Poet, Meet Pedant

A book club I know read Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, so a copy has been at hand in the living room. The club, I hear, on the whole enjoyed the book. I read in a steady condition of irritation. In this book, Ondaatje seems to prefer the portentous phrase to the accurate one, and his grasp of fact, where I can test it, is shaky. I concede that he may be playing a deeper game that I just don't grasp, but I doubt it. The novel is set for the most part in the middle to late 1940s.

Portentous: the author's mother, having done intelligence work during the war, is said to have listened "with her ears pressed against the complicated frequencies of a radio's headset." I don't know that the frequencies used for transmission were any more complicated than those of other electromagnetic radiation; and in the headphones one heard the frequencies of the human voice, probably simplified through loss in encoding and decoding. (Or one heard Morse, which required only simple frequencies.)

At a slow river, the day after bombs fell nearby,  "the water was flat, undamaged." Without the impulse of wind or a steep enough gradient, water is in general flat. And what can it mean to damage water? One can muddy or pollute water, but I never heard even the foulest rivers spoken of as "damaged".

A character "felt raised a league or a fathom into the air". Which? A league is three miles, a fathom is six feet, so a league contains is at least 2,640 fathoms, more if the miles are nautical rather than statute.

Facts: Early on, one encounters a man known as the Darter: under the nickname "The Pimlico Darter" he had some years before been the best welterweight north of the Thames. I suppose that I could have said with Jake Barnes, "Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title," and forgotten it. But in twenty or so pages, the Darter is described as tall. To box as a welterweight, one must weigh in at no more than 147 pounds. Welterweights are seldom tall as America judges height, or as I suppose England did.

In the Bibliothèque Mazarine, in entering which one somehow "entered the fifteenth century" (Mazarin was born in 1602), a character reflects that he prefers "older maps that are cityless, marked only by contour lines so that they can even now be used for accurate reconnaissance." The oldest maps with contour lines are from the nineteenth century.

An ethnographer (among her other vocations) "had risen into a dark sky infested with other gliders that shuddered in the air as brittle as glass, in order to listen to how porous the wind was and search for rainless light, so they could postpone or confirm the invasion."  How does one grade the porosity of wind, and are the gliders as brittle as glass, or is it the air? The gliders were fragile enough; but I believe that a) the meteorological observations for D-Day were made largely by ships on the Atlantic, and b) the only gliders then in the air in numbers that could could count as "infesting" were not observing weather but carrying troops.

A young expectant mother, reluctant to carry on her work as a waitress, finds work at an explosives plant. (I'm not sure that this is what the medical profession would suggest.) She works near "the Great Nitrator, in which nitroglycerine had been made for two centuries." Nitroglycerine was first synthesized in 1846.

And in general the notions of intelligence and counter-intelligence are silly. British intelligence as imagined by Ondaatje seems to have no idea of compartmentalization, of the sharing of data on a need-to-know basis. The same woman monitors transmissions from allied agents, broadcasts coded instructions, and carries out hazardous operations in the field. Agents knowing a great deal about sensitive operations are allowed to fall into the hands of hostile groups. I could go on, but won't.

Or is this all an elaborate leg-pull? There is nothing wrong with a bit of deliberate, elegant silliness. Yet the masters of that style--I think of Flann O'Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds or Gilbert Sorrentino in Mulligan Stew--make it clearer what is going on.