In London near the end of World War II, 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister Rachel are left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth, their parents having moved to Singapore. What follows is a strange little book that tries to blend la carre and dickens and despite having lots of initial promise falls a little flat. The books early sections with nathaniel interacting with the Moth and the Darter are fun, whilst the abandonment and distress Rachel feels for her parents abandoning her rings true, but when the book reveals information about the parents , rather than pushing the book forward it deflates it. The rest of the book is fine, Ondaatje is good writer after all, but this initial engagement I had with the novel dropped and finishing the book , rather than enjoying the book, became the goal.

‘In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who might have been criminals’: in the pantheon of great opening lines this one is right up there: simple, intriguing, beautifully balanced – it’s a shame, then, that the rest of the book didn’t capitalise on this opener.

Definitely a book of two halves, the first is part Proustian memoir (memory, mother), part Dickensian London caper (near-orphaned children, characters called The Moth and The Darter, smuggling) – but all is brought to an unexpected ending at almost exactly halfway through the book by the startling incursion of an episode straight out of a commercial thriller. Part two is le Carré-lite as Nat, our narrator, delves into the past life of his mother.

Ondaatje's prose is as elegant as ever but the long diversions into greyhound smuggling, and the gallery of cartoonishly 'colourful' characters made parts of this feel like a reading chore. Overall, this feels old-fashioned as a piece of writing, lacking literary thrill.

Wow - what a book. At first I was reminded of Linda Grant's recent book The Dark Circle and I loved the first half of the book - the falling through the cracks in London just post-war.
The second half took a different turn but for me was just as gripping and all in all I think that despite almost being two different books melded together it worked completely and was a gripping read.

My one gripe? I'd love to have known more about Rachel's side of the story. I think that fans of John Le Carre might find a lot to enjoy in this book.

I had read reviews of this book that were less than enthusiastic, however I was soon drawn into the shadow of this story.

Two children are left by their parents when they allegedly travel to Asia post war in 1945. However it's not long before they find their mother's trunk which never made it onto a plane and start asking questions. These are not answered by their "guardian" the elusive "Moth" or by his friends like the "Darter" who seem to exist within a half shadow /underworld of smuggling .

When Nathaniel himself later becomes involved in a "government building" the past is gradually revealed as are the identities and roles of the major "players" who had remained mysterious to Nathaniel.

This has the lovely flowing prose of Ondaatje's previous work. Like "The English Patient" there are characters who remain enigmatic and there is a shared "carpe diem" theme. I also noticed the similarity with "The English Patient" of the importance of maps as if identity can be related to place - or not . The Warlight of the title is apt as it conjures up subterfuge and opacity. There is a sense that there is no real safety to be had by any of the characters in this world of shifting identities.

My only reservation was that I wasn't sure how some of the revelations towards the end came about as there was a sudden shift to a third person narrator. Was this information that Nathaniel gained through reading reports or stories he himself constructed?

I think I may read it again in the light of what is revealed towards the end of the book in the way you might do with a detective novel.or like a Julian Barnes novel with an unreliable narrator.

An intriguing novel which lives up to its title.

Warlight is Booker Prize winning author Michael Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years. And he has not lost his touch. Much like his early novels In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, this is a simply but beautifully told tale full of secrets, revelations and complex characters. Set in Britain in the years after World War II, it explores the secret lives of a people who worked in intelligence during and after that war.

But this is not how it starts. Warlight starts with a killer opening line:

In 1945 our parents went away and left us with two men who may have criminals.

Nathaniel, the narrator, and his sister Rachel are in their teens and yet their parents leave them in the care of their lodger to go to Singapore. Although it is soon clear to the children that perhaps their mother has not gone with their father after all. They call the man they are left with The Moth and he fills the house with a range of disparate characters. One of these, an ex-boxer known to them only as The Darter, does get the two involved in some vaguely criminal enterprises. This opening has an almost mythic, fairytale feel which then morphs into more of a coming-of-age story. But just as the book is settling into a groove Ondaatje flips the narrative. The second half of the book is a revelation of their mother Rose and her exploits both during and after the war.

