To write a highly abridged version of the cultural history of the Second World War: First there were the tales of heroism. The Dambusters, Henry V, lots of Kenneth More. Perhaps even Casablanca, at a more twisted edge. My generation (the sixties) grew up with these stories, rendered in black and white, as distant as the eighties must be to a child born a decade ago. Although literature already adopted a more nuanced take: The Plague, Brideshead: a war whose complexity writers struggled to pin down. Next, perhaps the backlash. The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, the war as a backdrop for villainy, complexity. Marathon Man, Shoah, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Another Time Another Place: the truth that there was more to this war than tales of heroism. It was a dirty complex affair. Gravity’s Rainbow and Slaughterhouse Five. Primo Levi, Rawicz and the other holocaust writers. Then, perhaps, the decades of disinterest. War movies were about Vietnam; literature was grappling with post-colonialism, post-existentialism. When it returned, the Second World War had become a post-historical playground. A space for US directors to play out their fantasies. (Spielberg’s Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan; Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards.) It was just another theatre to display special effects and sanitised or desanitised variations on the hero myth. The audience was no longer likely to have lived or experienced the war; the memory ties having been cut, the narrative could be adopted to fit any kind of thesis. Films like Scorsese’s Shutter Island adopted it as a backdrop. Even Son of Saul, for all its potency, is as much an exercise in filmmaking chutzpah as it is a historical discourse. When all, including the worst, is known, there will be nothing more to reveal: it will be about how the work of art chooses to portray the narrative, the techniques, the “art”.
Which takes us to the UK. As previously noted, there has been a glut of recent interest in the arts related to the Second World War. Much has been made of the possible connections between a re-vindication of Britain as an independent nation and the spate of films about D-Day and Churchill. In literature, McEwan’s Atonement, (also made into a film which was celebrated above all for the quality of a tracking shot), signalled the employment of the war as a form of dissecting values which have extended and become distorted in the decades that followed. As though the Second World War is starting to replace the First (which replaced the imperial wars which replaced the Napoleonic wars etc) as a definitive starting point for the understanding of contemporary Britain. (For my generation, the first world war, dulce et decorum est and the poets, still marked that starting point.) All of which leads us up to Ondaatje’s novel, set both during and in the aftermath of a war which, the book suggests, didn’t end in 1945, but dragged on into an unforeseeable future.
Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel, AKA Stitch, whose mother was a spy in the war and the post-war, where she was involved in the partisan struggles in Italy and the Balkans. Nathaniel’s upbringing lacks any kind of familial warmth, with both of his parents absent on secret service duty. Instead, he and his sister are adopted by a surrogate family of oddballs and petty criminals. Nathaniel learns to fit in and feel as though he belongs to this classless society. He has stints working in the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly, as well as assisting the smuggler, ‘The Dart’, move his wares around the London canal system. This world, however, is abruptly taken away as his mother’s past (and present) catches up with him and his sister. A second family is ruptured. Nathaniel spends the rest of the book as a low-key Sherlock, (one of his surrogate family has him read Doyle when he’s young), trying to solve the mystery of his mother’s life, and his own fate.
The writing is, at times dazzling. The author succeeds in bringing this post-war Britain to life with precision and elegance. The book is stacked with detail, from the barrows where people go to eat and exchange gossip in the still bombed-out London streets to the details of the nature of the Suffolk coast. And perhaps there remains the odd reveal, such as the corps of meteorologists who flew in hang-gliders, studying the air currents and weather patterns as the generals prepared for D-Day. Above all, the book’s narrative, and Nathaniel’s emotional history, hinges on the post-war actions of the British, as the Second World War seamlessly elided into the Cold War. Nathaniel pays an emotional price for this over-elaboration, the way in which the power-games of war created a platform for military-political meddling at Europe’s fringes, and elsewhere. Likewise the new, classless British society, represented by The Dart and The Moth and Nathaniel’s teenage fling with the working-class waitress, Agnes, is brought down by the secret machine of war.
It’s tempting to view Ondaatje’s vision, which sometimes veers towards the nostalgic-bucolic, as a critique of the breakdown of the post-war values which lead to the Welfare State, one of the war’s great victories, the product of a kinder society, one which chooses to protect, even sacrifice itself for the good of Nathaniel and his sister. This world fades as, Nathaniel, who appears to have no affective life of his own, drifts towards isolation and nostalgia, desperately seeking to recover a maternal/ paternal affection he was deprived of. The coldness of the British, the novel seems to say, has its roots in pretensions of empire.
Whether this reading is valid or not, or just a reflection of the reader’s perspective, is impossible to say. However, what is without doubt is that Warlight is a novel constructed with a conjurer’s sleight of hand, whose elastic structure allows the writer to flit between post-war and pre-war Britain, telling a complex family history from multiple angles. There are least four beautifully realised worlds contained within the novel: post-war London; pre and post-war Suffolk; and post-war Italy. The writing is elegiac without ever giving into sentimentalism. It honours the valour of the war, whilst acknowledging the cost, a cost which British society, perhaps, continues to pay.
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