s his devotion to both disciplines dovetailed: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is usually classfied as verse, while 1976’s Coming Through Slaughter – perhaps the greatest book about a jazz musician ever written, and one that can count Steve Earle and James Dean Bradfield among its admirers – isn’t. Personally, I can’t tell the difference.
“I know, I know,” Ondaatje says. “In fact, Billy is often posed as a novel on some lists. I was writing a series of poems and then was longing to suddenly write prose and have a scene where a gunfight took place, and you can’t really do that with a lyric poem too well. So I just expanded the structure, but with the same blood.
“But that was the first book where I really saw you can place this poem by Sally Chisum against this gunfight at so-and-so. The power of those two together was remarkable, so the patterning and placing was where I got the idea of collage and juxtaposition and all that kind of stuff. With Slaughter I wanted it to be prose, but again it was the effect of one person’s mind jumping all over the place.”
Ondaatje’s non-linear approach to storytelling probably owes as much to film-editing techniques as literary devices. Divisadero is full of doubles and flash-cuts, and like Hitchcock’s Vertigo asks if our natures can be changed by taking on a false identity – or having one imposed upon us. The echoes that resonate throughout the book are elaborate and intricate: given or assumed names, mistaken identities, images of glass shards, illicit couples forming within the loose structure of the non-nuclear family. The ourobouros-shaped plot is akin to walking into a cinema halfway through a film and sticking around for the next screening to see what happened in the first few reels. On completing the book, the reader is left with the urge to begin again, this time equipped with the knowledge gleaned from the first reading.
“The concept of what a novel has to be is so limited,” Ondaatje says. “I was watching a Tarkovsky film called The Mirror, and a poem is recited and the camera floats around… you wouldn’t attempt to do that today, they’d knock it off in about ten seconds.”
The book that does most to explain Ondaatje’s methodology is The Conversations, his 2002 collection of interviews with legendary film editor, sonic architect, Coppola collaborator and all round polymath Walter Murch. The two met when Murch – whose portfolio of iconic film moments includes Michael Corleone’s first hit in a Mafioso restaurant and the overhead fan/chopper blades segue of Apocalypse Now – was editing Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation of Ondaatje’s Booker winning novel The English Patient. The resulting series of interviews comprised one of the most fascinating film books of recent times.
“It is a very kind of personal book in a way,” Ondaatje concedes, “because although it’s about somebody else, it’s about the things I’m interested in. And I think in an odd way, whatever the rules are that Murch has set up in that book, I sort of wanted to break them. You don’t want to be faithful to the rules of a master! So while I can totally understand how Murch works in a film with these nine or ten principles, at the same time I didn’t want to carry those principles on my back when I was writing Divisadero. I didn’t think about him consciously at all, but I’m sure there are small things he does that he talks about – us believing the validity of a scene is not just about what’s going on in the room, but the sound of a bell outside a window or the rustle of a branch or something like that.”
One of the most interesting revelations was that Murch buried a bell in the mix at the end of a scene in The English Patient to signify memory, and thus smooth the transition from present day to flashback.
“Yeah, that was an amazing thing to talk about. It feels like an accident – there happens to be a bell there, or a car passing by or something like that, but that’s real magic, to bury the clue so deeply you don’t kind of… it’s like in a Tom Waits song, when the rooster is singing away in the background, or crows are put there intentionally. I was talking to somebody about it and he said, ‘Yeah, the rooster might have been there as an accident the first time, but not the second or third time!’ I think accident is fantastic. You see that in Francis Bacon’s painting, there’s a lot of accident happening – even if it’s fixed, that’s such an important need that art has.”