Divisadero— meaning ‘division’ or ‘vantage point’— is a complex work, encompassing the stories of disconnected people.

Traditionalists, those who like a story to flow from a beginning to a neat conclusion, may find grouses with the plot handling in Michael Ondaatje’s first work of fiction since Anil’s Ghost in 2000.

The novel begins on a farm in northern California. A farmer, whose wife dies during the birth of his child, Anna, also brings an orphaned baby girl, Claire, home from the hospital.

They are raised as sisters by a distant father. They grow up, during the 1970s and 80s, alongside a boy, Cooper. Four years elder than the girls, Cooper joins the family after his own parents, who occupied the neighbouring farm, are murdered.

When Anna and Claire are sixteen, a violent incident occurs and ‘sets fire to the rest of their lives.’ The event, which takes place during a storm, shatters the family. They scatter, with physical and psychological wounds.
Ondaatje then provides episodes from the lonely adult lives of Anna, Claire and Cooper. Cooper becomes a professional gambler and cardsharp, Claire a researcher for a San Francisco lawyer and Anna an academic specialising in French literature. Though time passes, ‘the raw truth of an episode never ends.’

Just as the family members are distant and detached from each other, Ondaatje never allows his readers to warm to the characters. Is that a stroke of artistic genius, forcing us to empathise with characters who long for communication and warmth, or a simple lack of character development? Authors of lesser standing would probably be castigated for failing to make the characters rounder. But this is a recognised master, author of The English Patient.

That said, moving from chapter to chapter, Ondaatje’s frequent changes to the voice, style and tenses used in Divisadero can be distracting. At the same time, it could be argued that this aids Ondaatje’s exploration into the concept of time.

Challenging linear time

He challenges a linear perception of events. Past and present are not necessarily separate entities. Events from long ago may still have a very real bearing on the present.

‘There’s always damage collected in childhood,’ says Claire’s employer Vea, a man still living with the Vietnam War.

Anna, nominally Divisadero’s main character, rents a house in Dému, south-central France, in order to research the life of a poet and author, Lucien Segura. Her subsequent affair with a local man, Rafael, forces her to confront her past. Rafael too, has his ghosts.

He lost contact with his father, a thief, directly after the burial of his Romany mother, Aria. Rafael rues that he never got close to his father. Anna and Rafael are afflicted by similar pains.

In the final two-fifths of Divisadero, Ondaatje explores further parallels between France and the United States. Anna, Cooper and Claire fade into the background. Unexpectedly, Divisadero becomes the tale of Lucien Segura.
His experiences and emotional suffering reflects those of the American characters. Segura longs for familial closeness and, aged sixteen, is injured.

His fascination, friendship and love for his slightly elder and already married neighbour, Marie-Neige, inspires a commercially successful series of books which draws upon the suffering around him. The stories are his therapy, so that he ‘shall not be destroyed by the truth.’

A number of universal themes— for example, the impact of war on human lives— are touched upon in Divisadero.
Yet despite the universality of the themes, the switch in focus from the American characters to the tale of Lucien Segura is unsatisfactory. Divisadero is likely to divide opinions in the literary world.

Book Title: Divisadero
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN:  978 0 7475 8924 2
Cover Price: GBP 17.99