Michael Ondaatje's "Warlight" teachers' review for NSW HSC 2027-2028

Brief description and distinctive features

Teaching this novel cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

Warlight is set for study in 2027-2028 in Year 12 in Advanced: Critical study of literature.

Why choose Warlight for Critical study of literature

• Warlight will inspire students in Year 12 to know more about themselves and their world through the refracted light of the characters, uncertainties, mysteries and doubts of this substantial literary text.
• It’s a fascinating construction: part thriller, part spy story, an exploration of memory and fractured family life, of lies and secrets, of war and unsung heroes, of the corruption of ideals, of innocence and love lost (and found).
• Warlight will give students rich opportunities to explore, discuss and respond to the ways a text can be valued for its aesthetic qualities, text structures, language features and stylistic elements.
• Ondaatje is a respected and acclaimed writer which will give students a deep source of critical interpretations to enhance their critical responses.
• The beauty and intelligence of Ondaatje’s writing will afford students many authentic opportunities for close textual analysis.
• One of the most successful novels I ever taught in the classroom was Ondaatje’s In the Skin of A Lion. Students were entranced by it. Warlight will have an equally powerful impact in the classroom and inspire diverse analytical and creative responses.
• Warlight would be a wonderful choice in HSC Advanced English: Critical study of literature.

Distinctive qualities of Warlight

• A compelling and intriguing opening sentence which inspires the reader to explore its significance 
• The complex context of Post-World War 2 Great Britain and parts of Europe with the disruption of old hierarchies and the brutal aftermath of the war has a powerful role in the construction of the novel
• First person narrative voiced by 14 year old and then 28 year old Nathaniel in a two part structure echoes the fragmented nature of memories
• This literary novel contains many different elements with mystery, thriller, spy, revenge tragedy and love story at play
• Vivid characterisation, as The Moth, Darter, the geographer and ethnographer Olive Lawrence and other refugees from the war form a ‘night zoo’ in the Williams’ house in Part 1 and the mysterious Marsh Pelon and his association with Rose Williams is explored in Part 2
• Considerations of memory and truth, and the art and nature of story-telling will engage students as Nathaniel tries to put together the jigsaw puzzle of his family, his adolescence and the fragments of his mother’s life
• Poetic images (Rose listening intently with a hand held iron to the Moth’s recollections, Nathaniel learning the declensions of the river and canals, and making love in empty houses, artworks moved from safekeeping tunnels back to museums) presented as vivid shards of life with an aching acuity
• The Berger quotation that prefaced In the Skin of a Lion ‘Never again will a single story be told as if it was the only one’ echoes Ondaatje’s own statement in that book, ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human’. 

Ways to use Warlight in the classroom

Teaching this novel cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

Establishing the connection between context, reader, text and author 

Context

Ondaatje initially sets his novel in Post World War 2 London and the novel moves to the countryside of Great Britain and to Europe.  In London, the ‘warlight’ of the title with its blackouts, its mists and obscurity, continues to bathe the post WW2 houses, pathways and roads (with rubble still in the streets) and moves onto the canals and rivers. Life in in the country in White Paint, where Rose grew up in the house with its ‘nightingale floor’ and where she returned to with Nathaniel after the attempted kidnapping of her children provides a contrast with its natural setting.  The war and its aftermath weigh both sections of the novel. 

Draw up a table to identify the different areas in the novel and the historical and cultural events that parallel them. Some initial suggestions for you are set out below. 

What novels can do 

Novels “… ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything, and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?” George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“’We order our lives with barely held stories,’ Nathaniel says at the end of the book. In Warlight, these ‘barely held stories’ knit into a work of fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory.”

                                                   The Guardian June 2018.

Task

In what ways does Ondaatje deliver any of the listed narrative elements below to create this extraordinary novel?

Using the novel form authors can: 

• Break the rules of conventional structure 
• Challenges earlier storytelling conventions such as the need for a moral, caricatures and sentimentalism 
• Deliver the unexpected 
• Self-examine with metafictional possibilities  
• Provide ambiguous endings
• Have length and space to explore complexity 
• Extend the narrative through prologues, epilogues 
• Provide variety in the telling using chronological, flashback, episodic
• Use imagery, allusion, intertextuality, symbolism or allegory to convey a deeper meaning, ellipsis, characterisation, plot, setting, and multiple, singular or unreliable narrators 

Examine the construction of this novel 

In groups consider 2-3 of the sections in the novel and discuss and record memorable incidents and images. Discuss why the novel might be constructed in this way.

