Warlight has the immediate allure of a dark fairy tale ... Warlight is a mosaic of such fragments, so cunningly assembled that the finished pattern seems as inevitable as it is harmonious. What must happen does happen in this elegiac thriller; we just can’t see it coming ... As the pattern emerges, Ondaatje imperceptibly tightens the narrative. Gradually, we see that no detail or character, however incidental, has been extraneous ... Like its more immediate predecessors—The Cat’s Table, in particular—Ondaatje’s new novel is leaner than The English Patient and its focus tighter, a searchlight’s focus ... In Warlight, all is illuminated, at first dimly then starkly, but always brilliantly.
...a tender coming-of-age story so warmly delivered you almost forget how much of its plot involves smuggling, spycraft and assassins ... The pleasure of spy novels is their suggestion that smarter and savvier figures are protecting our lives. Ondaatje tweaks the notion, considering Nathaniel’s life in the context of spies falling down on the job ... Ondaatje gets to have it both ways: His elegant prose is a pleasure in its own right and a scrim that Nathaniel layers over his own story, protecting himself against how abandoned he’s been. A love of secrets, for better or for worse, is his inheritance.
Like The English Patient, Warlight's concern is with the wages and repercussions of war, again addressed in a narrative that involves morally ambiguous espionage, pieced together and revealed gradually, bit by tantalizing bit ... The murkiness, camouflage, and subterfuge add intrigue and atmosphere to Warlight, but many of the characters remain hazy, sometimes frustratingly so, as if you were trying to make out their features through sunglasses at night. The thwarted love story Nathaniel imagines for his self-contained, forever strategizing mother falls far short of the intense, aching passion and loss at the heart of The English Patient ... With Warlight, Ondaatje gives us another reminder of the long dark shadow cast by war.
Warlight is Ondaatje’s most haunting novel after The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize in 1992 ... Warlight might frustrate some readers, with its recursive, looping structure, its gathering of fragments into a significant whole. It will disappoint any readers who want only a second English Patient and aren’t more open to Ondaatje’s extraordinary range of storytelling ... But over time — and this is a novel that should be read in long slow sips — Warlight is mesmerising, and powerfully sad ... This novel dives into the darkness, and finds small miracles among the shattered glass, the ruins.
...a story of secrets and revelations that unfolds like a night-blooming flower ... Nathaniel’s expeditions with the Darter, floating the cuts and canals north of the Thames on a barge, smuggling illicit greyhounds to illegal races, have the texture of a dream that hovers on the edge of nightmare ... Warlight is a spy story, a mother-son story and a love story. They are eloquently told and heartbreakingly believable, but the main reason to read this novel is that no other writer builds a world with the delicacy and precision of Michael Ondaatje. You enter it, fall under its spell and never want to leave. Read Warlight to unearth its secrets, and read it again and again for the experience of total immersion into the imagination of a great writer.
In Ondaatje’s new novel, his eighth, his appetite for imprecision is stronger than ever (the title itself shrouds the action in a kind of twilight: the dimmed warlight in the wake of the blitz) ...
Ondaatje is a skilfully deliberate writer, and these secrets inevitably generate a certain degree of suspense ... But so regular is the pattern of uncertainty in this opening section of the novel, and so deep is the shading of motive and consequence, that it’s hard not to feel a degree of impatience ... we don’t really feel the threat on our pulses ... Rather than closing the book convinced that psychological insights have been generated by Jamesian withholdings, we might equally well feel that characters have been flattened by our simply not knowing enough about them, and that our interest in their doings is diminished by the same means.
Set in London in 1945, a city still broken from the Blitz, Warlight is a lyrical journey into the past, illuminating, as its title implies, both the traumas and the possibilities of rebuilding a life after war ... an entrancing and masterfully crafted story ... at a time when so much of warfare is difficult to see—special forces operations, cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and drone strikes—a novel can illuminate the human suffering of war by looking at it askance. If that is true, then Warlight is a novel for today’s wars: an invitation, indeed a demand, that we recognize our dependence on others and the profound responsibilities that brings.
If we think about memory this way—as a medium of visual metaphors—then we begin to understand the extraordinary intensity of Ondaatje’s writing style: he is a memory artist. The unique reality effect that he achieves in his best work is the product of his ability to summon images with an acuity that makes the reader experience them with the force of something familiar, intimate and truthful. Warlight is a novel that comes back to you as a series of sharply perceived images ... Warlight’s brilliance comes from telling a familiar story—the female spy has become an established literary trope, from William Boyd to Simon Mawer—in a way that gives us all the pleasures of the genre without ever feeling hackneyed or predictable. It’s as if WG Sebald wrote a Bond novel.
In Warlight it’s difficult at times to work out what’s happening ... [scenes containing] sexual encounters, where the young lovers run around naked in the dark, are some of the best passages in the book ... And yet all these scenes and their striking ephemera – the greyhounds, the china, the empty munitions factories, Agnes’s handstands in an empty house, the sculptures of goddesses hidden in tunnels under the Criterion – aren’t quite as seductive as they ought to be ... There’s something’s exhausting – or tired, slack inside the sentences – in Warlight’s effort to be enchanting, extraordinary, legendary ... Nothing in the world of this novel is ever redundant; nothing is accidental. Whenever you come across a striking detail... you can be sure it will crop up again, be charged with more significance, be joined with the rest of the story in a long chain of meaning, even if that meaning may never become entirely clear.
