<p>^ I agree. :D</p>
<p>Very cute, Mary!</p>
<p>mythmom: In an earlier post, you wrote: “As for Emily being the center, I agree, but she is a rather absent center which gives the book its sadness.”</p>
<p>I agree 
which leads me to question #6.</p>
<ol>
<li>For several characters—the three boys and Emily among them—the journey represents a loss of innocence. For whom does it have the greatest impact?</li>
</ol>
<p>I think Emily’s role in what happens wounds her irrevocably. She plays an active role in a tragic event. How active? How tragic?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Emily says: “I don’t think you can love me into safety.” No amount of love can turn what happened into what didn’t. Still, while on the ferry, Michael imagines an alternate ending for the convict and his daughter - one that can match Emily’s ‘perhaps.’ I believe that Emily needs to cling to that ‘perhaps’ … and Michael to acquiesce.</p>
<p>Michael ponders the question of that fatal night in regards to Emily:
Not a question he can answer … Still, thinking you caused death can’t be an easy burden to carry. (Another reason in my opinion to think that Niemeyer and those helping him cared for no one. Did anyone point fingers at Sunil, et al, or did they just get away with it all? Someone - and I think not Emily or Asuntha - murdered the undercover policeman in cold blood and let Emily believe she had.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s not only that the list is long, it’s that several of the relationships involve such violent interaction: a desire for a gun to shoot the wife’s lover “in the pump”; an attempted strangulation and stabbing with a fork; being knifed twice through the ribs; and, in the case of Miss Lasqueti and Horace, a scissors in the stomach. Michael’s parents’ divorce may have just been a “mis-step,” but so many of the other relationships were “car crashes.” </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Good catch – and it is a reminder of Michael’s earlier description of himself as “someone who has a cold heart” (p. 141). And remember that Emily, the “warm” one, chooses to leave Desmond because the marriage was “’too cold a building’ to live in for the rest of her life” (p. 246). </p>
<p>Could Emily and Michael have a sort of ying/yang symmetry? Not just the warm/cold aspect, but perhaps other personality traits as well? For example, Michael likes the Oronsay because it is “the chance to escape all order” (p. 13). Emily, on the other hand, marries Desmond “as an escape perhaps from disorder” (p. 247).</p>
<p>Question regarding plot.
Michael had NOT KNOWN about the key in Asuntha’s mouth until he visits Emily in Vancouver ?</p>
<p>Chapter "The Key in His Mouth "
So, while on the ferry Michael imagines what happened to Asuntha and Niemeyer.</p>
<p>Chapter- Letter to Cassius
Michael realizes that he now has something to give Cassius- this story which he has written, which is his way to reach out to Cassius, to bring him peace of mind ? </p>
<p>Arrival -
Ending chapter of book, meeting his mother.</p>
<p>^^^ I gather Michael had not known Asuntha had the key in her mouth until he talks with Emily in Vancouver.</p>
<p>With his new information, Michael reimagines what happens to Niemeyer and Asuntha - with a “perhaps” (Asuntha) in mind.</p>
<p>Yes … Michael has information to offer Cassius now, but it seems to me that he knows how to contact him should he want to do so. (My practical side speaks out.)</p>
<p>and as long as we’re asking questions: Niemeyer holds Asuntha in his arms on the ship’s rail. Giggs yells for him to get down … has his pistol pointed at the convict. A shot rings out … Niemeyer expects to be hit, but Giggs clutches his arm and drops his pistol. Michael noticed Emily watching the far side of the deck and turned to look, sees Miss Lasqueti throw something overboard and make a “quick recovery back to innocence.” </p>
<p>So Miss Lasqueti intervened and shot the police officer? Is she protecting Emily who she senses is “caught up in something dangerous” - a young girl who reminds her of herself? And doesn’t that make Miss Lasqueti responsible in part for the loss of life? And is her letter to Emily written in part from guilt - a half-explanation, a reason behind her actions? </p>
<p>Miss Lasqueti’s role - if she even had a role - is never addressed again, is it?</p>
<p>M,m,m,m,m,m,m, or was the “all knowing” Miss Lasqueti involved in the conspiracy? Seemed to have a pistol ready to use?</p>
<p>Remember when asked about the convict, she said not to believe in rumors, he may or MAY NOT have committed the crime.</p>
<p>** ignatius** regarding contacting Cassius.
