Water Works: Michael Ondaatje's Excellent In the Skin of a Lion

All the chit chat this morning around the water fountain (well, the gallon jug of bottled water put out by the bosses ) has been about how Montrealers are coping with a boil water order.  Seems routine maintenance at a treatment plant stirred up sediment yesterday, leading to the precautionary measure that went into effect Wednesday morning, and won't be lifted to this evening at the earliest.

 Water is such a commonplace substance that one tends to forget about it, except in times like these.  But providing safe tap water requires immense effort, and the stories connected with can take on elements of saga.

 Michael Ondaatje realized that 25 years ago when he researched and wrote  In the Skin of a Lion.  It was his second novel, following several volumes of poetry and literary criticism, so I remember being surprised when I read it at the way it portrayed immigrant life in the Toronto of the early 1900s.

 Apparently he spent days and days reading newspapers from the period, trying to get the facts right about the building of the city's water treatment plant and delivery system.  Among the many characters are Macedonians who came expressly to work on the project, most of whom ended up going back when the work was done.  Two of the characters, Hana and Caravaggio, turn up in his next, more famous novel, The English Patient.

 But the novel is far from a realistic, muck-raking exposé of the conditions of the people who worked on the project--and by extension on similar projects all over the continent.  Ondaatje is a poet, remember, and his imagery, descriptions  and portrayal of character raise the book to a very high level.  It's what John Steinbeck might have written if he'd been William Faulkne, a tough story that shimmers like reflections on water.

The original cover, by the way, shows what can happen when Socialist Realism is kicked upstairs to become High Art.