52 pages • 1-hour read
Warlight
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and gender discrimination.
The Subjective Nature of Memory
Nathaniel’s childhood is full of stories—the novels on Rose’s bookcase, the plays she performs with her children, the legends of King Arthur that she tells them, and her own “twice-told tales” (6) about her childhood. As an adult, Nathaniel gradually comes to understand that storytelling is a means to make sense of the chaotic experience of life. Because of his mother’s absence and enigmatic identity, he never feels quite complete, and he writes his memoir to better understand his mother and himself. In Warlight, the past is never a single, objective truth. Instead, memory is an act of reconstruction that mirrors the techniques of fiction, aiming to assemble a cohesive but subjective narrative out of the fragmentary and emotionally fraught raw material of experience.
Nathaniel begins his narrative with the moment of his parents’ abandonment, a trauma he revisits in hopes of demystifying his past. He frames his project in literary terms, where retracing his memories is like “clarifying a fable” (4) of his family. Recognizing that the memoir is similar to fiction and relies on similar literary tropes and devices, Nathaniel admits that the end result is shaped as much by the imperatives of art as by the factual record. He writes, “I suppose there are traditions and tropes in stories like this. Someone is given a test to carry out. No one knows who the truth bearer is. People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown location” (4-5). Nathaniel compares his memoir to fiction not to devalue the genre as false or made up, but to explore the complex ways memories and the “truth” of one’s past are always mediated through narrative.
Writing in hindsight, Nathaniel introduces the story of his life with the awareness that his memories are subjective reconstructions. He explains, “A memoir is the lost inheritance, […] so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another” (131). To tell a story of his past, Nathaniel relies as much on imagination as on evidence. He looks for his past in the fragments of personal memories and archival records, and when these alone do not suffice, he imagines the perspectives of others to fill in the gaps. He explains, “I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth” (272). Nathaniel creates vignettes of the past, replete with dialogue, on how he imagined his mother and Marsh’s relationship unfolded, or how The Darter and Agnes became a couple. These untold stories are in essence love stories whose “truths” cannot be captured in documents or from an outsider’s perspective. Instead, Nathaniel opts to imagine the past from their perspectives and in a poetic form that emotionally “rhymes” with the truth and “reflects” the past rather than verifying it.
Even with his remembered, researched, and imagined stories, Nathaniel’s past remains incomplete. Questions are unanswered, facts are illuminated sparingly and nonchronologically, and characters’ backgrounds are left untold, partially revealed, or layered in disguises. Memory is a compilation of stories and perspectives with no single master narrative, as evident in the novel’s thematic references to puzzle pieces (9), a “hall of mirrors” (131), and the Astral Plough—a random grouping of stars to which people have attached narrative and meaning over many generations. Rather than a jigsaw puzzle in which memories fit together in prescribed ways to comprise a single, correct whole, Ondaatje creates a “collage” in which narrative and meaning arise from the relationships between seemingly disparate pieces (200). Nathaniel’s memories are equally disparate and fragmented: a wish for a pearl, the sounds of the river, a squeaking floor, and his mother’s scars. Even the physical “evidence” has a layer of obfuscation: a translated audio recording, an unnamed map, and an obscured portrait.
At the end of the novel, Nathaniel concedes, “We order our lives with barely held stories” (280). The technique of the imagined, omniscient narrator has its limitations, and Nathaniel admits, “Even in this distilled, cautious version of Felon and Rose there is a confusion and even uncertainty about what may have happened, what may have been said; nothing quite fits within the rhyme of their story” (228). The reader, like Nathaniel, experiences his memories as an assemblage of quotes, rumors, secrets, songs, innuendos, suspicions, lies, and confessions, held together by imagination and by the conventions of narrative.
The Lasting Impact of War
Set shortly after World War II, the novel explores the traumas of separation and loss through the eyes of Nathaniel Williams as a youth and an adult. Although the war has ended, Nathaniel continues to experience disruption in its immediate aftermath when his parents leave him and his sister with a family friend while claiming to work abroad for a year. Raised in a climate of moral ambiguity and wartime danger, Nathaniel copes with feelings of alienation and uncertainty that never fully dissipate when he becomes an adult. The novel illustrates the ongoing impact of war and the elusive goal of peace across generations.
As a youth, Nathaniel copes with the upheaval of his life by imagining that normalcy and stability will return with the war’s end. With the news of his parents’ absence, he rationalizes, “There would be less calamity, less collapse of the family if we were left behind as opposed to [our mother] remaining in Ruvigny Gardens to look after us” (4). Having evacuated to White Paint during the war and survived the Blitz, he asks unconvincingly, “Everything had already happened. Hadn’t it?” (30). Yet, Nathaniel observes that postwar London is a space of pervasive desertion and loneliness. He writes, “There were parts of the city where you saw no one, only a few children, walking solitary, listless as small ghosts. It was a time of war ghosts, […] The city still felt wounded, uncertain of itself” (30). The city mirrors Nathaniel’s own internal feelings of vulnerability and invisibility. At 14, Nathaniel is haunted by his parents’ absence and uncertain of their return. His new homelife under The Moth’s enigmatic and questionable guardianship only exacerbates his feelings of isolation and apprehension as the boundary between their legal and illegal activities blurred. He comments, “When you are uncertain about which way to go as a youth, you end up sometimes not so much repressed, as might be expected, but illegal, you find yourself easily invisible, unrecognized in the world” (94). Distrust and disengagement characterize his early teens, and Nathaniel never tells his classmates or even Agnes about his parents. He decides with Rachel, “whatever we did we would do together” (14), yet even their relationship eventually becomes strained. In hindsight, Nathaniel considers the official end of the war as the starting point of his family’s dissolution and his haunting fear for his safety.