</p>
<p>It bothers me that the story never came back to explain what happened with Miss Lasqueti and the gun. At the time I thought she knew what was going on and was even working to help the prisoner escape. It’s not clear.</p>
<p>I just looked back through the Miss Lasqueti chapter. In the letter she sent to Michael she says
So maybe Miss Lasqueti wasn’t a conspirator, but an “all knowing” (to use SJCM’s words) busybody. My question is “How does shooting the police officer protect Emily?” What was Miss Lasqueti thinking?</p>
<p>Hmm, Miss Lasqueti does seek Michael out and tell him not to believe rumors. She carries a pistol and is a crack shot (as Michael and Ramadhin later realized) and Michael notices Mr. Giggs annoys her. She seems bored with her choice of reading material … maybe she just waits for something to happen. Hmm, a conspiracy.</p>
<p>While poking around in the book, I came across the Mr. Daniel’s dinner in the hold: the tailor/undercover officer listens as Asuntha recruits Emily, tells her the convict is her father.</p>
<p>SJCM: Cassius can’t be that hard to find - a renowned artist. Michael follows his career (his exploits) in newspaper articles, just missed him at that gallery showing.</p>
<p>Ignatius, yes he could find Cassius, but he seems to want Cassius to find him?</p>
<p>Page61 mr daniels points out curare-when inserted into the bloodstream was able to knock out recipient into a long unremembered trance."</p>
<p>Emily’s drug? If so who had access to this?</p>
<p>My reading of that scene was that Miss Lasqueti shot the gun right out of Gigg’s hand, after which the gun “hit the deck below the bridge and discharged a shot into the darkness” (p. 242). I thought she did it to protect Niemeyer and Asuntha, not wanting either of them to be killed. But if her goal was to protect Emily…well then, maybe she was afraid that if Gigg re-captured the prisoner, the truth would come out about Emily’s involvement.</p>
<p>I didn’t care for the drugged Emily plot point. It reminded me of the crime committed in a “narcotic trance” in The Moonstone—fine for a Wilkie Collins novel, but a little out of place in Ondaatje’s work.</p>
<p>I thought it was amusing that Miss Lasqueti threw crime novels overboard because at times she reminded me of Miss Marple from the Agatha Christie books. She is certainly the subject of one of the “Overheard Conversations” in Michael’s examination booklet: “It is absolutely prohibited to throw anything over the ship’s side, Madame.” Clearly, she didn’t take that decree to heart.</p>
<p>For a place where throwing items overboard was “absolutely prohibited,” an inordinate amount of things went overboard anyway:</p>
<ul>
<li> Miss Lasqueti’s thrillers</li>
<li> the bronze bust of Hector de Silva</li>
<li> the deceased Sir Hector</li>
<li> the Weimaaraner dog</li>
<li> Miss Lasqueti’s pistol</li>
<li> Niemeyer and Asuntha</li>
<li> possibly Mr. Perera?</li>
</ul>
<p>Don’t know if anyone has mentioned this yet, but apparently there is a Lasqueti Island off the coast of Vancouver. Michael visits Emily on Bowen Island, also off the coast of Vancouver.</p>
<p>[File:Vancouver</a> Island, with Lasqueti Island highlighted.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vancouver_Island,_with_Lasqueti_Island_highlighted.png]File:Vancouver”>File:Vancouver Island, with Lasqueti Island highlighted.png - Wikipedia)</p>
![http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vancouver_Island,_with_Lasqueti_Island_highlighted.png]File:Vancouver](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vancouver_Island,_with_Lasqueti_Island_highlighted.png%5DFile:Vancouver){kind=link}
<p>Clues, red herrings, all staples of crime fiction. Maybe Ondaatje wants us to throw them overboard too.</p>
<p>Your discussion has so stimulated me that I have been mulling over these questions. For me, I have decided that the entire Niemeyer/Asuntha/Sunil/Miss Lasqueti/Emily plot is quite fantastical and in the end when I ponder it, unbelievable in the precision of its orchestration down to the key in Asuntha’s mouth. As Mary points out, this kind of plot is a staple in an entirely different kind of fiction.</p>
<p>And the web grows further, Mr. Daniels, the stranger at the table who is Mr. Perera, is everyone involved?</p>
