2 / Established Fiction

There are three annual awards for the best Canadian novel or collection of short stories. The oldest, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, was established in 1937 by Lord Tweedsmuir, himself the author of many books including The Thirty-Nine Steps; it is administered by the Canada Council. The second, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, established in 1994 in honour of the late Doris Giller, journalist, book reviewer, and lover of literature, is a privately endowed and administered award. The third is the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, first presented in 1997 and sponsored by Rogers Communications and the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Although juries choose the finalists (always five) and the winners, their choices point out the varieties of our fiction as well as the emphases and prejudices of jury members. As Mordecai Richler commented at the founding of the then Giller Prize, ‘Nobody ever suggested that competitions are fair. From the Booker through the Prix Goncourt and Pulitzer, it’s a crapshoot.’

A finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, his sixth novel, is, in my opinion, the best novel of the year. Already a national and international bestseller, the book is a haunting reflection on the coming of age of a young Ceylonese boy, told by the boy as an adult and moving slowly backwards and forwards in time. It is both a classic boy’s adventure story, filled with hidden treasures and magical wonders, and an adult’s autobiographical summation of his entire life.

In August and September 1954, the large ship Oronsay is transporting its passengers on a twenty-one-day trip from Ceylon through the Indian Ocean, up the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, and on to England. Among the people onboard is an eleven-year-old boy named Michael, going to England to meet his mother, who left Ceylon three or four years earlier. Alone on the ship, he is seated at insignificant Table 76, known as the Cat’s Table, as far from the Captain’s Table as can be, along with two other young boys and an assortment of strange fellow passengers. ‘I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was,’ he comments in the opening chapter. ‘Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper or little cricket, as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future.’ On his first journey on a ship, nothing much was expected to happen: ‘The fact of my being at sea for twenty-one days was spoken of as having not much significance.’

Michael forms a bond with two other boys, the quiet and asthmatic Ramadhin, and Cassius, ‘a mix of stubbornness and kindness.’ Vowing to do at least one thing that was forbidden every day, the trio set off to examine, to explore, and to understand the inner workings of the passengers, the ship’s crew, and the concealed occurrences onboard during their twenty-one-day experience, ‘a very brief period in a life.’ From his adult perspective, Michael looks back lovingly, longingly, and quizzically at this brief span of time. After their sea voyage, he will never see Cassius again, though he would read about him or hear about his career as a ‘well-considered painter’ in London. He would keep in touch with Ramadhin, ‘always the most generous of the three of us,’ visiting him in London where his family lived, attending his funeral, even marrying his sister Massoumeh, a marriage which ends in divorce. The young boys meet all the adventures one can imagine. There is the chained criminal allowed to walk the ship only late at night. There is the famous millionaire who dies and is buried at sea. There is Mr. Fonseka, who ‘seemed to draw forth an assurance or a calming quality from the books he read’; he may or may not still be teaching in England. And then there is Mr. Daniels, conducting the young trio to his garden of plants and flowers down below in...