As patient as a fisherman, Michael Ondaatje writes 'up to 20 drafts' of each of his novels. He talks to Rosita Bolandabout the precise use of language
Writer Michael Ondaatje has the face of a fisherman. The white beard, the hair verging on wild, and the clear blue eyes that are skilled at reading the ever-changing texture of a surface; a necessary talent in order to successfully haul the unseen shoals of brightness from the depths, whether you be fisherman or writer.
"With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time." These lines from Divisadero, Sri Lanka-born Ondaatje's fifth and latest novel, could read as a concise description of his distinctive non-linear style of writing, where narrative perspectives and chronologies are constantly shifting.
"Divisadero, more than any of my other books, looks at how memory governs us," Ondaatje says.
Wearing a beautifully tailored dark tweed jacket, dark trousers, charcoal-hued jumper and white shirt, he's sitting in a Dublin hotel, drinking an inch of espresso, focused on the interview from the moment he sits down. Perched intently on the edge of his chair, he has even courteously offered to hold the tape recorder, so it will record his low voice with its eclectic accent more clearly against the backing track of the hotel-lobby muzak.
Ondaatje has said in the past that the starting points for his books are isolated images, and he has certainly given his readers many striking images which leap and glint in the memory long after the reading. A nun falls off an unfinished bridge in In the Skin of a Lion "into the long depth of air which held nothing, only sometimes a rivet or a dropped hammer during the day"; the nurse Hana, who writes her story in random pages of books she finds in the ruined library of the ruined Italian house in The English Patient; Lalla, Ondaatje's Sri Lankan grandmother in his memoir, Running in the Family, who was swept away by huge floods and died floating high over the solved fir-tree puzzle of Nuwara Eliya's drowned maze, within which her grandchildren had always got lost.
With Divisadero, a sometimes confusing novel of two different stories, voices and eras that interconnect in unexpected ways, the starting point, Ondaatje says now, was "with the scene of the horse in the barn". This is a startlingly vivid scene where the two 15-year-old sisters - who are not actually sisters - Claire and Anna, are each kicked by the same horse in the family barn.
"That was the first scene I wrote, and then I had to build a world around that," Ondaatje explains. "It was almost like being given a photograph in the middle of a story and you have to find all the pictures around it, and then before it and after it."
Michael Ondaatje was born in 1943, the youngest of four children in what was then Ceylon, to a wealthy and extraordinary family of mixed heritage. He is part Dutch, part Tamil, part Singhalese and part Portuguese. At five, his parents divorced, finally sundered by his father's manic alcoholism. At 11, he left for England with his mother. At 19, his older brother, Christopher (now a multi-millionaire businessman and philanthropist) invited him to Canada, where he was then living. Ondaatje has lived in Canada ever since, where his home is in Toronto.
Ondaatje's first three books were poetry. In There's A Trick With a Knife I'm Learning To Do (1979), two long poems, Light and Letters and Other Worlds, focused on his Ceylonese roots and his family life there, particularly the wild chaos of his father's life. He had not been back to Sri Lanka since leaving as a child: "These are their fragments, all I remember,/ wanting more knowledge of them."
"At the time I wrote the poems, that was all I knew of my family," Ondaatje says. "The memories I had of Sri Lanka were like nuggets. I had rumours, pieces of information that didn't hold together. A reference to some aunt or uncle, but I had no context for them. So when I went back to Sri Lanka, I had to find a context for all that; it all sort of fitted into the landscape as reasonable, all these surreal stories."
THE STORIES TOLD in these two poems turn up later in Ondaatje's beautiful and remarkable fictional memoir, Running in the Family (1982), which reimagines the lives of his dead relatives, while also being a lyrical, impressionistic portrait of the country he found on return. Of all Ondaatje's books, it is this one that has the most gaiety and lightness, although the merry ferocity of the stories told within it do not disguise the dark undertow that moves like a shadow through the pages. Is it exotic or appalling to have a father who went on such dedicated benders that he was finally banned from Ceylon Railways in 1943 after he produced a revolver, searched all passenger luggage, and made the train shunt up and down the tracks for hours, thus stopping all other trains from getting through, because, in his drunken paranoia, he thought the train had a bomb on it? Somehow, Ondaatje makes it seem both. Running is also the book which Ondaatje says he feels closest to, and for which he has consistently received the most mail from readers. "Which has always surprised me. And delighted me."
