2002 Winner of CBC Canada Reads defended by Steven Page, lead singer of Barenaked Ladies

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Product Description

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5668 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-14
• Released on: 1997-01-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A young man from the Canadian back country moves to Toronto and becomes involved with two actresses, experiencing love, despair and, eventually, compulsion to commit a violent act. "A spellbinding writer, Ondaatje exhibits a poet's sensibility and care for the precise, illuminating word," praised PW .
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In the Canadian wilderness, early in this century, Patrick Lewis grows up a child apart. Some time later in Toronto, an immigrant worker, suspended beneath the bridge he is helping to build, rescues from mid-air a nun swept away by the wind. The paths of these three people eventually cross, with explosive results. Born in Sri Lanka and now living in Canada, Ondaatje writes feelingly of the immigrant experience. That experiencethe ethnic mix, the battle against nature, the battle of worker against exploitationis familiar in outline but subtly different in detail because of the Canadian setting and Ondaatje's particular gifts. A fine poet, he gives us a series of piercing, beautifully controlled passages. If the novel finally spins out of controlepisodic, it seems not so much to resolve as dissolveit remains evocative throughout. Highly recommended for readers of serious fiction. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
A lyric and sometimes surreal novel by the Canadian poet and writer Ondaatje (author of the remarkable poetry volume The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 1974; and the novel about Buddy Bolden, Coming through Slaughter, 1977) that may remind readers of certain of the more captivating aspects of, say, Ragtime. Ondaatje's setting is Toronto and environs from pre-WW I years up to 1938, and his emerging (but not only) theme is the labor and union movement among immigrant workers. In segments that read much like stories themselves, the reader meets a boy named Patrick Lewis, whose father is a dynamiter for lumber companies in backwoods Canada, then follows Patrick as he later goes to big-city Toronto and becomes (in 1924) a "searcher" for the missing capitalist and ruthless millionaire Ambrose Small. As part of his search - conducted (as is the whole of the book) amid a pleasurable wealth of period atmosphere and detail - Patrick meets and falls in love with Ambrose Small's actress-mistress, Clara Dickens; and then, when Clara Dickens "must" return to the somewhere-still-existing Small (in one of the novel's more surreal sections), Patrick falls in love with Clara's best friend, Alice Gull. The reader will learn in time that Alice is in fact the nun who was thought to have disappeared after falling from a new bridge back in 1917 (though in fact she was caught in mid-air by an immigrant worker), and, in her new incarnation as actress and lover, she will seek to radicalize Patrick Lewis, who himself now works as a laborer for the city's vast and grandiose new waterworks project. The radicalizing will succeed, though something terrible will happen to Alice, and, in between, there will be side stories - colorful, imagistic, and often lovely - about union martyrs and labor pioneers. If there are flaws here, they lie in the minor hints of a history-lesson tendentiousness, but a poetically energized grace and a perfected and rich inventiveness remain the greater marks of this talented writer. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Customer Reviews

if you onlyever read one ondaatje novel, this is the one
In 1987, Ondaatje wrote his chef d'ouevre, In the Skin of a Lion, which combines the best of his previous prose, poetry, and recent autobiography. Here one will see fictional characters come to believable life, prose more sonorous than most poetry of the day, and learn more about the history and politics of Canada than one does at school (unless, of course, one is lucky enough to be Canadian.) Many feel (and I believe rightly so) that this is the book that should have won the prestigious Booker Prize--an honor later given to 1992's The English Patient. Certainly, this is the book that helped give birth to the latter. It is here that we meet Patrick Lewis, Caravaggio, and a much younger Hana. Lewis is the anti-hero of the story, so deftly written that we grow with him, we love with him, and we grieve with him. I somehow feel that Patrick is closer to Ondaatje's heart more so than any other character that he's written until the advent of Kip in The English Patient. The tale of Patrick's life in "Upper America" made me weep at each reading, as did the sheer beauty of Ondaatje's prose. In my humble opinion, it is his finest prose to date.

all the beauty that surrounds us
I am trapped by these words, I slow down on each one almost notwanting to know what comes next because I know it'll most certainly besomething that puts me in awe and leaves me hungry for more.

I thought The English Patient was a wonderful book, I walked in Libyan desert looking for Zerzura for weeks after reading that book. But In The Skin Of A Lion is something so much more. This book moves me so I'm left speechless. The continuance, the surprises, the beauty, the characters. If it was possible to choose to write like someone I would absolutely pick Michael Ondaatje. His work is simply beautiful.

I am amazed. Read this book, read all of them. Find the fine red line that ties all the stories together. END

Romantic, Cubist, Very Well Crafted
There is no more poetic and skillful an author on the scene today and this book is a fine illustration of his extraordinary talent. Part of the "big deal" that some fail to see is the sheer mastery with which Ondaatje paints a very deep and complicated portrait of the protagonist and his historical and geographical contexts. He comes at the characters and the plot from a variety of angles. But unlike Faulkner, (those who think this novel difficult should open "The Sound and the Fury"!) Ondaatje uses third person narration to keep us from getting lost. Ondaatje use of metaphor is almost overwhelming and that, ironically, is one of my problems with the book.

It is a bit too romantic in its depictions of some exceedingly difficult lives and there are too many metaphoric descriptions. Everything seems weighted. Nothing is light or allowed to pass easily. That is why some say the book is slow. But it does move along quite well. You need to read it slowly. It's not something to be crammed down or hurried.