A future in history

Rumina Sethi reviews Michael Ondaatje’s new novel Divisadero which unweaves the unseen connections running through people and continents

SEVEN YEARS AFTER ‘Anil’s Ghost’ appears ‘Divisadero’ which is the name of a street in San Francisco that symbolises the geographical split that takes the tale from California to France. Literally, it means “division” in Spanish.

It could also mean “divisar”, that is, “to gaze at something from a distance” which is appropriate to the opening of the novel that shows Claire gazing down at the arson and violence in the Glen Ellen Bar.

Taking the history of the entire 20th century as its backdrop, with all its joys and sorrows, we become aware of a distant war that portentously casts its shadow on the novel.

Hidden presences

Ondaatje locates the family of Anna, Claire and their father assisted by Coop, a farm hand, in the 1970s small town of Petaluma in California. And then, owing to the discovery of the affair between Anna and Coop, the world of this family stands brutally shattered. Anna moves to the south of France and begins her research on the Gallic author Lucien Segura.

Claire moves to San Francisco working for a lawyer while Coop runs away to become a gambler in Reno. Across time and space, the various characters impinge on each others’ history. Despite the divisions, ‘Divisadero’ is thus about the intertwining of characters from different backgrounds as well as the geographical intermingling of minds and continents.

As Ondaatje poignantly puts it: there is the “hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly”. This is Ondaatje’s way of unweaving an unseen connection between people moving across the globe, a world of displacement and belonging. It is the terrain that becomes the objective correlative of an inner upheaval and discontentment, of unshakable past and its imposition on the present.

Distinct style

Undeniably, the novel is a feat in poetic prose, taking the reader back 1849 and the gold rush. The ambience of various junctures in history is vividly recreated, but with discreet gaps here and there to be filled by the reader’s own creativity. For instance, when Marie-Neige reads ‘The Three Musketeers’ to the blinded Lucien, he wants to know some detail that he has missed.

When she volunteers to go back, he retorts: “No, just go on Not knowing something essential makes you more involved.” This fits in with Ondaatje’s notion of fiction which rejects linearity.

The ever moving scenario of the gold rush reflects in the itinerant character who remains an alien to her location, torn between two worlds, one that she belongs to, another that she quests to inhabit, but sees nothing but betrayal and violence at the heart of human life.

Indeed, attention to detail is minute and vivid such as when Ondaatje is describing the relationship between the daughters and their father: “I would watch the flicker under his eyelid, the tremble within that covering skin that signalled his tiredness, as if he were being tugged in mid-river by a rope to some other place. And then I too would sleep, descending into the layer that was closest to him.”

Each character has a depth and lives on vibrantly in the readers’ mind even when Ondaatje moves away from the chief characters in the last section into a world of other peripheral characters.

Thus the three sections of the novel resound with the reference to “a three-panelled Japanese screen, each one self-sufficient, but revealing different qualities or tones when placed beside the others.” Geographies of the mind.

Moving from a rural setting in California to the groggy air of Nevada casinos to France, the novel is an intimate account of a splintered family like the dominant image of shards of glass that runs through the novel.

It is a multifaceted novel, a geography of the mind, peculiar in its structure yet gripping in its hold, yielding more if one is ready to surrender oneself completely to its symphony of seductive prose and vibrantly complex characters.