A poetics of sense : Michael Ondaatje's 'In the skin of a lion'

Its politics are well-rehearsed in literary criticism: it is given to the celebration of humble labour over arrogant capital, to multicultural Canada over monological forms of repression, to the mysterious, though subordinated, knowledges of women, thieves, and working-class searchers over fraudulent regimes of wealth and institutional power. Patrick, the somewhat blank and passive protagonist, achieves a kind of heroic identification by the end of the novel. In darkness, in sleeping silence, in the nest of his own wounds, his antagonist Harris ingeniously identifies him as the mythic Gilgamesh, the king woken from a dream into grief to assume the skin of a lion. 'Bring a nurse and some medical supplies here, he's hurt himself,' Harris simply announces. Recognition of hurt has elicited compassion: Harris is not, in the end, the vengeful capitalist, rudely assaulted, but someone moved by the power of the wounded body, by an imagining of the dread trial of Patrick's exertions, and by the intuition that only grief could drive so perilous a task. What Maunce Blanchot calls 'fidelity to the demands of grief' has here, in an ironic way, emancipated Patnck; in the subsequent, final scene of the novel, he is the reconstructed father, driving away, moving from darkness towards the dawning light.