I read Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient a few years ago, and I felt much the same way about it as I did reading his earlier work, In The Skin of a Lion. It's beautifully written, poetic and lush. It has powerful themes, love and belonging and the building of a major city. But I never connected to either book. In The Skin of a Lion is told in a not-quite-linear format and has a dreamlike quality. When you remember that the story is framed as though it's being told by one person to another during a journey, this makes more sense. Its primary focus is Patrick Lewis, a man who grew up in rural Canada doing ranching and demolition work alongside his father (his mother was long since gone). The father was a solitary, taciturn man, and Patrick grows up to be much the same.

Patrick's adult life is presented to us as the story of his relationships with two women, both actresses: Clara, who he meets when he takes a job looking for her vanished boyfriend, and Alice, a friend of Clara's who he reconnects with after Clara has herself disappeared and after Alice has had a daughter, Hana. There are stories between and around those relationships, and stories about other characters who are more tangential to the plot, all loosely connected through Patrick.

I'm a reader who tends to be drawn to character-driven stories, which means this book was sometimes a struggle for me. The sheer beauty of the writing helped me get at least something out of it, but the characters were profoundly underdeveloped. Patrick is the central character, and although he's written as being pretty emotionally closed-off, it's frustrating how opaque he is. The other characters are barely people at all...the women especially seem much more like plot devices than actual humans, but the men aren't much better off. For plot devotees, there's not much here either...what I was left with by the end of the book was less the sense of a story than a series of beautiful, haunting images. Like a Malick film.

This was a book club selection for me, and talking about it with other people gave me a new frame of reference for it. There are two epigraphs introducing the book, and the one that I'll focus on is from The Epic of Gilgamesh. When you think about this novel as consciously echoing the style of an epic, some of its shortcomings make more sense: the clunky dialogue, the characters that feel more like archetypes than people, the sense of mystery that hangs over the entire thing. It still wasn't a book for me, but looking at it through that lens made me feel like its flaws were less egregious. If beautiful, almost poetic prose is something you're drawn to, this will be an amazing read for you. If you like a bit more traditional story structure with strongly drawn characters...it won't. ( )

FROM AMAZON: 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.

Ondaatje’s style is quickly recognizable; even if someone handed me this book without identifying the author, Ondaatje’s writing is distinctive enough that it would soon be apparent. Whether that is a plus depends, I suppose, on your feelings about his writing and his themes. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943, left for England in 1954 and eventually went to Canada in 1962 where he has lived ever since. His novels never seem to take place in the same location twice but, as I said, his style in unmistakable. I find his writing lyric and yet quite readable but can imagine that it would nevertheless not be to everyone’s taste. The story is fiction (though much of it is factual or fact-based) and tells the story of the construction of two major infrastructure sites (a viaduct and a water treatment plant) in Toronto in the 1930s through the lives of immigrants. Ondaatje’s theme is identity and, inferentially, the place of the nameless in history. He introduces two characters (Hana and Caravaggio) who will reappear in major roles in his next book, The English Patient. Though I liked the book, it is probably my least favorite among the number that I have read (I have read all of his works except the last two, The Cat’s Table and Warlight.) ( )

An incredibly self-indulgent and tedious novel. No amount of poetic license can paper over Ondaatje's frequent descents into navel-gazing and self-mastubatory prose. ( )

There is no disputing the literary skill of Michael Ondaatje. His works have been captivating readers for decades. However, it would be unreasonable for anyone to expect every work any artist creates to be extraordinary. And such is the case, in my opinion, with In the Skin of a Lion.

It is an ambitious novel which encompasses the lives of several immigrant workers in Toronto, Ontario, Canada during the early 20th century, in particular those involved in the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct, and the Harris Water Treatment plant. From a purely historical perspective it is fascinating, because Ondaatje reveals a few of the true stories from the era, such as a disappearance of Ambrose Small, a nun falling from a bridge, the murder of labour union organizers, and other such events of the era.

From a literary perspective, the novel doesn't hold up against much of Ondaatje's other work. Because of the scope of the subject matter, stories are somehow incomplete, leaping from one to the next without any comfortable connection or segue. The prose remains gorgeous, drawing in the reader so that events lift off the page. But there is a sense of disconnect and disorientation as Ondaatje abruptly moves from one character's life to another.

My comments, however, pale in the face of the fact the novel was shortlisted for the 1987 Governor General's Award.

Is the novel worth reading? Absolutely, if for no other reason than to explore some of Toronto's history. ( )