In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

First published: 1987

Type of plot: Family

Time of work: c. 1908 to 1938

Locale: Ontario, Canada

Principal Characters:

• Patrick Lewis, a farmboy who moves to the city and becomes involved in radical politics
• Rowland Harris, the commissioner of public works for metropolitan Toronto
• Ambrose Small, a millionaire businessman, the subject of a massive manhunt
• Clara Dickens, his lover, a radio actress
• Alice Gull, Clara’s best friend, a former nun, later an anarchist
• Hana Gull, her daughter
• David Caravaggio, a thief, Patrick’s cellmate in prison
• Nicholas Temelcoff, a Greek immigrant

The Novel

According to a brief prefatory note, In the Skin of a Lion is told by a man driving at night from Toronto to a town in rural Ontario. He is weary and worried, and his narrative swerves from one scene to another very much as his car swerves through the moonlit night. Yet he has a good listener, a girl of sixteen.

Patrick Lewis grows up on a farm in eastern Ontario. His father, Hazen Lewis, teaches him how to work with dynamite, blasting mines and breaking up logjams. After his father dies in a mining accident, Patrick goes to Toronto to find work. He becomes a detective or “searcher” whose job is to locate a missing millionaire named Ambrose Small. When he finds Small’s former mistress, she seduces him. They live together, and he comes to love her deeply, but she always says she will leave one day to rejoin Small. One day, she sets out on a train journey from which she never returns.

Meanwhile in Toronto, a young nun is knocked off a new bridge during a freak construction accident. Miraculously, she is caught by a daring worker from Macedonia who saves her life. She has never been so close to a man before, and she decides she will not return to the nunnery. She meets a Finnish immigrant with revolutionary ideas and becomes pregnant by him. A gifted actress and accomplished speaker, she takes part in political rallies and espouses the cause of anarchy: opposition to any exercise of power over the working people. Her lover, Cato, is murdered before their daughter is born.

These are the events recounted in book 1, though some details appear only in the novel’s third and last book. The former nun is Alice Gull. Her rescuer is Nicholas Temelcoff, an immigrant who soon after marries and opens a bakery. Her best friend is Clara Dickens, an actress who becomes involved first with Ambrose Small and then with the “searcher.” Alice meets Patrick through Clara and looks him up in the city after Clara has disappeared.

In book 2, Patrick is a construction laborer, helping to dig a tunnel for the city’s new waterworks. Though attracted to Alice, he is still obsessed with Clara. He tracks her (and her still missing millionaire) to their hiding place. Because he is no longer interested in the reward, and because Clara is no longer interested in him, he returns to Alice. He loves her and her daughter, Hana, but his life is shattered when Alice takes the wrong satchel one day and carries a load of explosives to the site of her accident years earlier. Unable to forget her and her radical ideas, he burns down a lakeside resort and blows up the dock. He is arrested and serves five years in prison. Again, some details are supplied only in book 3.

In prison, Patrick meets David Caravaggio, a former bridge worker who has turned to theft. He learns Caravaggio’s story and begins to plot his revenge on the powers that Alice fought. After his release, he plots a bombing at the city’s new water-filtration plant. Injured in the daring underwater approach, he is confronted by the commissioner of public works, and they talk late into the night about the city, their dreams, and the people with the real power. Exhausted, Patrick falls asleep, while the commissioner calls the police to defuse the bomb but lets the bomber go free. As Patrick is recovering at home, Alice’s daughter, Hana, awakens him to say that Clara has called. After hearing that Ambrose has died, he agrees to meet Clara and begins the six-hour drive with Hana.

The Characters

The story covers thirty years in the life of Patrick Lewis, from childhood to the attempted bombing in 1938. It takes only six hours to narrate, about as long as the novel takes to read. The narrative is confusing, ostensibly because Patrick is tired but also because Ondaatje deliberately throws the reader off balance. He offers the novelist’s equivalent of a filmmaker’s extreme close up. He provides much sensory information, as Patrick works with his hands, but little generalization. This forces the reader to reconstruct the action and re-create the plot.

