Ondaatje's hallucinatory prosody should rankle me, but it doesn't. Almost every paragraph contains a sentence so beautiful you want to copy it down but to do so would be to lose its contextual heft.

"A green man on fire." See?

Like Slaughter, Ondaatje make this fever dream work when no one else could. I can't read him too often; to do so would be too much of a strain on the moth wing delicacy his work baffles you with. Highly recommended.

I'm not sure what I can say about this book. As far as the prose goes, it's written beautifully, very lyrical. The plot is a bit loose and felt a bit disconnected for me. It more or less follows Patrick Lewis through much of his life, hopping from childhood to various parts of his adult life, the things he did and the things that happened to him. There didn't seem to be a lot to connect each section, as far as Patrick's motivations at times.

It starts with the building of an aquaduct in Toronto in the 1920s. The workers are mainly immigrants. Several nuns stumble onto the unfinished bridge and one falls off, to be rescued by one of the immigrants. Each of the two characters do appear in the book later on but one seems to be only a support character and the identity of the other isn't revealed for some time. They do have connections to Patrick Lewis who gets involved in other industrial projects that build the city including tunnels under the lake.

He also gets obsessed with finding a missing millionaire, finds love and affection a couple of times and some of his actions seem to happen for no discernable reason that was obvious to me. But I don't always pick up on these things and if the story isn't pulling me in, I tend to skim at times. It didn't really feel like a story with a beginning, middle and end as such. Apparently, a few of the secondary characters are also in Ondaatje's The English Patient. I read that a long time ago so I don't remember aside from one name that sounds familiar.

Don't take my low-ish rating too much to heart. It might be that I wasn't in the right mindset to read this. I can appreciate the prose and the flow but it didn't feel like a "story" to me.

The first half of the book was good. (up until the halfway point of palace of purification). The second half was boring. The writing style was something that I did not enjoy, at all. It was trying to be poetic. Just, no.

When I think of Ondaatje’s work – and all I’ve read before this is the marvelous The English Patient – I think of internal experience. I think of narrators who are trapped in a bed or confined to an abandoned hospital, or recuperating from amputated thumbs. I think, that is, of characters in the midst of reflection.

As I look at his method of narration, though, it’s actually steeped in the external. As he writes, he pans across landscapes. He gives us lush descriptions that become almost cinematic. In this book in particular, I often found myself lost in the larger story, but I never felt bored. I was always confident I was in the hands of someone who knew how to make words bring scenes (and, implicitly, characters) to life.

It’s a challenging method. Part of the inspiration of The English Patient is that it’s claustrophobic. Characters recall experiences of vast spaces and of epic love, but they don’t get to leave the scene of the hospital for the setting of the story’s present tense. That novel, tangled as is it, has a clear and tight focus. Everything points to the experience of our nurse and patient who, without quite knowing it, sit as the culmination of a number of great emotional arcs.

Skin of a Lion, though even shorter, is expansive in its scenery and in its setting. We go from the wilds of Canada in the days of timber empire, to the building of Toronto’s sewer system, to the birth of a radical workers’ movement in the years before World War I. It doesn’t have the same inspired focus of The English Patient. It’s never boring and always reflective of great passion, but it spins in different directions.

As an elevator pitch, this is an inspired plot: a young man who learns dynamiting from his father goes to Toronto, contributes to the great physical work of building the city, becomes radicalized through a betrayed love and from seeing the greed of the city’s capitalists, and determines to assassinate his arch enemy by swimming through the very sewer tunnels he helped build.

Given Ondaatje’s method, though, I rarely saw that plot as it unfolded. (In fact, I have to acknowledge various on-line sources as helping me sort out how one scene connected to another.) I loved the reading experience of being caught in the lush exterior reflections of the characters, but I was generally confused about how they combined. I respect the ambition behind all this – as a scholar of American multi-ethnic literature, I admire Ondaatje’s seeming goal to celebrate the mix of immigrant labor that made the city, and I recognize the philosophical claim that, when dismantling the master’s house, one cannot use the master’s tools. That is, I think I understand that he’s challenging conventional chronological narrative as a means of critiquing our received history. Still, he’s asking a lot of us. He writes brilliantly but here, in what turns out to be a prequel to The English Patient, he never lets his story cohere.

I’m all in for more Ondaatje, and I do recommend this one, but be prepared for a challenging ride once you begin.