In the Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaattje
"The first sentence of every novel should be:
'Trust me, this will take time but there is order here,
very faint, very human.'"
Michael Ondaattje's In the Skin of a Lion unfolds the story, a story that is very similar for most countries, the development of a nation envisioned by the rich yet built with the hands
of the marginalized, the hands of immigrants. Ah! Keep reading, I know this trope is in full swing of repetition..yadda yadda Egyptians using Jews to build pyramids, oh wait you thought aliens did that? Ok so this book takes Giglamesh to the next level! From the beginning of epic tales to the reversal storyline of the Swamp Thing, In the Skin of the Lion is one of the first narratives of many narratives to examine the human condition of the superman mentality set in Canada! Cool right?
Yes Ondaattje focuses on those national narratives who are not represented, yes he investigates the thought of never returning home and constructing a new identity, yes he examines the move from the wilderness into the industrial city, yes he questions whether tradition is a jail cell where one is stuck with their family for eternity! As well as the search of construction, reconstruction, replaceability, the plague of curiosity, and removability.
Okay I need to back up, I am little excited about this book because it really reminds me of Tom Robbins Still Life With Woodpecker, oh yeah its got explosives too! And it may be even better. It is about CANADA, the country that everyone seems to always tell shut up, well it has one of the best national narratives. Fuck yeah. Ondaattje's style does change book by book, but this one is filled with this most brilliant prose. And if you are at all thinking that this style of writing may cause aesthetic to trump ethics, don't get your panties in a bunch.
A really scary thought came into my head, after sharing a bunch of childhood stories concerning hilarious moments with bugs, I wondered if the kids who are born in today's world would ever share stories such as these. No, because kids today have forgotten nature, perhaps it may be bold to say, but their concept of the wilderness is of a city, and not of the wild. A professor of mine once asked what color are the trunks of trees. The consensus, brown. Wrong he claimed! Gray. When we were painting with those awesome watercolors in preschool, our teachers told us to paint them brown. But if we really bothered to stand in front of a tree and open our own damn eyes, we would realize the color gray. Patrick, Ondaattje's protagonist, grows up during the 1920's, Canada was just beginning to use technology's first methods of constructing a nation.
"Patrick gazes on these things which have
navigated the warm air
above the surface of the earth
and attached themselves to the mesh with a muted thunk...
There will suddenly be order and shape to these nights."
Patrick is not god, he is just a boy, but it has always been man's dream to be god, and well the only possible way for this to exist, even though yes there is a chance god doesn't exist but then what would that make us? Oh crazy people who write superhero comics, oh wait...
Patrick in a sense is in the making of the superhero mentality, he examines nature to understand himself, but
"the trouble with ideology,
Alice, is that it hates the private.
You must make it human."
So the superhero mentality appears plenty of times through daredevils working on water ducts and a major bridge, catching a nun plummeting to her death midair, and searching for a runaway millionaire, the chaos is interrupted constantly with lines that remind us of the dangers of the superhero mentality...
"people step in out of sunlight
and must move slow in darkness".
The concept of time is creepily illustrated, Patrick is plagued as a boy as to why he must rest at night and work during the day, juxtaposing the workers on major construction sites who work only at night.
"Night removed the limitations of detail"
Just as all superheroes' avenge villains in the night, the most important question is illuminated.
Who really is a hero and who is a villain?
There are detectives, aliens, "child murderers" and shadows incapable of separating themselves from humans!
"You must remove her shadow from you".
Just read it. I would love to talk to someone about this book!
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