<p>Total non-literary observation: Sir Hector got some bad medical advice. After the initial dog bite, instead of getting on a boat for England, he should have hightailed it (pun intended ;)) for the United States. The post-bite vaccine series was in use by the 1940s and there were several treatment centers in the U.S. The Pasteur Institute opened at the University of Michigan in 1903:</p>
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<p>Sylvan – that’s funny!</p>
<p>Too funny Slyvan…I wish I had thought of it!</p>
<p>Mary, can you imagine how many more adventures we would have to discuss if the voyage had been all the way to America?</p>
<p>Thanks for the laugh sylvan8798 … and you too Mary</p>
<p>I do so enjoy this book club. :)</p>
<p>i made myself curious about the distance from Sri Lanka to London. I looked on Google Earth and followed the journey. It’s an impressive journey. I don’t have any idea how long the journey to America would be on a ship in 1954. Any guesses?</p>
<p>
This particular passage was one that resonated with my own life. I’m wondering if that sort of response comes from having sharp discontinuities in one’s early life. Michael’s trip to England marks a break between his old life in Colombo and his new life in England. </p>
<p>Looking at H’s life it has always seemed to me to be so continuous, like a long book about one central character, whereas my own early life is like a series of vignettes which could very well be about totally different main characters. I’ve commented to him on occasion that I don’t feel as if any place is truly “home” to me. </p>
<p>Michael has no “home” to return to, no apparent sense of roots. His story parallels in that sense the idea of a ship on moving water that is not anchored firmly to the earth. There is no one place where a ship “belongs”.</p>
<p>Or something like that…</p>
<p>Interesting. But do any of us really belong anywhere? There’s is something old fashioned about the novel, but also something the opposite and radically post-modern with its plethora of plots all pointing in different directions, like so many different threads on the back side of the tapestry all just leading back to the central image.</p>
<p>According to Derrida, the sense of a center is sheer nostalgia, so maybe the nostalgia for the past, for Colombo and the judge’s house has a hollow center like everything else. We think if we were just situated in the past, it would all be okay, or “home”, and yet that was where Michael was separated from his parents, where Emily’s father was an abusive drunk, where Ramadhin was diagnosed with a heart condition and Cassius was seen as a smart-aleck pest. Was that existence really better?</p>
<p>Cats are attached to place, dogs to people. Perhaps that’s part of the riddle of the animals, I’m not sure.</p>
<p>The journey seems so long, yet it is only three weeks, one would think too short to comprise a separate slice of existence, except maybe, just maybe for children. Is it the trauma that made it a focus?</p>
<p>I like to think that Michael somehow resolved his sense of rootlessness. We know that he eventually had children–maybe that helped “anchor” him.</p>
<p>Michael and Massi aren’t the only bad marriage in the novel. In fact, unhappy unions seemed to be the only ones described. It’s not so much a leitmotif as it is a sledgehammer:</p>
<p>Michael’s parents: “When my parents abandoned their marriage, it was never really admitted, or explained, but it was also not hidden. If anything it was presented as a mis-step, not a car crash. So how much the curse of my parents’ divorce fell upon me I am not sure.” (p. 26)</p>
<p>Mr. Mazappa and his wife: “… his first marriage had indeed ended in a betrayal. He had come home unexpectedly to find his wife with a musician and had confessed to Miss Lasqueti, ‘If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him in the pump, but all there was in the room was his ukulele.’" (p. 168)</p>
<p>Emily and her husband Desmond: “…she had left him. She said the marriage had been a cautious one, and she had stepped out of it, recognizing it was ‘too cold a building’ to live in for the rest of her life.” (p. 246)</p>
<p>Emily’s parents: “…their family lived constantly under the threat of his temper. His wife bowed under his rules. From the scarce amount Emily told me, I knew he was a punisher.” (p. 11)</p>
<p>Anonymous shipboard couple: “A bit of chaos had broken out in the Delilah Lounge when a passenger attacked his wife during a game of cards. Mockery had gone too far during Hearts. There had been an attempt at strangulation and then her ear had been perforated by a fork.” (p. 19)</p>