Patrick is the main character, and five of the novel’s seven chapters are told from his point of view. Of the remaining chapters, one is told from several points of view, including Alice’s, and the other from Caravaggio’s point of view. The novel’s narrator knows what Patrick knows by the time he takes Hana on the night drive. Yet the narrator knows more, including what Patrick will later read in the Riverside Library in Toronto and what Ondaatje will learn as he does research for the novel. The story is Patrick’s, and it becomes Hana’s, but the words are Ondaatje’s.

Patrick is also the most fully realized character. When there is dialogue, he is usually taking part. By contrast, most of other characters are two-dimensional, painted with a few simple strokes of the brush. Patrick’s father, Hazen, is a farmworker who seeks a better career in explosives and is hoist with his own petard. Ambrose Small is a “jackal.” Rowland Harris, the commissioner of public works, is a visionary who turns out to have humble origins. Temelcoff is a daredevil who dreams of owning a bakery. Hana is a good child on the brink of adulthood.

All these characters belong to their time and place. They serve to make “Upper America” what it became by World War II. If there is some irony in the minor characters’ stories, if they are somehow living in the wrong time and place, that is part of the conundrum of existence as Patrick reflects on it.

Critical Context

Ondaatje’s first novel, Running in the Family (1982), tells the story of Ondaatje’s origins in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). It shows how a young person is formed by the stories he or she hears, especially when family members are dead or absent. (Ondaatje’s parents divorced when he was a small child.) In the Skin of a Lion shows the same interest in a family’s traditions, its “hand-me-downs.” Patrick is not Hana’s biological father or even, perhaps, her legal stepfather; one learns only that he loved her mother and wanted to spend his life with them. Caravaggio is not “family” in any proper sense, only a former jailmate of Hana’s guardian. They are, however, representative of Toronto’s ethnic diversity.

Like many Torontonians, Ondaatje drove into town on a freeway built along a river that runs into Lake Ontario. Like other drivers, he admired the Bloor Street Viaduct, which he drove under as he crossed the city’s main east-west artery. He liked the design and wondered about the people who built the city’s infrastructure. Like his “searcher,” Patrick, he went to public libraries. He read about Small, the theatrical impressario who financed the viaduct, and about Harris, who supervised its construction. He found an account of Temelcoff, who worked on the project and who was still alive in the 1980’s.

After the first draft, he despised Small, whom he calls a “jackal,” and was bored by Harris. He wanted to know more about the men who actually built the bridge. It seemed to him that the official history of Canada was in danger of becoming racist because it was erasing the contributions of its immigrant population.

The novel won many awards in Canada, where Ondaatje was already known as a poet and filmmaker. It won a nomination for the prestigious Booker Prize in England, awarded to the best novel of the year. Ondaatje finally won the prize for The English Patient (1992); although that novel is set in bombed-out Italy in 1945 and tells the story of a man who had never been to Canada, it has a close link to this one. The patient tells his story to Hana, who remains a fine listener and is now a caring nurse. They are visited by Caravaggio, who tells of new exploits. It takes a careful reader to make sense of their stories, but the extraordinary detail and emotional charge make the effort worthwhile.

Bibliography

Barbour, Douglas. Michael Ondaatje. New York: Twayne, 1993. A comprehensive account of the author’s life and works, both poetry and fiction.

Cooke, John. The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. An interesting look at the visual arts’ effect on Ondaatje and other prominent Canadian authors.

Jewinski, Ed. Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully. Canadian Biography Series. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994. Follows Ontdaatje’s odyssey from his arrival in Canada in 1962 to his Booker Prize for The English Patient thirty years later. A beautifully written story and a pleasure to read.

Siemerling, Winfried. Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Includes a chapter on identity issues in Ondaatje’s work and a section on oral history in In the Skin of a Lion.

Solecki, Sam, ed. Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1985. Published before In the Skin of a Lion, this collection includes many fine essays on Ondaatje’s early work. Especially pertinent are Linda Hutcheon’s essay on Running in the Family and the editor’s interview with Ondaatje.