Michael Ondaatje, Warlight ***

The narrator of Warlight was a teenaged boy in post-war England when his parents "went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals." It's clear to Nathaniel and his sister that their parents trip to Singapore is somehow related to the work they did during the war, but they don't know what that work was. Their guardians are two men they call the Moth and the Darter, the latter of whom smuggles greyhounds into England for illegal racing. The first part of the book describes Nathaniel's adolescence; the second part describes his efforts a dozen years later to discover what his mother was up to during that time.

The fundamental theme of Warlight is that our lives are driven by forces we only obliquely understand. The actions of Part 1 all find their true meaning in the the war and its immediate aftermath. Ondaatje's style, here as in The English Patient, creates vivid set pieces with clearly metaphorical intent. 

We continued through the dark, quiet waters of the river, feeling we owned it... We passed industrial buildings, their lights muted, faint as stars, as if we were in a time capsule of the war years when blackouts and curfews had been in effect, when there was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river.

Ondaatje's prose has a peculiar distancing effect, so that it always feels like we're viewing the narrative at a remove. Nearly everyone in the story goes by a nickname or pseudonym. Most of the story consists of memories that have a romantic gloss to them.