Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Knopf, 304 pages, $26.95

“Warlight” is the most beautiful spy book I’ve ever read, but it is not so much a book about spies in Great Britain around World War II as it is a poetic novel about how war, politics, and necessity affected the people who lived through thundering bombers flying overhead at night, the subsequent bombs changing the landscape of a neighborhood in the blink of an eye, and the mostly invisible underground war. World War II changed European agencies and it changed the expectations of at least two generations in "Warlight."

Michael Ondaatje’s main character, Nathaniel — a name that apparently reeks of pretension, according to other characters — narrates most of the book, although he becomes more of an omniscient third person later in the book. First he tells his story, then he hypothesizes further afield as he describes the world hidden from him by his near and dear.

When the book opens, Nathaniel is fourteen; his older sister, Rachel, is sixteen. Suddenly their parents are required to move from a comfortable life in England to Asia, for their father’s career advancement. The parents will only be gone a year, they say. In a change of plans, their mother, Rose, leaves them some time after their father. She elaborately packs her trunk and spends a few pleasurable days with her teenagers. Then she is gone.

In Rose’s parental place lands The Moth. He has a real name, but not as far as Nathaniel and Rachel are concerned. He shyly flits like a moth, they decide. His is a peculiar guardianship. They almost always eat away from home. His rules are rather lax and his friends are vaguely criminous. The Darter, another sobriquet that strips whatever his real name is from our consciousness or need, is one of those friends who seems heavily occupied with transporting illegal greyhounds down wayward branches of the Thames at night. Of course, Nathaniel and Rachel tag along.

As the teens grow older, Ondaatje gives the impression that they only vaguely hanker after knowledge of their mother. They, or at least Nathaniel, seem placidly accepting of their unusual status. And this is when Ondaatje turns the tale outward. In lovely little pieces, the author drives Nathaniel into adulthood and a part of Rose’s story into the light.

Everything relates to World War II. And not everything is beautiful. The brutality is mostly hidden from Ondaatje’s readers, but the aftermath ripples forward. Nathaniel finally wants to know the truth about his strange childhood and his recalcitrant mother. As an adult he is in a position to find out, but he finds that truth is an elusive term.

Ondaatje’s story flows in a dreamlike way. Instead of ogres and trolls, there are members of The Moth’s coterie who drift into and out of the children’s lives. Instead of a princess, there’s an impecunious kitchen helper. Instead of a king, there is The Darter. Instead of a mother, there is a queen lost in exile. Instead of specificity, there is the vague dreaminess of somnambulant characters.

This would be a great spy story, if only it were a spy story.