On the ocean going liner Oronsay, the Cat’s
Table represents the opposite end of the social scale to that of the Captain
and his dinner guests; and this is where 11 year old Michael takes his meals
during his three week voyage from Ceylon to London, where he will be reunited
with his mother.
His fellow diners, as well as some
interesting adults, include two boys of his own age with whom he soon forms a
companionship based on a shared appetite for adventure and mischief; which
without any meaningful adult supervision (it is the 1950s) they are able to
indulge to the full.
The story is related by the adult Michael
looking back with a mixture of nostalgia and hindsight, and as the book (and
the voyage) progresses the lives of the adults on board take on more
significance than the boys’ pranks. The fellow cat’s table diners, crew members
and others on board form an eccentric bunch, with rich seams of adult
experience for the boys to mine.
As the book delves into their lives, and
into more recent events in Michael’s life, its pace drops to a meandering
reflective stage almost mirroring some sort of mid-voyage doldrums.
Just as the reader begins to accept that the
book is no more than an enjoyable series of episodes and character sketches,
the pace picks up again with moments of tension and glimpses of potential
resolution that last to landfall in the Thames.
The sense of time and place and the
unfolding of chance encounters carry the narrative along effortlessly, even
though little happens most of the time. But how little is needed to
disproportionately affect us at an impressionable age?
As Ondaatje says “it would always be
strangers like them at the various Cat’s Tables of my life who would alter me”.
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