A life spent watching

FictionA small boy witnesses the brutal killing of his parents. He is in time adopted by a solemn widower, who raises him in the company of his two daughters, one earthbound but blessed with an escape. Years pass, the sisters, once so close, become divided.

The father continues living his silent life of grief, while the adopted son commits the ultimate crime. This is a narrative of family, memory, longing and pursuit - pursuit of what happened and how it happened. Ondaatje's episodic fifth novel, his first in seven years, is characteristically impressionistic and choreographed verbal cinema, as graceful and as intense, and as desperately urgent, as a man climbing up a rope ladder.

It is also a story within a story, several stories. Ondaatje makes the craft of narrative a religious experience. There is invariably a ceremonial flourish. He establishes a mood and that limpid, detached tone informs every loop of the tale. There is never any doubt but that this is a fiction, layered and filtered through a kaleidoscope of emotion and colour. Anna sets the scene. Initially she is the witness but she also becomes the truth teller and the seeker.

The mood of poetic despair can drift towards the oppressive, yet the sheer density and relentlessness of the telling, its insistence, continually elevates this strange, beguiling and meandering work into a theatre of sensation; seductive, even irritating, yet fascinating in its insistent, wilfully lyric daring. Here is a novel in which nothing is simple; Ondaatje may seduce with his prose and artful set-pieces, but nothing is too easy. In most years, Divisadero would have confidently been expected to be battling it out for the Booker Prize, but it proved possibly the most surprising omission from the bizarrely low-key long-list.

ANNA THE WATCHER remembers. She describes how her sister, Claire, on horseback, "moves slowly on the ridge above the two valleys full of morning mist. The coast is to her left. On her right is the journey to Sacramento and the delta towns such as Rio Vista with its population left over from the Gold Rush." According to Anna, Claire "persuades the horse down through the whiteness alongside crowed trees". These are the images that make this odd book live, in the same way Ondaatje will take a fact or a historical detail and create a pause, a long sigh that makes the reader stop, think and consider. It is a particular style of narrative that Ondaatje has perfected, evoking a moment in time, just as once upon a time, in In the Skin of a Lion(1987), he described a nun's habit billowing out about her as she fell from a bridge.

Later, in this new novel, in the story within a story, another father, a writer, quite innocently sees his adult daughter bathe in the same outdoor shower he had once washed both himself and her in years earlier when, as he recalls, "she had been as tall as his knee". That phrase carries such heartbreak, a parent, any parent, pauses and remembers. But then the moment, jolted back into the present, explodes into shame for him as the daughter's lover, the fiance of his other daughter, joins the girl in the shower. This novel is full of word pictures such as this. It is also sustained by voices, often not all that distinguishable. Ondaatje is engaged in the pursuit of a fabric, a tapestry shimmering with incident.

Divisaderoreads as a book shaped by the random act of remembering. It is often unsettling, even confusing. He makes clever use of Nietzsche's famous remark, "We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth". It is Anna who quotes Nietzsche. Anna who has had her dream destroyed and who sets off from home in California to become a writer. And it is Anna who controls this novel of fragment and allusion. In a preface of sorts, she says in an address to a lover: "When I come to lie in your arms, you sometimes ask me in which historical moment do I wish to exist. And I will say Paris, the week Colette died . . . Paris, August 3rd, 1954. In a few days, at her state funeral, a thousand lilies will be placed by her grave, and I want to be there, walking that avenue of wet lime trees until I stand beneath the second-floor apartment that belonged to her in the Palais-Royal. The history of people like her fills my heart."

Anna dominates the book, through her memory, her personal experiences, her loss, and her subsequent career as a seeker of truths. The Californian sequences are the most convincing and most beautiful in the book. Anna remembers her young mother, a woman long dead, but whose vitality lived long after her. Anna and her sister are the survivors of a childhood recorded in a photograph album, "a time-lapse progression of our growing up from our first, unconcerned poses to feral or vain glances, as the truer landscape of our faces began to be seen". Late each passing December, the sisters would be "herded" by their silent father to stand beside the outcrop of rock where their mother was buried. Then the girls would study "this evolving portrait". Standing in the shadow of their growing was Coop, "the endangered heir of a murder". At once predictable and surprising, the drama of Coop and the sisters is played out and its implications for them all are long-lasting.

THE NARRATIVE IS divided into three major sections but Divisadero, named after a street, is far more fragmented than that. Anna as an exile takes her life and her curiosity away from the scene of her shame. She shapes a life for herself by tracking the life of a writer, Lucien Segura, through its various acts.

Ondaatje's most recent novel, Anil's Ghost(2000), looked to the brutal realities of civil war as enacted in Ondaatje's native Sri Lanka. It is a fine novel and proved that Ondaatje the prose poet could also look to politics and injustice. It is interesting that the novel that most reverberates through this new work is not Anil's Ghost, nor even his famous Booker winner The English Patient(1992). Divisadero continually looks to the stark romance of In the Skin of the Lion, which remains his most vividly cohesive and persuasive artistic statement. In that wonderful novel, part fable, part romance, part historical record, Ondaatje used the device of the thief. Caravaggio steals on many levels and in time, the thief returns in The English Patient.

A thief also surfaces in Divisadero. Even in the opening preface, Anna recalls that no less a thief than the writer Jean Genet visited the dying Colette, "who stole nothing . . . ". The further Anna the writer investigates the life of the French writer Lucien Segura, the more she reveals parallels and similarities. The theme of family and kinship, the disconnected connections, seep through the text.

Lucien himself recalled watching his stepfather, a clockmaker, at work. He says, in a document discovered by Anna, "I love the performance of a craft . . . I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it." It could be referring to Ondaatje's approach to narrative. His great themes of doomed romance, memory and, of course, war shape the tale.

There is great beauty and emotion to be felt throughout this book, which could have made next week's Booker shortlist far more interesting than it appears destined to be, yet for all the scene shifts and dazzle, the prevailing image is that of the lonely Anna's vigil; a life spent watching, waiting, retracing, piecing together the information, recreating the moment and above all, remembering.

Divisadero By Michael Ondaatje Bloomsbury, 273pp. £17.99

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times