The Cat's Table

Is it a memoir? Is it autobiographical or a work of fiction?  Critics have questioned Michael Ondaatje on his latest novel, The Cat's Table,  and received a somewhat elusive response.  While the author did leave Ceylon at the age of 11 and travel aboard an ocean liner to England, he maintains that this is a work of fiction based on and embellished by autobiographical elements.

As a reader, it hardly mattered to me if this very beautifully written account of a both a literal and metaphorical passage of a boy on the brink of young adulthood was complete fiction or not; the characters and events that peopled the story were so thoroughly engaging, I stopped wondering if it was true or not about ten pages into the story. 

Michael, nicknamed Mynah,  is traveling without any direct adult supervision on a vast and multi-layered (in every way) ship heading towards a new life in England.  His assigned dining table is filled with a variety of strange and interesting fellow passengers, among them a jazz pianist down on his luck, a botanist overseeing an incredible garden in the lower levels of the ship (where many poisonous specimens flourish largely unguarded), a tailor who seems to be mute, and a woman traveling with thirty pigeons who wears a many-pocketed jacket in which one may always find several of her pets.  The "pigeon lady" is the one who identifies their dining table as the "cat's table"- the table farthest from the Captain's Table and the lowest in status in the dining room.  This low status actually gives Mynah an incredible sense of freedom and adventure.  No one is bothering very much with those passengers seated at the cat's table, and that's just fine with him.  The story is also peppered with a few other intriguing characters that become important to Mynah's experience: a reclusive very ill millionaire traveling to England in hopes of a cure, a frightening prisoner who is walked in chains each midnight, and Emily, a distant older cousin of Mynah's on whom he focuses much of his adolescent desire. 

As the journey progresses, Mynah begins to understand "grown-ups" and their secrets in ways he might never have guessed prior to his shipboard adventure.  

Mynah also forms a close friendship with two other (loosely-supervised) boys traveling on the ship and they soon realize they are more or less "invisible" to the mostly self-centered adults surrounding them.  The boys make the ship their own, engaging in pre-dawn explorations, spying, and countless other experiences.  They smoke, hide in lifeboats eavesdropping and get involved in several scenarios that are not necessarily light-hearted.  As a matter of fact, as the ship (and story) progresses, the subjects of the boys' observations start to take on some quite mysterious, even ominous overtones.  The plot does indeed thicken, and the tone of the story grows darker.

About halfway through the story, the narrator suddenly takes us forward into his adult life and starts to share his perspective, many years later, of what he saw and learned on the ship.  As as adult, he attends a seminar on filmmaking and says the filmmaker "spoke of how viewers of his film should not assume they understood everything about the characters."  We realize that we are perhaps going to gain a different perspective or understanding of some of the characters and events that were first recorded through an eleven-year old's eyes and are now being revisited from an adult's perspective.  

In the latter sections of the story, the author continues to move back and forth in time, which can occasionally seem disruptive and give the tale a fragmentary feeling.  As the reader, I sometimes got a little frustrated with this, although I did appreciate the new, "adult" understanding of some of the more mysterious events the boys witnessed unfolding during the voyage. 

I think the strength of The Cat's Table lies in the author's juxtaposition of what we see and understand as children and how that understanding changes when we look back as adults and reflect on the same events and/or people.  I don't know about you, but I must admit to several ah-ha moments (occasionally tinged with regret or embarrassment) when I think back to quick judgements, misunderstood actions, and at-the-time mysterious behavior of grown-ups.  The puzzle pieces rearrange themselves into a slightly changed picture and I'm forced to step back and take a new look.  

I'm reminded once again: this is why I love to read.