As an adult, Nathaniel continues to feel hesitancy about his life, which often expresses itself as isolation and self-doubt. He confesses, “I suppose we choose whatever life we feel safest in; for me it is a distant village, a walled garden” (46). Nathaniel lives a “solitary life” (266) and wonders to what degree he was “damaged” (146) by his parents’ choices, as his father was by the trauma of combat. This reflection suggests the transgenerational trauma of war. The Moth tells Nathaniel, “He was brilliant, your father, but he was not stable. You must understand that the war damaged him badly. […] Wars are not glorious” (26). The Moth depicts war not in its victorious grandeur, but in its destruction and suffering. The sentiment is shared by his colleagues when Felon teaches a young Rose, “Wars don’t end. They never remain in the past” (208), and Rose in turn teaches Nathaniel that “the world was a place of continual war” (279). At the archives, Nathaniel discovers records that the war indeed was still ongoing with partisan groups and remarks, “an unauthorized and still violent war had continued after the armistice” (128). The moral ambiguities also persist, as Rose is implicated in the post-war foibe massacres in Yugoslavia, and Nathaniel’s job involves sanitizing records for history to be re-written. Nathaniel’s investigation into his mother’s past is in part an investigation into the meaning of war, its devastation, its contradictions, and its lingering effects.
The novel’s title, Warlight, refers to the minimal light permitted during the regular blackouts that hid cities from German bombers. The term connotes restriction and repression, a state of near darkness, uncertain survival, and surrounding danger. Nathaniel recalls the areas along the Thames during the war “when there was just warlight” (77, 261), where vessels concealed themselves and moved undetected in the night. By exploring the emotional and psychological consequences of the war, Nathaniel depicts postwar London as perpetually cast in warlight.
The Multifaceted Nature of Identity
The archetype of the spy evokes themes of secrecy, deception, and double identities. For Nathaniel, his mother’s occupation as a spy means that he spends his life reckoning not only with her absence, but with his sense that he can never really know who she is. In retracing the hidden story of his absent mother, he discovers that the contradictions inherent to the life of a spy mirror those of any woman navigating the tensions between her work, her love life, and her family in a patriarchal society.
Nathaniel delves into his past and the archives to unveil a portrait of a woman challenging the expectations of traditional gender roles. Rather than view Rose as a negligent mother, he begins to question what motherhood may have meant to her. Looking back at the theatrical performances he and his mother would re-enact, he wonders, “Did other mothers do this? Did they fall gasping over the sofa with a flung dagger in their backs? […] But why did she do it at all? Was she bored with looking after us on a daily basis? Did dressing up or dressing down make her another, not just our mother?” (10). Skeptical of his mother’s love, Nathaniel interprets her love of performance as another attempt to escape the role of mother. The young Nathaniel and Rachel loved these performances, and they served as a form of bonding between mother and children, but later events lead Nathaniel to reinterpret his memories in a harsher light, and these formerly happy moments become signs that his mother’s was not who he thought she was. What he doesn’t realize until later still is that no mother is only who her children think she is.
As Nathaniel continues to explore Rose’s past, he begins to contextualize her decisions in terms of her own agency and the limitations of traditional gender roles. In their days together before her departure, Nathaniel recalls Rose’s playfulness and comments, “It was as if she had returned to an earlier version of herself. […] Was this new version caused by a release from her husband?” (9-10). When Rose returns to the Saints after leaving intelligence, she enters a long line of women who were expected to stay at home as wives and mothers. Nathaniel writes, “She could witness the generations of women in their labours with a husband’s visit now and then, and child after child, cry after cry […] This was the inheritance she had come back to, the prior life she had run from. She was once more back in a small repeating universe” (250). Nathaniel begins to see Rose as a young woman with aspirations to study law but who was expected to marry and have children instead.
Rose’s intelligence work made use of her courage and expertise, offering her an opportunity to be someone else beyond the domestic sphere. Espionage was not just political work, but personal achievement. Nathaniel realizes that his mother’s secrecy was not out of deception or malice, but out of her professionalism and desire to protect her children. Remembering how she paused her ironing to hear The Moth’s story of her skills driving down an unlit coast, Nathaniel wonders whether she ever held a gun. The image juxtaposes an instrument of domesticity—the iron—to one of danger, broadening Nathaniel’s view of his mother’s overlapping identities. As a daring agent who parachutes into missions, she is reliable and respected in her field. As a woman who has a brief affair with Marsh Felon, she is not an adulterous wife, but a woman with complex desires and emotional entanglements. Nathaniel recenters his investigation not on what his mother did, but who she was. He asks,
And she? My mother? What did she feel? And was it he or she who had persuaded the other into this adventure? I still don’t know. […] For this was not just physical love and desire: it encompassed the neighbouring skills and possibilities of their surrounding work. […] The whole dictionary of love, war, work, education, growing up, growing older (216-17).
The adult Nathaniel realizes that Rose was a woman of many identities, each of them true in some ways and false in others. Rather than employ the theme of espionage as a binary between a disguise and one’s true self, the novel explores how Rose found ways to subvert restrictive gender roles and express her agency as the agent Viola.
At the end of the novel, Nathaniel concludes that he has to envision the multiplicity of his mother’s identity and understand her from her perspective. He writes, “It had taken me a while to realize that I would in some way have to love my mother in order to understand who she now was and what she had really been” (166). Though his approach does not negate the pain he experienced by her absence and silences, Nathaniel comes to accept that he will never fully know who Rose was, and he hopes she lived the life she wanted. He wonders, “Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be? It may not have been a path built by Marsh Felon at all. Perhaps such a life was what she always wanted, the journey she knew she would at some time leap towards” (207). In providing a fuller, more complex portrait of Rose Williams, the novel also honors the role of women in World War II, their dedication, and their untold stories.
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