Michael Ondaatje’s novel ‘In the Skin of a Lion’ explores what it means to be an outsider amongst outsiders. The story follows Patrick Lewis who in the 20s leaves his rural life for the urban swell of Toronto. Here, he moves from group to group of working-class immigrants who are, amongst other things, building the Bloor Street Viaduct. The book gives a voice to the people that history forgets: builders, bakers, fabric dyers and relegates the important, the planners and city commissioners to obscurity.
There are several striking scenes in the book. After dusk in The Palace of Purification, the name of the filtration plant, a milieu of workers of different nationalities illegally create a puppet theatre. The climax of the play sees the only human character brought before the puppet authorities and beaten to the ground because he couldn’t understand the language. Patrick as an ethnic and linguistic outcast himself can’t bear the scene and struggles onto the stage to intervene, holding the human-puppet who he realises is actually a woman. Another is the meeting of the thief Caravaggio and Anne. He watches her pondering her existence by lamp light whilst sitting in darkness on the glass roof. He breaks into the house to call his wife but Anne discovers him. Instead of confrontation they chat about his life as a thief and she tells him that she has written a poem describing the sound of the lake as her lover. She offers him to stay the night.
Ondaatje’s use of language is exquisite. At times a single line stands alone from the rest of the paragraph with lyrical, proverbial beauty, for example: ‘strangers kiss softly as moths.’ His narrative has the technical brilliance of being intimate and sensual, for example during a sexual encounter and then draws back, refusing to fill in gaps and leaving mouth’s free of dialogue.
‘In The Skin of a Lion’ is a fusion of story-telling and poetry. The narrative is strikingly visual with metaphor and unique vignettes. Ondaatje’s unusual tale gives the starring role to those that history usually forgets describing them with flurries of colour, dowsing them in light or casting them in darkness. He shifts the eye of history and portrays those of seeming unimportance with depth and gravitas. As the epigraph by John Berger declares: ‘never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.’
Steven Partridge
