Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Opening the pages of "Warlight", the new novel by Michael Ondaatje, is like stepping back to 1945, both because of the setting and because of the elegant prose. Immediately after the war, most of London still in rubble from The Blitz, siblings, Rachel and Nathaniel find themselves largely on their own after their parents decamp to Singapore leaving them under the dubious guardianship of a "friend" whom they call The Moth. Gradually it is revealed through our first-person narrator, Nathaniel, that all is not what it seems. Who is The Moth? Criminal? Spy? Both? What is really going on with their parents? Ondaatje makes the English language sing as he tells the story of this brother and sister as they grow up quickly in this well paced and plotted novel. Focusing on Nathaniel, we learn that their home quickly fills up with other “strange” characters, and one of them, a former boxer, known only as The Darter, enlists Nathaniel into helping him smuggle Greyhounds for the burgeoning and entirely unregulated Greyhound Racing business. Nathaniel and The Darter become close until a violent confrontation changes everything. The second part of the novel moves us to Suffolk in the late 1950s as adult Nathaniel attempts to piece together the mystery of his parents, and their cohorts’ war work. “The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.” Says Nathaniel. Through a mixture of investigation and imagination, Nathaniel fleshes out his own origin story, for in essence, this is a mother-son story merely set around WWII where the muted light at night is called “warlight”.