Cat's Table

The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje, is a captivating coming of age story about three boys who make the long journey from Columbo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England on The Oronsay, back in 1954. The protagonist is eleven year old Michael, who befriends two other boys his age, Ramadhin and Cassius. They are each traveling without parents, and so at mealtimes, they are seated with a random group of adults who seem like a ragtag group of less fortunate people. It is one of these, an eccentric woman traveling with pigeons, who coins the name of their table and declares it the least privileged spot, being as far away from the captain's table as possible.

During these twenty-one days, these boys get into various kinds of trouble, witness unusual and frightening events, and begin to look outward in more observant, mature ways than they ever have before. Specifically, these boys are awakened to how much lies beneath the surface of seemingly boring, ordinary adults. The denizens of the cat's table, for instance, are most intriguing. These characters are well presented, with a beautifully crafted amount of development twined with enough mystery to challenge the reader's imagination, leaving much to ponder.

As Michael, Ramadhin, and Cassius take the long cruise through the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean, new worlds open up for them, in both positive and negative ways; towards the end of the trip, there is a very disturbing event which remains mysterious.

This story is not told linearly. Instead, Michael moves back and forth between his momentous journey and his present life. Very little is said about his early life in Sri Lanka, or about his very first days in England with a mother he hadn't seen for about three years. I got the feeling that his story became somewhat anti-climatic after this magical time he spent on The Oronsay, that he never experienced anything so intense ever again, and that the rest of his life was all about interpreting what had happened during those days at sea.

As an adult, Michael does receive more enlightenment about what he'd witnessed during his eleventh year, when his mind was growing to include the a larger world, while still clinging to a vestige of magical thought. Of course, these things are not completely illuminated, but then, they never are. Ondaatje chose the right place to let Michael go on without the reader.


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Though Michael Ondaatje states that this work is a novel, not based on fact, there are aspects that must be autobiographical, namely the fact that Ondaatje moved from Columbo to England in 1954, when he would have been eleven years old. And he did make such a voyage alone, but states that he barely remembers it, and that the adventures in this story are completely fabricated. Also, like his novel's character, he became a writer.

Anyway, both thumbs up! I enjoyed this one immensely.

It's a four-star book with five stars. I'll explain in a minute.

I'm still thinking on the Cat's Table. I've enjoyed Ondaatje's poetry more than his novels and this book seems to straddle those categories a bit. He writes beautifully on the visual and emotional fronts. He structures long works creatively and I'm still trying to decide how well this one works for me.

The Cat's Table is, primarily, a story of a three-week voyage by ship, from Colombo to London. Its focus is on three unrelated and unsupervised boys and their interactions with fellow travelers, especially those assigned to their low-profile dinner table. It's a 1952 bit of exotica and bildungsroman with flashes into the future to see how these characters fare or have been effected by events along the voyage.

I think the structure lessens the emotional impact a bit, but I'll keep thinking on it for a while. Sometimes a really excellent book will have characters that come back to the front of my mind over the course of years. I can almost imagine the ship and the lights of the Suez Canal at night coming back to me, but not the characters.

So, five stars?

If you are an author who wants to evoke a powerful emotional response, there are some easy paths to this: rape, torture, abuse of children or other innocents, messy divorces, cancer, etc. Some of these things are fairly common in our lives, some much less so. All can be used for shock value and as a foil for characters to be tested, to explain their growth or diminishing.

As a reader, often but not exclusively, of what passes as serious literature (I want to read short lists for the Booker and Tournament of Books selections and Pulitzers and National Book awards) I want to see what an author can say about life without resorting to these easy obstacles. Being wiped out in a drug deal gone bad is not particularly enlightening. I am shocked but not improved in any way from the depiction of a brutal rape either from the victim's or the aggressor's point-of-view. What is particular bothersome is that these shortcuts are more frequently becoming the path toward critical acclaim and awards.

So, in some categories of literature, I'm taking away a star or more for authors that require this little bit of shock value to propel their characters or add weight to their writing. Likewise, I'll add a star to authors that can get by without it. Ondaatje has written beautifully and thoughtfully about humanity enlarged by events and gets one rape-free star bonus point.