<p>Mr. Hastie and his wife Anabella: “…on another ship, after he had again admitted his hesitancy about their relationship, my cabinmate was watching a four-day-old moon, when [his wife] came silently up to him and knifed him twice through the ribs, missing his heart “by the width of a communion wafer.” (p. 162)</p>
<p>Asuntha’s parents: “When he was taken away to prison, the wife and child were left with barely a rupee. The wife began to lose her wits, and the child soon found her mother no longer reliable.” (p. 177)</p>
<p>Horace and Rose Johnson: He is an unfaithful husband, who seduces Miss Lasqueti-- and it’s pretty clear that she is neither his first nor his last “sexual prey.” (p. 230)</p>
<p>Re Michael’s comment, “how much the curse of my parents’ divorce fell on me I am not sure. I do not recall the weight of it,” I can only guess that subconsciously it must have weighed upon him very heavily indeed, considering that these are the marriages he chose to include in his story.</p>
<p>This is all so interesting! Way back when I was in college, nobody was talking about Derrida yet. :)</p>
<p>Well, I am going out of town this morning, for two days. Have fun, I’ll see you all when I get back.</p>
<p>Have a good trip, NJTeatreMOM.</p>
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<p>I like to think so too. I think Michael and Massi marry for the wrong reasons … at least, the wrong reasons in terms of a lasting marriage. I think Michael and Massi need each other rather than love each other. But who’s to say that brief marriage doesn’t help heal? Did Ramadhin’s death draw Michael and Massi together? Yes. I guess I just don’t think it all bad. </p>
<p>Did Michael’s time - his adventures, comic and tragic - on the Oronsay affect him? Of course … but did it change him enough to damage his marriage to Massi. I’ll say “no” … he seems to be content enough in life now … successful career, children, a home with a joyous dog 
to greet him whenever he returns from travels. An early marriage to the wrong woman … or maybe just for the wrong reasons. </p>
<p>By his own admission, Michael already kept part of himself back before he ever boarded the Oronsay. And in his own words:</p>
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<p>If we take him at his word, his adventures haunted his later life less than we think. Perhaps this is an example of reader hubris:
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<p>Have a fun trip NJTM. Hope your excursion has less adventures than Michael’s on the Oronsay and I mean that in a good way.</p>
<p>ignatius: Interesting points. I think that this makes an interesting dilemma for the reader. If the time on the Oronsay isn’t as formative and/or wounding as we think, why does it merit such close attention. Do all experiences? Maybe so. Maybe such detail is offered because Michael can – a writer blessed with a great memory. And yet, I think we doubt that any slice of three weeks would yield such a rich tapestry.</p>
<p>I like when the novel moves forward it time, but I find it less successful when it leaves the ship to give backstory.</p>
<p>^^^ I agree with you: I like the novel as it moves forward in time, less so when it leaves the ship to look back in time, i.e., the letter 
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<p>As for time spent on the Oronsay being formative? Yes, but maybe of less import for Michael than other upheavals in life at the time.</p>
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<p>I think the three weeks spent on the Oronsay merits close attention because the ship itself (“the first and only ship of his life”) contained both a limited time frame and adventures. Those three weeks comprised a setting, characters, adventures never to be experienced again. Real life hit Michael upon landing.
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<p>I really liked the ending.</p>
<p>Re: the Title- disliked it before I read the book , for the reasons NJTheatermom stated, </p>
<p>Sylvan, I think you’ve clarifed for me the “undercurrent of this book”.
Yes, the story of the frisky boys, having a three week adventure, contains a vein of such lonliness.
Your personal reflections hit a nerve. My Mother-in-Law has said those exact words ’ I don’t feel like I have a home"- because she moved so much when she was young. My husband, also, moved a lot growing up and I think there may be a persistant sense of not belonging. Michael’s quest. </p>
<p>Page 54 after the section about “orginally remembering the trip as placid” - it continues
</p>
<p>He describes the “chorus of insects , howls of garden birds, gecko talk” </p>
<p>And, then his early morning routine with Narayan.
