On a large ship travelling from Sri Lanka to England in 1954, an 11-year-old boy makes the first significant journey of his life; it will be a rite of passage in more than one sense. Three weeks are to be spent at sea and he is for all practical purposes travelling alone.
A distant acquaintance who happens to be on board keeps an eye on him, but she is a First Class passenger while Michael — along with two boys his age and a few scattered adults — has his meals in the least privileged section of the ship's huge dining room. The good thing about being placed at the “cat's table” is the sense of independence and disreputability it engenders in one so young.
New friends
Michael spends his days mainly in the company of his two new friends, the self-assured Cassius and the introverted Ramadhin, and their paths intersect with those of the adults around them: A botanist who is transporting a whole shimmering garden in the ship's hold; a half-Sicilian pianist named Max Mazappa; an acrobat with the stage name The Hyderabad Mind; the enigmatically spinsterish Miss Lasqueti; and most thrillingly, a shackled convict who is believed to have killed a judge.
“Once we climbed the gangplank on to the Oronsay, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults,” says the grown-up Michael, narrating the story decades after the journey.
Over the course of this novel (written by another Michael — Ondaatje — who also happened to be on an ocean liner from Ceylon to England in 1954), we are left in little doubt that his shipboard experiences have resonated throughout his life. As a married man, when Michael sees his wife dancing with someone else and making a casual gesture that implies intimacy, he is reminded of seeing a similar gesture on the ship's deck years earlier. There are many other echoes of this sort. But even while The Cat's Table recognises the many ways in which people are shaped by — and return to — their early experiences, it is perceptive about the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood. At one point, Cassius suggests that the three boys keep their backgrounds to themselves. “He liked the idea, I think, of being self-sufficient.” It's a reminder that this is how so many of our childhood friendships play out, with the participants being uninterested in the family and background details that will later come to mean a great deal.
This book is also about the impossibility of knowing exactly how and when you pass from one life-stage to the next. (When sailing through one vast body of water after another, the boundaries are necessarily imprecise. There are no signposts to tell you “exactly” where this sea ends and that ocean begins.)
Even as Michael spends his time blithely adventure-seeking with his friends — in other words, “being a child” — there are passages where he gains the self-awareness one associates with growing up.
Looking back
Briefly coerced into assisting a thieving Baron, his body covered in the oil that allows him to slither through a narrow window, he sees himself in a mirror. “This was, I think, the first reflection or portrait that I remember of myself,” the adult Michael tells us, “It was the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years — someone startled, half-formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet.” Another significant moment between Michael and his older cousin Emily — who is also on the ship — carries a hint of sexual awakening before resolving itself into a more conventional scene of a distraught child being comforted by a relative. The one thing that slightly muddied my appreciation of The Cat's Table is that this is two different novels in one. The first is a pure, often exhilarating adventure tale, a boy's voyage of discovery on board an unimaginably big ship where exciting things happen and intriguing people are met.
The second is a more reflective attempt to link these events with Michael's future, and while this is done with care and insight, the two different modes don't always come together seamlessly. At first it seems the book will be set exclusively aboard the ship, but then the first of many “flash-forwards” occurs — a bracket-enclosed, page-length paragraph in which Michael mentions a further acquaintance with Ramadhin in London.
Later, midway through the story, we are taken off the ship for 30 pages and given extended information about Michael's subsequent life, including a relationship with Ramadhin's sister Massi; and there is another long detour towards the end.
I found my attention drifting during these sections. The Cat's Table is full of lovely passages, and has a real feel for how people and their relationships change over time — but the minor disconnect between its two halves make it as choppy in places as the ocean Michael crosses on his way to a new life.