Warlight is vintage Ondaatje. Written in his very straight forward, understated style. For example, this description of London in the year after the end of the War:

There were parts of the city where you saw no one, only a few children, walking solitary, listless as small ghosts. It was a time of war ghosts and grey, unlit buildings, even at night, many of their shattered windows still covered over with black material tacked up where glass had once been. The city still felt wounded, uncertain of itself. It allowed one to be rule-less. Everything has already happened. Hadn’t it?

The book feels a little unfocused, rambling between scenes and characters but in a way that slowly builds to a series of revelations. But those individual scenes – stolen nights in empty houses, dog smuggling on the Thames, stories of great chess matches, thatching roofs in Suffolk – are inthemselves beguiling, written with Ondaatje’s poetic flair.

As Nathaniel uncovers the secrets of his mother’s life and those of her friends, Ondaatje ups the pathos. There is quiet, English pain in this search, as if everything is shrouded in the warlight of the title: “the dimmed orange light on bridges to mark the working arch for water traffic, a quiet signal in the midst of the bombing”. But slowly, tragically and inevitably, as the mists of war fade, the truth starts to emerge. The reader is forced to reassess not only the characters that Nathaniel has encountered but their actions and words. And it turns out that Warlight, among other things is also a strange kind of espionage thriller where the outcome is never in doubt.

It may have been a while since Ondaatje’s last fictional outing but in Warlight he demonstrates that he has lost none of his narrative power. This is a sometimes baffling, ultimately satisfying but always beautifully written novel in which, with patience, everything is eventually fully illuminated.

It’s World War II in London and Nathaniel and his sister are left by their parents in the care of a mysterious and somewhat dubious figure known as the Moth. His acquaintances are unusual, varied and often rather suspicious and the two children soon come to the conclusion that their soft-spoken guardian is a criminal. But why would their parents leave them under the eye of such a man? Why did they leave so suddenly for Singapore? Why is their mother’s inexplicable return surrounded with fear and violence? As an adult Nathaniel tells us his story and he has few of the answers himself and we learn along with him as he searches for explanations for the strange and unsettling things he recalls from his childhood. It’s a story full of those things that have made Ondaatje famous, the complex non-linear narrative, the unreliability of memory and recounted events, the nature of guilt, particularly in war where the ends may be said to justify the means. They’re the things that worked so perfectly in the English Patient but just don’t quite come together here, at least not with the same force. It’s a book to that will leave you thoughtful and mildly confused but it fails to resonate the way that his most famous work does.

For me this is not a consequence of the style, which many other reviewers have found frustrating, at least not in the main. It goes without saying that the prose is wonderful but I also loved the non-linear, circuitous route that the story took. This way of circling back to events to offer new thoughts, new details and new complications is one of the best, if most difficult, forms of the first-person voice. It mirrors more closely how we think and how we remember and also how we lie. The same is true of the gaps and the answers that we never get; the readers’ frustration is deliberate because in life sometimes there are no answers or those that keep them refuse to give up their secrets.

For the majority of the novel this worked with all of the effectiveness and precision that I expect of Ondaatje. Where it faltered was the sudden change to the third-person when we were given such a large portion of Nathaniel’s mother’s story without any real idea of where these revelations came from. The problem was not the complexity of the narrative or the omissions but this odd section where an omniscient, unidentified narrator offered up so much information for free when we had had to work so hard to piece together the fragments of information revealed thus far. I kept waiting for an explanation as to why this happened, expecting it to be revealed as another unreliable element but it seemed to be utterly straightforward and I just couldn’t integrate it with the rest of the narrative or even what I had imagined were the key themes of the story. Why offer all of this information and leave the other gaps, the other problems so unsolved?

This conspicuous deus ex machina destabilised the whole story but for no discernible reason, not even as a reflection of fractured unbalanced of life itself. This episode left me unmoored from the story and I was never able to fully reconnect, not least because it returns to its earlier formulation leaving this strange protuberance casting a shadow over the rest of the narrative. It could almost have been excised completely and the story would have been better for it.