Author Michael Ondaatje. (Jeff Nolte/McClelland & Stewart)
There’s a neat symmetry in the release of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel Divisadero coming just a few weeks after the announcement of his inclusion on the shortlist for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded every two years for an author’s life work. It’s not that Ondaatje’s place as one of the great writers of our time was ever in doubt. But it’s been seven long years since his last novel – the Giller Prize winner Anil’s Ghost – and the bewitching, assured Divisadero is the perfect reminder of why Ondaatje deserves to be honoured with his global peers.
Anna and Claire are sisters in every way but blood. Raised on a northern California ranch in the 1970s, the two girls were born at the same hospital within days of each other, and both lost their mothers in childbirth. In an act of grief and compassion, Anna’s father adopts Claire and raises the two girls with a gruff approximation of love. He is a ghost of a man, so taciturn that the only time his daughters can touch him is during his evening nap, “when he had ceded control on the tartan sofa, his girls enclosed, one in each of his arms.”
Rounding out this de facto family is Coop, a near-mute ranch hand four years’ Anna and Claire’s senior, who was brought into the household as a toddler after his entire family was murdered. Coop is intimate with the family – he plays an almost maternal role as confessor and witness to bookish Anna and horse-loving Claire. But he remains an outsider: “As a teenager he was hesitant, taking no more than he was given.”
When Coop is 20 and Anna 16, they fall into a passionate, sexual affair. On the night of a brutal storm, they are discovered by Anna’s father and a violent fight ensues. Years later, Anna reflects that the incident was “in retrospect something very small, something that might occur within just a square inch or two of Brueghel. But it set fire to the rest of my life.”
(McClelland & Stewart)
Indeed, the fight severs the family forever. Coop flees to find his fortune in Nevada as a card sharp. Anna runs away and reinvents herself as an academic in France, researching a First World War-era poet named Lucien Segura. Claire winds up working as researcher for a San Francisco defence lawyer, spending solitary weekends riding her horse through the California wilderness.
Like a kaleidoscope, the novel fragments after the fight, first reconstituting itself 20 years later as Coop learns to con poker players in Nevada. Then a decade after that, the story continues in France, where Anna is seduced by a Roma musician; then again, back in America, with a chance reunion between Claire and Coop. Finally, the novel travels back to the early 20th century, with the life story of Lucien Segura.
This strange, seemingly haphazard structure might have been a disaster if not for Ondaatje’s maestro-like control and page-turning plot. It’s only in the novel’s final pages that the genius of this multi-layered, multi-perspective approach fully reveals itself. This is a story of splintered characters, liars and tricksters, people with histories cut short, or memories destroyed. And in this fractured state, they are constantly seeking a perspective and a purchase on their history. (The novel’s clever, carefully chosen title refers to a Spanish word that means both division and an elevated place from which a broad expanse can be viewed.) No wonder Anna spends her days mired in another person’s past. “Those who have an orphan’s sense of history,” she says, “love history.”
Divisadero is published by McClelland and Stewart.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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