In the Skin of a Lion

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But my mood and the timing were such that my heart just wasn’t invested in this book, and that makes it very difficult for me to separate my apathy toward the act of reading it with any apathy I might feel as a result of the story itself. Back in Toronto, Patrick finds a job in the tunnels for the waterworks that Commissioner Harris is now building. I find this author difficult as I am never sure what the point of the stories are and this book was the same. I have a great love affair with Ondaatje's prose, which gently lilts and probes and carefully illuminates the most telling truths about his characters. Yet the prospect of re-reading this book when my mind is less taxed does not particularly excite me.

I will re read it again though as the language is complex and there are things that still do not make totally sense in my head. This novel works pretty well and has some pretty imagery (the Swedes skating the river with burning cattails comes to mind) but it doesn't reach the heights of it's more famous sibling.We learn of events that were in the news while the bridge was being built—the fall of a nun from the as yet incomplete bridge, the disappearance of Ambrose Small (a bigwig theater owner), labor union meetings and the murder of labor union activists. Harris and Pomphrey at the far end looked on helplessly as one nun was lifted up and flung against the compressors.

Prominence is given to the construction of two Toronto landmarks, the Prince Edward Viaduct, commonly known as the Bloor Street Viaduct, and the R. I understand why his prose is appealing, though it's the sort of thing nobody can do without occasionally seeming laughable (not even Virginia Woolf). He is elemental, like Graham Greene, and speaks of action with such a precise use of his poetics (The English Patient is--gasp--a smaller pleasure, than this!Among his many Canadian and international recognitions, his novel The English Patient won the 1992 Man Booker Prize, was adapted into a multi-award winning Oscar movie, and was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018; Anil’s Ghost won the Giller Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the Prix Médicis; and Warlight was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Although the details of her last moments are not known until the end of the novel, Patrick later recounts that she died because she mistakenly grabbed a bag in the street that contained a bomb. Throughout the book, light (from a lantern, flaming cattails and other sources) and darkness plays heavily in the context of the main characters and development of the plot, i. Blindness/ sight is a theme that recurs throughout the novel, first with Patrick observing the loggers in the night where they are barely visible, then Patrick’s game of blindfolding and running around the room, where he accidentally kicks Clara. This peaceful aspect of her personality makes Patrick fall in love with her, as he too believes that grand causes should remain moved by compassion.

Patrick's father, Hazen Lewis, becomes a dynamiter and is meticulous when washing his clothes each evening to remove remnants of explosives on his apparel.Ondaatje has, since the 1960s, also been involved with Toronto's influential Coach House Books, supporting the independent small press by working as a poetry editor. At the end of the novel, he confronts Harris, and a struggle that seemed to be between labour and capital turns out, in fact, to be between worker and dreamer; false opposites, who are incapable of destroying each other after all. Ondaatje illuminates the investment of these settlers in Canada, through their labour, while they remain outsiders to mainstream society.