<p>Ondaatje has taken pains to give us foreshadowings – Miss Lasqueti throwing a book off the edge of the boat allowing us to see her throw a gun in the water in a similar manner. Her violence with the scissors may let us imagine her violence with a gun.</p>
<p>But does it?</p>
<p>I imagine an alternative narrative that reads more like this. Three small boys travel to England from Sri Lanka and become fast friends. They are of markedly different temperaments, and they are utterly unsupervised except for the smallest cursory involvement. One boy has a heart condition. Another boy is full of high-jinks, and one is related to a beautiful, somewhat older girl on the boat.</p>
<p>She comes of age amid several admirers and perhaps a bit of sexual intrigue.</p>
<p>They roam the boat watching the other passengers.</p>
<p>When they get to England they part, but the boy with the bad heart contacts the boy with the beautiful cousin and they become friends in England. The third boy is lost to them. They boy with the bad heart has an alluring sister who the other boy is quite drawn to. </p>
<p>All three boys go to college and achieve differing amounts of success. The ill boy is quite cloistered to protect his heart and from his rather withdrawn nature. At an age old enough to know better he falls in love with one of his very young pupils and tries to fight for her honor and dies just after from his weak heart. His death brings his sister and his friend together and they marry but later divorce. Finally, this boy visits his lost cousin.</p>
<p>That’s the book stripped of its dramatic elements. The dramatic elements all seem borrowed from other fiction, and we mentioned many names. The storm – Conrad? Melville? The dog deaths a postmodern writer like Angela Carter. The intrigue with the prisoner Agatha Christie as some have said. The tapestry segment and scissors a French novel, Colette perhaps. The circus section? A Fellini movie or Nightmare Alley or Nightwood.</p>
<p>Perhaps this was a placid journey and all these hyper-literary elements that range from absurd to dramatic to melodramatic are the writer, Michael, accounting for a voyage that has formed him in ways he doesn’t understand.</p>
<p>The intersection of the mundane plot with the fantastical plot is, of course, Emily. I may be soft-headed, but I really wanted Michael and Emily to get together, sort of like Anakin Skywalker and the Queen (her name escapes me – Natalie Portman) in Star Wars. She is fourteen and he is nine when they meet.</p>
<p>I think this failed romance is at the heart of the book for me. Michael is at the Cat’s Table, exiled not from the captain, but from her. Miss Lasqueti is her stand-in.</p>
<p>Ive been really enjoying this discussion, but its hard to keep up! I hope I don’t repeat what’s already been said in these bits and pieces…</p>
<p>mythmom: I like that comparison to Huck Finn! Also the reminder that Asuntha is an acrobatmaybe Ondaatje uses that fact to make us think it more likely that she survives? It isnt very likely, but we want to believe it. And as you say, the acrobat metaphor works for other characters in the book, too.</p>
<p>Very interesting about all those failed marriages in the book, Mary13. I hadnt noticed that. Ondaatje is also divorced (he was married to a painter).</p>
<p>SouthJerseyChessMom: Thanks for looking up the information on RK Narayan! </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is a great find, ignatius! I agree with Mary that Mr. Perera/Gunesekera probably went overboard. But I don’t think it was ever mentioned that anyone noticed he was missing! </p>
<p>As for drugged Emily (and I didn’t like this plot point, either) I assumed Sunil did it with the prize bracelet from the otherwise unnecessary Jankla Troupe-with-volunteers performance:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sunil could have easily learned about the plants, because he met Emily through Mr. Daniels (and Michael thinks he hears Daniels mentioned when he and Cassius are in the lifeboat and overhear Emily and Sunil talking). Emily was just a tool for Sunil to use. Michael believed Perera was examining Emily’s cut out of concern; I think he was suspicious because he knew Emily was connected to Asuntha and the prisoner.</p>
