The King's English Bookshop

Three prepubescent boys vaguely supervised but essentially alone, run feral on the decks of a ship. Also on board are the slightly older (and lovely) Emily; the enigmatic but ancient (at least in the eyes of the boys) Miss Lasqueti; Daniels, who tends a secret garden in the bowels of the ship; a wounded Lord, a fake Baron, a mute, and a shackled prisoner who appears with his guards late each night. As one of the young boys, Myna, narrates, he slips seamlessly from present to future and back again to shipboard, weaving the fragments of lives he and his friends witness, the bits and pieces of conversation they overhear, into a mysterious tapestry of their own design—a design that turns out to bear only partial relationship to reality. The journey and the tale proceed at a deceptively quiet pace, suddenly coming to a full boil in unexpected ways as Myna engages in surprising escapades, encounters characters in shocking situations, responds in the unpredictable ways young boys are capable of. The pace then quiets again as he views these startling events through the hindsight of memory. The misperception of youth, its ardent loyalties and heedless heroics, the distant, bloodless vistas of adult recall, the unexpected connections, the missed chances and unrealized relationships are cumulative in affect. As in The English Patience, Ondaatje has, in The Cat’s Table, blended passion and adventure, metaphor and memory, into a blindingly good and unforgettable work of fiction.