Divisadero Michael Ondaatje Bloomsbury, 288pp, £17.99
“Everything is collage,” Michael Ondaatje writes in his new novel. “There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.”
Divisadero brings together two different narrative strands, one set in present-day California and the other set in France a century ago. The first is about three unrelated children – Anna, Claire and Coop – who are brought together as a family. How the children came to be siblings is relayed in vignettes of the past. Ondaatje’s prose, in this first part of the book, is lucid and transparent, but its lyricism does not detract from the violent episodes at the novel’s core.
Then, the focus abruptly shifts to the life of the author who Anna has moved to rural France to write about. This kills the momentum of the first story, leaving us hanging and confused: as if, caught up in one television programme, you suddenly flipped to a new channel. Here, Ondaatje’s prose works against him: it feels slow and monotonous in comparison.
Divisadero is disappointing and frustrating to read, because Ondaatje is clearly capable of writing compelling fiction, yet chooses to abandon it midway through. And so, in a way, he abandons his readers as well.
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