Storytelling 

Nathaniel knows he can “only step into fragments” of the stories of his mother and Marsh Felon, The Moth and the Darter the others associated with her intelligence work as he tries to piece together his mother’s life and death. 

Olive Lawrence, one of Nathaniel and Rachel’s surrogate parents in the years their parents are missing, tells him, ‘Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.’

Task

‘We never know more than the surface of any relationship after a certain stage, just as those layers of chalk, built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures, work in almost limitless time.’

In the light of the quotation above from Warlight write a 600 word account of the mother and son/daughter relationship and the impact on the children of their parents’ disappearance. Consider the different ways the children reacted to the discovery of their mother’s steamer trunk p15 26-27 and the actions of Rose to protect her children. 

Aesthetic qualities of the novel and its storytelling 

Ondaatje is a poet as well as a novelist and many of the images in the novel are evocative and vital to our understanding. The night river journeys, a dim and darkened London seen by ‘warlight,’ (as hard to navigate as the memories in Nathaniel’s mind), the houses for rent or sale, shorn of furniture and Nathanial and Agnes making love amid the running greyhounds, the final moments of Rose: all are indelibly printed on the mind. 

The unattributed epigraph at the beginning of the book ‘Most of the great battles are fought in the creases of topographical maps’ gives insight into the interest Ondaatje has in exploring the secrets and lies in historical contexts such as the intelligence work during and after the war and in family contexts such as the Williams’ relationships.  Maps become metaphors for the silences and gaps in their lives. Nathaniel makes maps to make sense of his life. 

Task

Look through the novel and explore the metaphors and maps that occur and the impact they have on the narrative. 

Language use

Task

Keep a record of unfamiliar words and phrases. 

Ondaatje introduces the reader to a range of vocabulary from other cultures and languages. For example:

Schwer: German for ‘difficult’ or ‘heavy’. The Moth tells Nathaniel and Rachel, that the composer, Mahler, used to write ‘schwer’ against sections in his musical scores. The Moth warned the children that they needed to prepare for such moments as nothing was safe anymore. 

Find the origin of the ‘nightingale floor,’ a defensive alarm which Rose thought would keep her safe. 

Developing an informed personal perspective as a reader

Following a group debate on the merits of the novel and its cultural contribution students collect and share reviews of Warlight, reflecting both positive and negative receptions. 

Then, following a group discussion on the conventions of review writing and possible ways to those conventions each student will write a review reflecting their own perspective on the novel. 

Some reviews to get them started can be found at: 

• The Guardian
• The Sydney Review of Books
• The National Book Review
• The Washington Independent Review of Books
• The New York Times 
  'A Mother Keeps Wartime Secrets in Michael Ondaatje's New Novel' by Dwight Garner, 7 May 2028
  'Wartime Acts, Postwar Retribution: A Mother's Risky Legacy' by Penelope Lively, 7 June 2018

HSC style-like questions for a Critical Study of Literature 

Teaching this novel cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

1.Through its representation of human experiences, Ondaatje’s Warlight strengthens the significance of honesty. To what extent does your interpretation of Warlight support this view? In your response, make detailed reference to the novel.  

2. In what ways does the opening extract from Warlight introduce key ideas and aesthetic features of this novel?

In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals. We were living on a street in London called Ruvigny Gardens, and one morning either our mother or our father suggested that after breakfast the family have a talk, and they told us that they would be leaving us and going to Singapore for a year. Not too long, they said, but it would not be a brief trip either. We would of course be well cared for in their absence. I remember our father was sitting on one of those uncomfortable iron garden chairs as he broke the news, while our mother, in a summer dress just behind his shoulder, watched how we responded. After a while she took my sister Rachel's hand and held it against her waist, as if she could give it warmth.

In your response make close reference to the extract and to the novel as a whole.

3. How is the quest or pursuit for control explored through characterisation in Ondaatje’s Warlight? In your response, make detailed reference to the novel.

Relevant details in relation to the new NSW English Stage 6 HSC syllabus

Teaching this novel cannot commence until Term 4 2026 and will be first examined in 2027.

There are requirements for particular types of texts to be selected from the prescribed texts list for different courses. Great care must be taken in selecting a pathway of texts that meets all the requirements.

For the Advanced course 

Four prescribed texts to be studied with at least ONE from each of the following categories (prose fiction, poetry, and drama OR nonfiction OR film OR media) and ONE authored by Shakespeare

Warlight is a novel (pf) and includes a range of social, cultural and gender perspectives.

The pathways below include a drama text by Shakespeare which can be found in all sections of the course except Texts and Human Experiences. 

Possible pathways for HSC Advanced course