Reader Reviews for In the Skin of a Lion:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Too many plots with too many "characters"
Comment: I found this book incredibly slow and over-detailed with scenery depictions and metaphors. It dropped into the abyss of sappiness. The first 30 pages took me two days to get through and as if coming out of the fog, a story finally emerged. However, after meeting Nicholas Temelcoff and getting to know him and his quirky introduction to Alice, he was dropped like a hot potato. Alas we were then re-introduced to Patrick, who was one big hopeless romantic. Truthfully the end was the most boggling and felt as if a piece was left out, but, that's sort of how I felt after every chapter. The textbook style descriptions of water tunnels, pipes and bridges left me thinking the author really wanted to write a book about something completely different. And if I had been going to school to become a plumber, this information would have been handy. However, I just didn't care and therefore skipped many paragraphs when it delved into Commissioner Harris.
Maybe I'm just not a deep, descriptive, several stories-wrapped-into-one kind of literary reader that needs lots of random thoughts and plumbing information to keep me entertained.
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Summary: This is my favorite novel of all time
Comment: I first read this book in 1995 and I re-read it every couple of years. The prose is gorgeous and nuanced and the characters are so full-fledged that they take on the familiarity of old friends. The dozens of reviews here already go over the specific merits in great detail, so I will simply note that this book is always my first recommendation when asked for a good book of fiction.
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Summary: "Trust me, this will take time ...
Comment: ... but there is order here, very faint, very human." This should be the first sentence of every novel, the narrator reflects midway in Michael Ondaatje extraordinary novel. And he makes taking the time more than worthwhile. Actual short news items are creatively woven into a tapestry of life in and around Toronto during the early decades of the last century. Real or realistic characters, essential for the construction of the city at the time are at the centre of the story: primarily immigrant workers from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds. Ondaatje makes them the heroes of this powerful and captivating novel, with a few established Canadians added into the mix and set against the social and political context of the time. "It is a novel about the wearing and the removal of masks; the shedding of skin, the transformations and translations of identity." Ondaatje stated in an interview, hinting at the novel's title, taken from the ancient Sumerian Epic, Gilgamesh.
A nun falls off a bridge under construction, a millionaire theatre mogul disappears, neither person to be traced or washed up somewhere... "Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle." Yet in his novel, the author spins a possible continuation of each news story, bringing the events to life, giving the characters an alternative reality, in which their lives are closely connected to other, imagined, characters.
Patrick Lewis is the central figure in the novel, the linking element of what initially may appear as disconnected stories. With his father he lives on a farm and learns his father's skill as a logging dynamiter. One night, he watches a group of loggers, Finns, dancing on the frozen river, burning cattails in hand. "...Skating the river at night, each of them moving like a wedge into the blackness magically revealing the grey bushes of the shore, HIS shore, HIS river." [emphasis in the text in italics] He is too uncertain of himself to join them despite being transfixed by the beauty and grace of it. "So at this stage in his life, his mind raced ahead of his body." As he grows up and moves around the different lowly jobs open to him, he is increasingly drawn to the communities his mates come from. As one of the few "locals" and English speaking characters, he realizes that the others are not the outsiders, rather he is. He has become the observer and a sideline to events and stories. "His own life was no longer a single story, but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web - all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day."
One of Patrick's many jobs is that of a "seeker" a private investigater of sorts, who is tasked with finding the whereabouts of Ambrose Small, the theatre mogul. What starts as a job grows into a quest and later obsession, less related to Small as time goes by as to Clara, the gorgeous and mysterious lover. Patrick's emotional maturity will be tested more than once.
Ondaatje is a poet at heart. He is well known for his lyrical strength in evoking emotions and describing intimate relationships and in this novel, these form an essential element in his protagonist's life. In addition, though, whether evoking the atmosphere of the loggers dance on the ice or the depicting the construction workers labouring on the bridge, the leather dyers at the abattoir, he finds a language that adds vivid imagery and poetry to the hardest human conditions. Few authors would have the power of words to bring beauty to the description of the leather dyers, covered in yellow, blue or green dyes, standing together like a living sculpture... Their dangerous work, like that of the bridge construction workers or the dynamiter and others is conveyed with understanding, empathy for the men while at the same time reflecting the growing anger against those in control: those who take "collateral" damage for granted and pass on to the next party and drink. The social tensions in the society of the day are one of the underlying threads of the novel, integrated subtly as an integral part of the immigrants' surroundings and realities. Similar to Divisadero, the various narrative strings are pulled together at the end, but it is helpful to re-read the beginning to close the ellipse completely. A remarkable novel of timeless power [Friederike Knabe]
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Summary: Film Clips
Comment: As epigraph to this, his second novel (1987), Michael Ondaatje quotes John Berger: "Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one." As in all his novels up to his latest, DIVISADERO, he delights in telling what seem to be several different stories at once, apparently unconnected in literal terms, but subtly related in imagery and theme. Gradually, the connections become more apparent, but be warned: much of the work is left to the reader, and not all the loose ends get tied up.
Personally, I find this fascinating. Ondaatje has the power of pulling you in with vividly-realized scenes as unforgettable as film clips; in the first few pages alone, a boy helping his father haul a cow out of the mud, Finnish lumbermen skating at night by the light of burning cattails held above their heads, and a man who catches a nun blown off a bridge in a storm. The boy, Patrick Lewis, will move as a laborer to Toronto in the 1920s and become the nearest thing to a protagonist in the story, though filling this role as much by what he reveals of the life and people around him as by anything he does himself. The nun disappears from the action unnamed, leaving the reader wondering what happened to her; only much later are we given enough information to guess. The skating lumbermen are peripheral to the story, but the firefly image of flames moving through darkness recurs four or five times more, and will culminate in the striking picture from THE ENGLISH PATIENT of the Sikh sapper showing the frescoes in Arezzo to the Canadian nurse Hana, while swinging from a rope to the light of a hand-held flare. Indeed Hana herself is introduced in this earlier book as a child, together with one of the other characters from THE ENGLISH PATIENT, David Caravaggio, the professional thief.
I hate to tie down such an open-ended book by specifying a theme, but the word that comes to me is inequality. Certainly social inequality. This was a time of unionization, labor unrest, Marxist and anarchist movements. Ondaatje is firmly on the side of the poor, the polyglot immigrants, the workers in such horrible conditions that their lives are shortened just through the fact of having a job. Many of the happenings in the later part of the book are inexplicable except in the context of such class warfare, though the writing is stronger because the cause and effect is never explicit. But there are other kinds of inequality also: between lawlessness and order, between women and the men who feel they scarcely deserve their love, and between adult and child. Ondaatje constantly strikes sparks across opposite poles of such surprising brilliance that he both catches the reader unawares and amazes him with his inner truth. Perhaps he owes something to EL Doctorow in books like RAGTIME. He has certainly set an example for other Canadian writers such as Jane Urquart (A MAP OF GLASS) and Anne Michaels (THE WINTER VAULT). But Ondaatje has an intensity which makes him, for me, the most exciting of the lot.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Comment: This is a spectacular reading experience. Each word is carefully chosen to produce the most incredible imagery. It is a book that needs to be read slowly and savored for the complete mastery of the prose. A work of art.
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