At the age of twenty-nine, Nathaniel tries to make sense of these bizarre events, imbuing the narrative with the character of both a memoir and an investigation, the outcome of which promises a fuller picture of his own past as well as the true identities of his parents and their associates. The children gradually acquire information about their mother, who operates as an occluded presence around which the events of the novel circulate. The parents leave the children in the care of guardians, a cast of shadowy figures whose names suggest espionage codenames (The Moth, The Darter, Olive, and McCash) and who have obscure connections to their mother’ s equally sketchy wartime activities. Immersed in the bewildering atmosphere of post-WWII London, Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight introduces the narrator, Nathaniel, a fourteen-year-old English boy, and his sister Rachel at the moment when they learn that their parents will abandon them to take up work in Singapore for an undisclosed amount of time.
