Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion (hereafter ISOL) successfully reveals memorable ideas and encourages readers to search beyond the text for various ways of interpreting the novel through its strong post-modern techniques, intriguing multiple narrators and thoughtful artistic techniques. It’s potential to be interpreted in a post-modern context, through post colonial lenses and furthermore by the symbolism of light and dark used throughout the novel gives the text integrity and sophistication. However to view the novel through only one perspective would not give full credit to the text, so one must consider various interpretations to enhance one’s understanding of the novel.
Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943, moved to England with his mother in 1952 and settled down in Toronto, Canada in the 1960’s. He himself was a migrant, forced to speak a different language and accept a foreign culture and this aspect of his life influences the strong emphasis placed on the impotence of migrants to communicate with society within the novel. As I read this novel in the 21st century, I have lived in Australia my whole life and am not fully aware of the implications of being marginalised in society. ISOL is a text that can be appreciated in many ways and not only gives readers a chance to understand the social and political history of Canada in the 1960’s but the social and political issues that are ongoing in our society.
ISOL has many post-modern characteristics such as the clever elliptical fractured structure, intriguing authorial intrusions as well as thoughtful intertextuality. “Let me now re-emphasise the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects”; Ondaatje alludes to the loose structure of the novel which allows a vast number of interpretations. The memories and stories that are told are incomplete, fragmented and move cinematically from past, present and future tense, which symbiotically reflects our lives and how we remember our past. Although the story teller moves quickly through stories making it almost impossible for the reader to find a stable centre the story is told mainly in third person, enabling the reader to trust the story as there is no conflicting perspective and the story is authentic and not a stretch of the truth. Ondaatje’s authorial intrusion allows him to address the reader directly and let them see his thought process, “trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human” this reassures the reader that there will be an explanation for the novels loose structure. Intertextuality is present at the very beginning of the novel in the epigraph “never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one” which enriches the text with underlying values including the significance of each and every person’s story being equally important. The structure of the novel as a whole is cyclical, ending where it began, in the car with Patrick telling Hana a story. Ondaatje’s post-modern techniques highlights the reality of stories told by Patrick giving them an authentic and personal tone.
Furthermore, ISOL can be seen as a post-colonial novel because Ondaatje gives a voice to the oppressed humans of his context, whose stories were ignored by the oppressors. One of Ondaatje’s purposes of the novel is to promote social equality which is done by telling the stories of the forgotten individuals who contributed to the building of Toronto, particularly immigrants and marginalised who need to be acknowledged. Ondaatje thoughtfully uses multiple narrators to create a polyphonous novel which allows the many stories to be told. The workers in ISOL are depicted as men who are “an extension of hammer, drill, flame” which implies they are easily replaceable and not valued by history. As well as their poor wages and atrocious working conditions; “they slip in the wet clay...pissing where they work, eating where someone else left shit”; they receive no recognition for their work yet those in authority are admired for their ‘work’ while they walk around in coats that “cost more than the combined salaries of five bridge workers”. When Patrick is at the Riverdale Library he discovers photographs of Canada's workers and realises that "Official histories and news stories were always soft as rhetoric, like a politician making a speech after a bridge is built, a man who does not even cut the grass on his own lawn." This informs the reader that historical documents were not reliable and only told one side of the story, from the perspective of those with authority, and this is what encourages Patrick to become the storyteller. The puppet theatre scene portrays the idea that the migrant workers are just like puppets; controlled by the oppressors of society and unable to communicate. Ondaatje explores his social tendencies throughout the novel promoting egalitarianism by the use of multiple narrators and showing us the exploitation of bridge workers. The symbolism of light and dark present throughout ISOL provides further understanding of the novel. Patrick as the major storyteller “was nothing but a prism that refracted their lives". This articulate metaphor conveys how Patrick brings light to many lives and his prism-like qualities allow others to see the importance of stories such as Temelcoff and Hanna who will know her mother's story because of Patrick. The quote taken from the Epic of Gilgamesh:"I will let my hair grow long for your sake and I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion" explains the need for a storyteller who can face hardship and tell the stories that bring light to the lives of others; qualities that Patrick has.
Ondaatje continually plays with characters in the dark – the five nuns on the bridge at night, Patrick leaping around in the dark room and Caravaggio working in darkness – because the darkness is safe, at least safer than the corruptness of the daylight hours. The metaphorical darkness which the characters stumble through symbolises their search for light and meaning. We as readers are also put in the dark by the loose structure of the novel and as more details of the novel are revealed more light is shed on the meaning of the novel. “Lights”, Patrick says in the end of the novel, implying that the whole story has been revealed and illuminated. Ondaatje’s use of light and dark is similar to an artistic technique, chiaroscuro, which demonstrates that history itself, like art, is a construct that is recorded how humans interpret it to be.
Ondaatje evokes an emotional and intellectual response in the reader, leaving the reader with unforgettable issues through his intriguing use of an elliptical fractured structure, authorial intrusions, intertextuality, multiple narrators and chiaroscuro in his novel ISOL to allow numerous interpretations of the story to be made, to reveal the authenticity of the stories told and promote egalitarianism. Ondaatje unites distant elements together to encapsulate a period of history and establish the true stories that existed in that period. Textual integrity is established through the development of such timelessness in terms of the concepts presented, and this is bound together by the combined use of post–modernism, post-colonialism and symbolism of light and dark.