First thoughts

The Cat’s Table: A Novel. Michael OndaatjeJonathan Cape, £16.99. Kindel $3.22

ALMOST 20 years since Sri Lankan-born Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize for The English Patient he’s back with his latest work, narrated by a writer named Michael.

Although The Cat’s Table is a fiction book, the author acknowledges it “uses the colourings of memoir”.

The story is mainly set in the 1950s on the Oronsay, a liner bound for England, where the 11-year-old Michael befriends two boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, who roam the ship as free spirits.

Ondaatje conjures enticing vignettes of the eccentric people they meet around the Cat’s Table, the one furthest from the Captain’s, and the adventures they have, only half aware of the adult dramas playing out around them.

Michael’s cousin Emily is on board, giving him his first stirrings of desire, as well as a shackled prisoner who the boys spy on at night.

It’s a coming-of-age story painted with Ondaatje’s beautiful imagery.

Gods Without Men. Hari Kunzru, Hamish Hamilton, £12.99; Kindle, £6.49

Review: Zahra Saeed

Gods Without Men is a multilayered novel spanning centuries, cultures and faiths. It consists of several stories set around The Pinnacles, a rock formation with sinister undertones found in the Mojave Desert.

The characters’ fates are somehow intertwined — from doped-up ‘70s alien worshippers, to an 18th century Spanish priest/explorer and a high-flying modern-day New York couple whose autistic child goes missing.

Author Hari Kunzru has tried to be very ambitious with his fifth work, but at points his ambitions are almost self-defeating.

So many narrative strands make it difficult for the reader to engage with the story and Kunzru does not have the same mastery as comparable writers, such as David Mitchell.

Nevertheless, this is a challenging, contemporary read.

A Walk-On Part: Diaries 1994-1999. Chris Mullin, Profile Books, £25. Kindle £11.25

Review: Jeremy Gates

WHEN even “nice” John Major explodes in fury at the mention of Rupert Murdoch’s name and suggests a cross-party alliance to attack him, you realise in the final volume of Chris Mullin’s diaries that it seems some MPs have been biding their time to settle old scores with the newspaper tycoon.

Mullin says his trilogy has been a fine retirement hobby, and the fascination of this book is seeing how Labour’s hopes and dreams of the mid-1990s turned out.

Welfare reform, Lords reform and even Mullin’s quirky obsession with the Masons may have generated more hot air than anything else, but the diarist and his fellow Labour backbenchers were gobsmacked from the start by Tony Blair’s obvious knack for converting former Tory voters.

“A potentially catastrophic Chancellor” is his view of Gordon Brown two months before Blair’s first election triumph. Not bad! And few could now dispute his description of the Millennium Dome as “ludicrous”, as he opened it in June 1997.

Diarists, though, must be indiscreet to add something important to the official record. This pleasant, gentle read reveals intriguing facets of well-known characters, but Mullin may be too far out on the margins to be wounding.