Warlight reads, at its not-infrequent best, like a late-career John le Carré novel. It hooks you in ways that make its quiet storm of bombast almost possible to bear ... Warlight moves at a clip that, in Ondaatje terms, can be said to be breakneck. He writes well about all sorts of things, from British private schools to river navigation to how large restaurants operate. He’s a devotee of curious detail. This story is, however, told at a distance ... There’s an unpleasant sense that Ondaatje is regaling us rather than simply putting across a story. In his overweening interest in secrets and tall tales, in his relish for how stories are told, he’s taken the Salman Rushdie exit off the Paul Auster turnpike ... his burnished, lukewarm sentences don’t snap to life like the people he enjoys. Reading him on these scruffy men and women is like listening to someone try to play 'Long Tall Sally' on solo cello. It’s not awful, but it’s weird.
Most comfortable as an observer, Nathaniel’s passivity can make Warlight at times satisfyingly methodical and contemplative, and at others slow and frustratingly peripheral ... In this latest book, Ondaatje largely eschews robust characters and gripping plotlines to instead spend his creative energies on atmosphere, observation and theme. This is something of a departure, as the author’s spare novels have typically given a feeling of energetic movement and lifelike realism despite their reticence. Warlight feels more akin to the playful absurdity of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, and at its best it embraces a postmodern two-dimensionality that works in sync with its absurd feel. But at other times it seems to work against its own impulses, as though it hopes we take seriously things that are very hard not to laugh at ... Ondaatje tantalizes us with these alternative histories resting just beyond the story we have, each of his characters only ever picking out the patterns within their own small sphere of illumination. The frustrations of Warlight’s cul-de-sac-like plotlines ultimately serve to remind us that all of our stories will be necessarily incomplete — we are all always operating in the titular half-light.
The world that Ondaatje has created is intensely mid-century English, abundant with details of old-fashioned arts such as thatching and beekeeping, and arcane details about greyhound racing and college roof climbing. Scenes depicted in the earlier pages are drenched in the shadowed lighting and elliptical dialogue of classic black-and-white British films such as Brief Encounter or The Third Man ... Every sentence that Ondaatje writes defies gravity with its elegance, yet is weighty with significance ... underneath the uncertainty there is a sturdy cohesion that makes this one of Ondaatje’s most successful and satisfying novels.
Warlight moves with the same sinuous language as [Ondaatje's] earlier books ... The story can twist out of reach at a few points, but Ondaatje reels us back — sometimes years later ... Warlight sets this drama appropriately amid London fog at its murky edges — the shores of the Thames and its lacework of canals; the countryside near Suffolk. In finding his way through the story, the author crosses new lexicons, and we emerge from it like after a hard rain.
This is a book that requires close reading. A sentence, a reference, will signal something yet to come ... This is a book rich with detail. The reader is bound to be conscious of a hidden ballast of research...but so deft is the writing that you forget this, simply appreciating the meticulous background that brings alive a time and a place ... But it’s often the telling image that’s the most striking, the incidental note that summons up the living past ... [an] intricate and absorbing novel.
Warlight is a thoroughly fogbound book about childhood and espionage in postwar Britain that feels its way forward with little sense of direction, creating intrigue and allure from the 'mysterious cloak'—to borrow again from Monet—that covers and conceals its story ... Mr. Ondaatje has stepped into John le Carré’s world of spies and criminals but he has left his resolutions tantalizingly incomplete. His novel views history as a child would, in ignorance but also in innocence and wonder at the scope of its unknowns.
Woven into Warlight’s pages are the fragments of several fascinating half-stories ... Ondaatje approaches most of them at a kind of lyrical but inscrutable remove.
Ondaatje’s gorgeous, spellbinding prose is precise and lustrous, witty, and tender. As the painful truth of this fractured family emerges and Rose’s riveting story takes center stage, Ondaatje balances major and minor chords, sun and shadow, with masterful grace beautifully concentrated in 'warlight,' his term for the sparest possible illumination during the city’s defensive blackouts ... Ondaatje’s drolly charming, stealthily sorrowful tale casts subtle light on secret skirmishes and wounds sustained as war is slowly forged into peace.
...chewy details charm the curious reader and testify to a writer’s expertise — always essential in novels that burrow into history ... As ever, Michael Ondaatje writes beautifully. His sentences whiz to the target like arrows. His observations intrigue, as does the structure of his novel — a tale of adventure and mysteries that switches into a quest for answers. Some answers come. But as they do, this rich novel raises other questions that are just as fascinating.
The title of Booker-prize winning author Michael Ondaatje’s latest work, Warlight, aptly sets the atmosphere: the darkness of war casts an emotional and physical pall over this captivating novel ... Warlight is constantly surprising and thoroughly satisfying. It is a rich story with intriguing characters whose personal secrets resonate more broadly -- as a lesson in the prolonged, haunting repercussions of war.
This is an immensely rich and rewarding, and at times uncanny, aspect of reading Michael Ondaatje ... The lives of parents before their children are always something of a mystery to those children. Growing up, it can be difficult to imagine that our parents even existed before we arrived on the scene. As Warlight lyrically indicates, parents’ lives always exist simultaneously within themselves and in their children’s imaginations.
...[a] haunting, brilliant novel ... Mesmerizing from the first sentence, rife with poignant insights and satisfying subplots, this novel about secrets and loss may be Ondaatje's best work yet.
