Michael Ondaatje, In Peak Form

"It wasn't planned, as usual," Ondaatje says. Nor was the part in which an immigrant workman miraculously snatches the nun out of that depth of air. But if he hadn't imagined these things, "The English Patient" -- in which the rescued nun's not-yet-born daughter, Hana, was to play a leading role -- might have been a different book.

"Billy the Kid" may have offered its author a hint of fame, but "The English Patient" brought him the full monty. "Bang, bang, bang, all this was happening," he says, referring to his Booker win and his pursuit by filmmakers. "What saved me was that I was already into 'Anil's Ghost.' "

"Anil" is set in the midst of Sri Lanka's murderous civil war, with its legions of death squad victims. Ondaatje researched the book by interviewing forensic anthropologists and following doctors into war zones ("they were talking about cricket the whole time"). It felt surreal to fly into Hollywood for the ceremony at which "The English Patient" won nine Oscars.

What had felt utterly natural, however, was observing veteran film editor Walter Murch's work on the adaptation of the novel. Invited into the editing room, Ondaatje had seen Murch make decision after decision that established the movie's pace, influenced its moral tone and shaped its disparate elements into a creative whole.

The writer watched, fascinated, as the shadowy outline of intention came into focus -- just as it did when he edited his own work.

Unanticipated Collisions

Ondaatje took the title "Divisadero" from a street in San Francisco. "I just love that name," he says, but there was more to his choice than that. The word suggests a dividing line, which seems appropriate for a novel split by both narrative and geography.

It may also, he notes, suggest gazing at something from a distance: at another person's story, for example, or into one's own past.

"Divisadero" starts with the odd assembled family Ondaatje imagined into that stunning California landscape. There's a man whose wife has died in childbirth; two sisters, Anna and Claire, unrelated by blood; and Coop, a somewhat older orphan. A love affair sparks a burst of violence that blows all three young people into separate, haunted lives.

Coop surfaces as a cardsharp in Tahoe, Claire as an investigator for a San Francisco lawyer. Anna turns to writing and moves to France, where she researches the life of a poet named Lucien Segura, a man "disconcerted by the secrets he had kept from himself." It is Segura's unknown history, and in particular the story of an old, unrecognized love, that takes over the last third of the novel.

What to make of this abrupt turn? Might Murch, Ondaatje's cinematic alter ego, be able to explain?

Well . . .

Murch hasn't read "Divisadero" yet and thus can't really judge it. But "there's a rule of thumb in filmmaking," he says, "which is that all the central characters in the film have to be on the boat by at least the halfway point. Preferably by the end of the first third."

Murch and Ondaatje have collaborated on a book of interviews: "The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film." In it, Murch talks about "the incredible richness that comes from the unanticipated collisions of things."

The phrase may come as close as anything to capturing what Ondaatje is up to.

"I think what he's done in this novel is very daring," says his longtime Canadian editor, Ellen Seligman, "and I think it works supremely." Readers will absorb the book's meaning, she thinks, less through its narrative than "at a more or less visceral level."

"There's a kind of a great indirection to 'Divisadero,' " agrees his American editor, Sonny Mehta. "The echoes build up as the second half unfolds."

Ondaatje himself finds it hard to articulate the indirect connections he has worked so hard to achieve.

There are "no definite parallels" between his French and American stories, he says, just "lots of echoes." Parents discover secrets about their children. Siblings' identities get confused. A story involving a father ends -- "I could not think of anything to take it further" -- only to be echoed and advanced in a second story, involving a different father.

Binding all this together is the remorseless pull of the past, and the question of whether we can escape it.

"We have art," Nietzsche said, "so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth." The philosopher's view is quoted twice in "Divisadero," followed each time by Anna's view that "the raw truth of an incident never ends."

"It's a phrase that's in debate in the novel," Ondaatje says.

But at least it's in debate in a finished novel now.

"The book is done; the book is out there and you feel certain about it," he says happily as a waiter collects the check. "Six months ago, I was still in turmoil."

And yet:

Can the creative process ever really come to an end for Michael Ondaatje, insatiable improviser, perpetual hunter for the right accidental notes? The answer is suggested by his attitude toward rereading his own books.

He never has.

"I should read them someday, and learn something," he says. "But I'd probably want to rewrite them."