For the past 14 years I have led a book club at the library where I work.

 For the past several years I have written a "wrap-up" of the book after our discussion.

 I think I will start to share some of them on-line. Today's contribution is Cat's Table.


According to Ondaatje, in 1954 a young boy set off from Colombo to England, on a boat named the Oronsay, to meet his mother after an absence of 4 or 5 years. The boy’s name was Michael, known as Mynah to his friends because of his attentive observations and mimicry of his surroundings.

 The ship was filled with passengers, but the ones of immediate interest to Michael were the fellow diners at the Cat’s Table – the lowliest table as far away as possible from the Capitan’s Table. Included in its’ occupants were his two mates, Ramadhin and Cassius. In the three weeks that followed, the trio roamed the ship, exploring dark cavities, skulking on the edges of rendezvous, listening in on conversations, swimming in the first class pool and snatching breakfast before the first class world awoke, crouching at night near the manacled prisoner who was being transported, watching, absorbing, testing, experimenting in all the adult behaviors they witnessed around them.

Though formal supervision was non-existent, they were befriended by Mr. Daniel the botanist who was transporting a garden of exotic plants housed in the gloom of the hold; Mr. Fonseka, a lover of literature who conveyed to them the beauty of language and classic literature; and Mr. Mazappa who taught them jazz and bawdy lyrics. In addition a garish array of characters extended the boys’ education by teaching them how to break and enter, chew and smoke exotic substances, cheat at cards, and in general how to grease their way through sticky situations!

Though Michael entered the ship “trained into cautiousness” from boarding school’s inequities of authority and punishment, nothing had prepared him for the sexual, psychological and emotional onslaught provided by the parade of passengers – each with his own personal murky whirlpools. He learned that despite all levels of class and their incumbent barriers, “what is interesting and important happens mostly in secret.” Against the backdrop of the wild grey  sea, cultures flare and dance with color, but underneath there is heartbreak and even death….  but also humor - for if Miss Lasqueti’s paperback annoys her she simply flings it overboard!

Walled in by the sea, the boys stalk life. The nine occupants of the Cat’s Table who all seemed non-descript at first glance, unfold petal by petal into glorious, but sometimes, deadly blooms.

The voyage of Oronsay took permanent form within the eleven year old Michael. And as the years passed he recalled what he learned on board from Mr. Nevil, the destroyer of ships, “In a breaker’s yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway, carriage or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.”

And so do we as we silently sit at the Cat’s Table and partake of Ondaatje’s exquisite sustenance.