The Cat's Table

The Cat's table, by Michael Ondaatje, was an entertaining read. Not that it was funny, but that the way that it was written pulled me into the story, as if someone was right there, almost reading it aloud. It is written as an autobiography, but it is actually fiction. For more than half of the book I thought that it was in fact the author writing about his own experiences. The story is a man, looking back on his childhood. He is remembering his experience traveling via large ship from his home is Sri Lanka to London, where his mother lives.

There are quite a few children's books which have some of the same basic themes, but this book is much more adult because of the fact that the narrator is an adult, and is able to decipher more. This book appealed to me in much the same way that movies like Dunstan Checks in, and books like Eloise, and From the mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler did when I was younger. A kid is confined to a hotel (or mobile hotel in the form of a ship) for an extended period of time and gets into all sorts of mischief.

The main character is Mynah, an 11 years old boy from Sri Lanka.  He is traveling on his own, although he does have an older female cousin along who doesn't want much to do with him. Mynah is placed at the Cat's table (the one farthest from the Captain's table) in the dining room along with two other unaccompanied boys, and an odd assortment of adults. They get into just the shenanigans that one would expect of unsupervised, unaccompanied minors. They have a great time in the first class area before other people are up, and they see a surprising number of things while they hide in life rafts at night, including the discovery of a prisoner, and even a murder. These boys are also brought into many less that moral/legal situations by some of the adult around them (for example, sneaking into 1st class suites to aid in robbery).

It is in these more serious situations that the true plot comes out.I was certainly not expecting the twist in the last few chapters. Minor characters all of a sudden become major players in the plot, and the book went in a completely different direction than it had been before. All in all, it was a good read. It had me interested from the beginning through to the end, albeit for different reasons.