In many ways, Running in the Family is the cipher to the rest of Ondaatje's work. The power of story and the function of memory (both reliable and unreliable), each of them themes which have run through his work ever since, are most clearly evident here.
"My childhood was one of stories, and of hearing stories being told," he says. "There was that sense of a version of the world around me that was verbal. And I think that's one of the things that has probably been a huge influence on me in two ways. One is that aural tradition was very evident: it was the way one wrote in Sri Lanka, and when we wrote books or kept diaries, there was that real sense of storytelling.
"The other thing about it I think was important was that you had a whole variety of opinions in those stories, that you had different versions of the same story. So you tell one story one day and the next day, someone would say, well that's not true, what really happened was . . . this. It was never really just one story. It was a method of telling and it was also the fact that one story contradicted the other one. When I was writing Running, I really got a sense of that. So I think that kind of splintered narrative thing, which I obviously have now, is possibly a part of that."
From time to time in the interview Ondaatje grasps his hands and cracks his knuckle joints loudly. He does this unselfconsciously, usually when he is taking time to think about an answer to a question, and the sound of bone cracking within flesh resounds with eerie consistency through the empty hotel lobby.
Ondaatje still writes poetry, and the precise use of language which that form requires is evident everywhere in his prose.
"Certainly, I began as a poet. I kind of slid into fiction by accident," he says. "That kind of tightness, that kind of edited quality, is something I suppose I wanted to bring from poetry to fiction; the poetic voice, which is hopefully as precise as possible, and as evocative as possible, and as suggestive as possible.
Ondaatje writes "up to 20 drafts" of each of his books, which are published at seven-year intervals. (He is not currently working on anything.)
"I usually write by hand for the first four or five drafts," he says. "The first four or five drafts I edit word by word. Later, it's about shaping it and so forth, and moving things around if necessary, and cropping whole sections and adding things. At that point, still no one will have seen it.
"Then, when I have taken it as far as it will go, say it's about draft eight or six, or something like that, then I try it out on a few friends and take their responses and then I go back to the book and work on it again - and eventually I give it to a publisher and at that point I work with the editor. Some pages are rewritten numerous times, and there are whole sections I try a few versions of."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, having read and reread the books so often when writing them, Ondaatje never rereads them later. But does he read reviews? Divisadero has received some very mixed reviews.
"Very mixed reviews," Ondaatje agrees. It's the only point in the interview where his composure falters. His face, which has been animated and open throughout, and often smiling, becomes set and guarded. It's suddenly clear that he minds a great deal about his mixed reviews. There is a tiny silence, which goes on a beat too long, and then he says, quite stiffly: "I'm not thrilled about it, but it's okay."
At the end of the interview, when asked if there is anything else he'd like to say, Ondaatje says yes. What he comes out with is a surprise, a non-sequitur.
"I've been thinking about animal life the last few days," he says slowly. "Coetzee [the South African-born novelist] talks about this, and obviously he's very obsessive about this. I think the whole respect of animals as much as humans is a very interesting thing. And landscape. The wideness of it is much greater than we think when we are kids or teenagers. That's what I've been mulling over lately, the affection one has for certain trees or certain animals."
Given this, does he have a dog? He does. "Stella. She's a brown hound. Partly mongrel." Then he laughs. "But of course!"
Only a couple of minutes earlier he's been talking about how he loves the "mongrel form" of fiction; fiction that is rich with a mix of styles and forms. A mongrel.
But of course. What other kind of dog would the writer Michael Ondaatje possibly have?
• Divisadero , by Michael Ondaatje, is published by Bloomsbury, £17.99