In the Skin of a Lion (Univ.of Texas Medical Branch Series in)

by Michael Ondaatje

'A magical book. Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch' Graham Swift

It is the 1920s, and Patrick Lewis has arrived in the bustling city of Toronto, leaving behind his Canadian wilderness home. He immerses himself in the lives of the people who surround him, learning, from their stories, the history of the city itself. And he has his own adventures: searching for a missing millionaire, tunnelling beneath Lake Ontario, falling in love.

In the Skin of a Lion is Michael Ondaatje's sparkling predecessor to his Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. It is here that we encounter, for the first time, Hana the orphaned girl and Caravaggio the thief, among a large cast of characters who are all lovingly and intimately portrayed. It is an exquiste and musical novel, a romance that challenges the boundary between history and myth.

'Ondaatje writes in curves, in time-lapses, a sort of verbal cinema whose narrative is unfaltering' The Times

'A triumph . . . a powerful and revelatory accomplishment' Times Literary Supplement

• ISBN10: 0436340097
• ISBN13: 9780436340093
• Publish Date: 17 August 1987 (first published 1 May 1987)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 11 July 1996
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing
• Imprint: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 246
• Language: English

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

I read Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient a few years ago, and I felt much the same way about it as I did reading his earlier work, In The Skin of a Lion. It's beautifully written, poetic and lush. It has powerful themes, love and belonging and the building of a major city. But I never connected to either book. In The Skin of a Lion is told in a not-quite-linear format and has a dreamlike quality. When you remember that the story is framed as though it's being told by one person to another during a journey, this makes more sense. Its primary focus is Patrick Lewis, a man who grew up in rural Canada doing ranching and demolition work alongside his father (his mother was long since gone). The father was a solitary, taciturn man, and Patrick grows up to be much the same.

Patrick's adult life is presented to us as the story of his relationships with two women, both actresses: Clara, who he meets when he takes a job looking for her vanished boyfriend, and Alice, a friend of Clara's who he reconnects with after Clara has herself disappeared and after Alice has had a daughter, Hana. There are stories between and around those relationships, and stories about other characters who are more tangential to the plot, all loosely connected through Patrick.

I'm a reader who tends to be drawn to character-driven stories, which means this book was sometimes a struggle for me. The sheer beauty of the writing helped me get at least something out of it, but the characters were profoundly underdeveloped. Patrick is the central character, and although he's written as being pretty emotionally closed-off, it's frustrating how opaque he is. The other characters are barely people at all...the women especially seem much more like plot devices than actual humans, but the men aren't much better off. For plot devotees, there's not much here either...what I was left with by the end of the book was less the sense of a story than a series of beautiful, haunting images. Like a Malick film.

This was a book club selection for me, and talking about it with other people gave me a new frame of reference for it. There are two epigraphs introducing the book, and the one that I'll focus on is from The Epic of Gilgamesh. When you think about this novel as consciously echoing the style of an epic, some of its shortcomings make more sense: the clunky dialogue, the characters that feel more like archetypes than people, the sense of mystery that hangs over the entire thing. It still wasn't a book for me, but looking at it through that lens made me feel like its flaws were less egregious. If beautiful, almost poetic prose is something you're drawn to, this will be an amazing read for you. If you like a bit more traditional story structure with strongly drawn characters...it won't.

[Linda]

This was a very haunting story, about all kinds of people from different places in the world, their life paths crossing in mysterious ways. The language was sometimes very poetic, other times quite crude. Patrick was introduced first only as 'the boy' and he was the only Canadian in the story, all the other characters were immigrants. Patrick himself felt like an immigrant when he moved to Toronto, he was lost, with no real goal.

The end was very open, with no real resolution for any of them.

[clementine]

I know I should like this book more than I do, but I found it nearly impossible to get through. The prose is so overly descriptive and flowery. The plot moves at a glacial pace. I guess it's to be expected; it's literary fiction, after all, so it's obviously going to be thick with the manipulation of language and lacking on the plot side.

It's obvious that Ondaatje has a lot of skill. This book has been analyzed to death and I'm not going to deny that a lot of what he's doing is really neat. Some of his manipulation of English and many of his metaphors are very interesting. But I just found the book almost completely unyielding. I appreciate the talent, but this is just not for me.