“invisible universe”
</p>
<p>When he imagines a photo of himself during those days, it’s with village friends, barefoot, and looking toward the dusty roads outside his family compound". He was ** happy **</p>
<p>I don’t think the Oransay trip was significant , in Michael’s life, for such a long while ,therefore, he orginally thought it was “placid”. What was significant was having to leave, being afraid.</p>
<p>It was his loss of community</p>
<p>His life in Sri Lanka, was an “adventure” each morning with someone he loved, and he was plucked away from this. So sad. </p>
<p>Literary research - I didn’t know about RK Narayan-</p>
<p>RK Narayan, India’s most famous author wrote about a fictional town, Malgude.
He wrote about humor in everyday life. Compassionate humanism. “Simplicity and gentle beauty and humor in tragic situations”
He’s compared to Faulkner !</p>
<p>** cross posted with Ignatius-
**</p>
<p>Re: Marriage to Massi
page 143
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<p>Mary13- what a long list of unhappy marriages in the book. I hadn’t realized.</p>
<p>Ignatius, I LOVED the ending of the book. Michael finally matures and looks at this ‘childhood’ scene from his Mother’s angle. Finally, selfish, self centered Michael is empathetic. </p>
<p>He realizes he is “cold” after his mother mentions it immediately, thinking of him.
“You must be cold”.
The embrace, smiling, she moved to hold him tighter!
And, Emily, white gowned, flitting by, and her “warm” hand over Michael’s! </p>
<p>I think I’ll remember that ending and the chapter when they are thethered during the storm for a long, long time.</p>
<p>Perhaps that grandeur and sense of belonging is always lost when we are no longer children. Or maybe the geographical upheaval is the most significant element for Michael. I’m not sure.</p>
<p>I think we can assume that he’s now found a marriage and home that don’t recall his childhood in the way Massi did.</p>
<p>I often feel like a refuge and my bio calls me “a refugee from the sixties.” That time was my home.</p>
<p>But I <em>do</em> also like an exchange that occurs in THE HOURS when Clarissa tells her daughter, </p>
<p>“I thought that was beginning of happiness, but I was wrong. That was happiness.”</p>
<p>Daughter: “What you are really saying is that you were young.”</p>
<p>So for me, I’m not sure, though I find the above discussion really interesting.</p>
<p>It’s also interesting to me that you really liked the ending, ignatius. I found it so sad that Emily seems so alone and exiled on a remote island.</p>
<p>Perhaps the Cat’s Table was a real community, and she wasn’t a member.</p>
<p>And maybe Sri Lanka is the Cat’s Table, so far away from imperial London, like the Captain’s Table, but actually the place of luminous beauty.</p>
<p>Cats can also be seen as exalted creatures and “cool cats.” </p>
<p>Maybe in the end, we’re meant to see this reversal.</p>
<p>SJCM: I posted before I read your last post. Ah, so I am probably alone in the chill I felt at the end.</p>
<p>And shouldn’t it have been The Cats’ Table?</p>
<p>Ignatius - I agree that Michael seems content enough with his current life. I guess it is something we don’t really know for sure, but it seems it’s his reflections of past times and acquaintances that come across as melancholic.</p>
<p>I agree that the characters are looking for their community. It was the smell of burning hemp that brought Michael to Mr. Fonseka. The same smell later brought Sir Hector’s ayurvedic to Mr. Fonseka’s room. They were all missing home and trying to find something that would help them hold on to it. It’s interesting that Emilly and Michael both ended up in Canada. Maybe Emily picked Canada because Michael was already there. </p>
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<p>Yes, mythmom, I agree. I think Emily was the most alone on the trip. I was very sad to see her story at the end. The book focuses on the 3 young boys and their adventures, but Emily was also young on the ship. Wasn’t she 17? She was a young woman, on her own, also experiencing things for the first time. She must have been quite overwhelmed.</p>
<p>^^I sure did a lot of agreeing on that last post! :)</p>