<p>
After reading this and reading mythmom’s last post, I realized that Michael waits for everyone to contact him. Ramadhin, Miss Lasqueti, and Emily all contacted Michael. Even Michael’s meet-up with Massi happened because Michael was contacted about the death and funeral of Ramadhin. Michael regrets never getting in touch with Mr. Fonseka, but still doesn’t try to contact him. Michael did go to Cassius’ gallery show, but when he left a message in the visitor’s book, he didn’t leave a contact number. What’s up with all this? Why can’t Michael reach out to the others?</p>
<p>
If we go back to Mr. Daniel’s dinner in the hold, we see the whole Cat’s Table was there, along with Emily, Asuntha, and the ayurvedic. It could have been one of them or it could have been Sunil, as beunavista suggests. Maybe it was Cassius? He seemed to have a thing for Asuntha. He might have been willing to help her, not realizing it was Emily who would get the drug. Perhaps Emily herself got the drug, not realizing it would be used on her. In the conversation Michael overhears during the dinner in the hold, he thinks Asuntha tells Emily “You could help us”.</p>
<p>sylvan: I didn’t notice your post. That’s so interesting about the islands. Again, underscoring Miss Lasqueti as a stand-in for Emily, and now visa versa. They are like twins which we see when Michael reports that they go out with Mr. Daniels, dressed as two matching boys (another implausible detail.)</p>
<p>For me, this points up the artificiality of M’s narrative.</p>
<p>I don’t think this takes away from the novel at all, but rather, it is part of Ondaatje’s point.</p>
<p>Hello, buenavista! Good to hear from you!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Massi wondered the same thing: “Your goddamn cautious heart. Who did you love that did this to you?”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>At the risk of sounding like an arm-chair psychologist, I would say that Michael is afraid of being rejected. He is happy to be sought out, but won’t do the seeking. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is how I saw it, too. I look at Michael’s telling (or really re-telling) of the story as something positive—not as a flaw in either him or his novel, but as a gift. As NJTheatreMOM said in an earlier post, “What really matters are the psychological truths of the book.” </p>
<p>Discovering those truths—and the literary greats that influenced him as he revealed them—has been a treat. I have to quote writer Ann Patchett again here—she said that writing a novel is like “working a crossword puzzle or playing a game.” Analyzing a novel is the same, and Ondaatje has given us lots to work with. Sometimes, I think his “game” is more like one of those old intricate pencil mazes rather than a crossword puzzle, as there are more dead ends than hard-and-fast solutions.</p>
<p>Mary: I agree that Miss Lasqueti wants Mr. Giggs gun rendered useless. She shoots him in the arm either accidentally - though the author makes a point of Miss Lasqueti’s skill (“perfect target score”) - or intentionally:
</p>
<p>Regardless she injures Giggs:
</p>
<p>mythmom: Love post 115, ending with
</p>
<p>Now I understand why you don’t like the end to the novel … find it sad.</p>
<p>buenavista: Of course Sunil drugs Emily during the episode with the bracelet/ungent and the tailor suspects. I totally missed that and it makes such perfect sense now.</p>
<p>When I finished the novel, I felt confused by the “intersection of the mundane plot with the fantastical plot” (great wording, so I borrowed it from mythmom), as though the author changed directions for some reason. Looking back through the book and realizing how early - and subtly - clues get introduced, I no longer think that. mythmom finds the “failed romance … the heart of the book”. I find it to be a coming-of-age story firmly rooted within a mystery. Clues leading to the climactic scene turn out to be omnipresent - if only one knows to look for them. So yes to bildungsroman but one sharpened by events - particularly for Emily:
Michael may remember his time on the Oronsay as placid. He had other concerns and the role of witness to events, but Emily does not get off as lightly:
</p>