The feline quality of Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cat’s Table” will appeal to anyone who wants to curl up with a playful novel that can bite. This story of retrospection and introspection moves gracefully through a three-week adventure when the narrator was an 11-year-old boy, traveling on a steamer from Sri Lanka to England. The passing decades have transformed that boyhood voyage into a series of burnished moments, some comic, some tragic, some tenaciously mysterious. The result is lithe and quietly profound: a tale about the magic of adolescence and the passing strangers who help tip us into adulthood in ways we don’t become aware of until much later.
Ondaatje claims in an author’s note that, although his new novel “sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, ‘The Cat’s Table’ is fictional.” Indeed, there are obvious similarities between this narrator and Ondaatje, who also traveled from Colombo to London when he was 11. But the number of weird — and even extraordinary — events compressed into these 21 days suggests just how thoroughly the actual voyage has been transformed and enriched by the Booker Prize-winning author of “The English Patient” (recently rereleased in a handsome new edition from Everyman’s Library).
“The Cat’s Table” takes its title from “the least privileged place,” far from the captain’s table, where young Michael and a collection of other lowly passengers are consigned to eat their meals. But of course, for a curious 11-year-old boy left mostly to himself on the open seas, such class distinctions mean nothing. His strange dinner companions are a source of endless fascination: a lovelorn botanist whose artificially lit garden deep in the hold produces every poison known to man; a narcoleptic woman traveling with 30 pigeons; a pianist who knows “confusing and often obscene lyrics from songs”; and a “ship dismantler” who can explain the awesome engineering of their boat. Beyond his assigned table, young Michael discovers a beautiful 17-year-old cousin he hasn’t seen for two years; a famous philanthropist dying from rabies; and — most exciting of all — a shackled prisoner being transported to London for trial.
Michael quickly befriends two other boys on the ship, and, realizing that “we were invisible,” they spend the next three weeks in a breathless series of adventures — “the chance to escape all order.” Sleep is a waste of time when there’s a new universe to explore. “I had no family responsibilities,” Michael recalls. “I could go anywhere, do anything.” It’s a Dickensian Disney at Sea Cruise, unsupervised except by a snobby aunt who winces whenever he calls her “Auntie.” He and his two buddies quickly establish one rule: “Each day we had to do at least one thing that was forbidden.” They smoke twigs broken off from a cane chair, aiming “to smoke the whole chair before the end of our journey.” In one comic, Homeric scene, they strap themselves to the deck during a cyclone to experience the fury of nature. Later, hiding in the lifeboats, they overhear passengers saying things like, “How can it be an aphrodisiac and a laxative?”
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