Divisadero
By Michael Ondaatje
Bloomsbury £17.99, 274 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

Michael Ondaatje’s fiction often grows out of an image. His most celebrated novel, The English Patient, for which he shared the 1992 Booker prize, had at its origin a vision of an aeroplane crashing into the desert. Who was in it, or why, was unclear until he began working on the book.

Divisadero, Ondaatje’s latest novel, originated less from an image than from a particular setting: the Petaluma hills of northern California. It is a region of tucked-away ranches, dotted with debris of the Gold Rush era, where Ondaatje lived while teaching at Stanford University some years ago. “There’s a kind of solitude and privacy in the landscape,” he says. “As soon as I arrived, a new world started coming forward.”

Ondaatje speaks in the imprecise accent of someone who has led an itinerant life. He was born in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in 1943, into a family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese background. He moved to England aged 11 to join his mother after his parents separated. Eight years later he moved to Canada, where he has lived ever since.

He has written a memoir about his Sri Lankan background, Running in the Family (1982). And his novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) occurred against the backdrop of the bloody civil war that has besieged the island since 1983. Unusually for a migrant writer from the Indian subcontinent, however, Ondaatje has avoided using his place of origin as the main source for his fiction.

Among Canadian novelists, his standing matches that of his prolific near-contemporary, Margaret Atwood. Intellectually and artistically, however, he is more akin to other foreign-born poet-novelists such as Michael Redhill, with whom Ondaatje co-edits a literary journal, Brick.

To a wider readership, Ondaatje is still known primarily as author of The English Patient, made into an Oscar-winning film by Anthony Minghella in 1996. Some 31 years after publishing his first novel, Ondaatje is highly regarded in the literary world – he was nominated for this year’s Man Booker International Prize. Yet Divisadero is only his fifth novel. So how has this writer, who has published comparatively little, gained such stature?

Ondaatje is a writer who appeals to all the senses. As we talk, his love for film, music and other media is clear. In his writing, both in subject matter and form, the influence of all the arts is present – it’s fitting, perhaps, that this writer should be best known for the film of one of his books.

Divisadero, his new novel, reflects many of the topics that nestle in Ondaatje’s work: desolate lives, new beginnings, the possibility of tenderness in a time of war. It also represents the purest expression yet of his signature style. The taut prose verges on the poetic – indeed, Ondaatje was a poet before he was a novelist.

His first verse collection, Dainty Monsters, appeared in 1967. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), although always listed as a book of poems, heralded the fragmented, polyphonic storytelling that Ondaatje would apply to his novels. He has described Coming Through Slaughter (1976), billed as his first novel, as a verse hybrid. “A memory, a story, can be amphibious,” we read in Divisadero. This is true of all Ondaatje’s stories.

He admits to bringing his ideas about poetry into his fiction. Among them is his belief in a poem’s open-ended quality. “The poem is a meeting place for reader and writer. There has to be empty space, and silence, so that the reader participates.” He relishes the poem’s economy of language, and cites American poet William Carlos Williams, for whom a poem was “a machine of words”.

A line from In the Skin of a Lion (1987), to which The English Patient is a sequel, tells us: “The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’” Here is the author’s ethos and aesthetic articulated. At the point in Divisadero when the protagonist hears faraway music in a field, she thinks of “a tune that seemed to have no scaffolding” - an appropriate description for Ondaatje’s work.

Like Ondaatje’s earlier novels, Divisadero eschews linear narrative. It tells the story of Anna and Claire, whose mothers died in childbirth, raised as sisters by Anna’s taciturn father. Into this stitched-together family comes the orphaned Coop, brought up as a farmhand. As the girls grow and flourish, so do their longings. Anna and Coop are drawn to each other, but they are cleaved apart by an act of paternal violence that hurls them all in different directions. Coop gets involved with a rag-tag confraternity of gamblers. Claire works as an assistant to a public defence lawyer in San Francisco. Anna becomes a literary scholar, researching the life of an early 20th-century French poet, Lucien Segura.

The story then shifts from northern California to south-west France, where Anna has moved into Segura’s house in the village of Demu. She takes a lover - a man whose Roma family once lived on the poet’s land. In Segura’s life, Anna finds echoes of her own. The two worlds mirror each other across time and continents.

There are autobiographical elements in Ondaatje’s novels – the protagonist of Anil’s Ghost also remained uneasily detached from her native country’s troubles. But his fiction is never a straightforward reflection of personal experience. He is warm and amenable when he talks, but is reticent when discussing his own work. He pauses and leaves sentences unfinished.

Examining other people’s art, it seems, comes more easily to him than talking about his own. He is at his most ebullient when commenting on different creative forms whose influences are apparent throughout his writing. Music – jazz in particular – is a constant reference. Coming Through Slaughter, one of the finest jazz novels ever written, tells the story of the real-life New Orleans trumpeter Buddy Bolden, a man often credited with inventing the genre. Elsewhere, allusions to jazz are rife. His English patient looks “the way Duke Ellington looked and thought when he played ‘Solitude’.” For a character in Divisadero, the music in Thelonius Monk’s early recordings resembles a trapped songbird.

Jazz is not only present as a subject, but also influences Ondaatje’s style. He considers Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings pinnacles of American art. “You can’t find anything tighter, or freer in form,” he says. In a soft and earthy voice he talks about the different instruments’ “private stories”, the solos amid the chorus. “In fiction there should be the freedom to have those solos, or monologues, which merge together at the end.” Discussing the importance of paring down his writing to bare essentials, Ondaatje quotes trumpeter Miles Davis’s efforts to “listen to what I can leave out”.

No less appealing to Ondaatje is jazz’s emphasis on spontaneity. “An improvisational quality is very important in anything you write – in fact, in anything you make, whether you’re a painter, a composer, or a writer.” This idea is central to his own creative process, he says. “If I plan a novel too much before I sit down to write there isn’t any energy for me.”

When Ondaatje talks about his working methods he refers not to how others write and edit, but to making a documentary film and not knowing what’s going to happen in it. Having directed two documentary films, Ondaatje considers editing to be the stage of filmmaking “closest to the art of writing”.

Of the creative mediums that Ondaatje discusses, his passion for film shines through in all his books. Dainty Monsters included a poem dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock. The posse of gamblers in Divisadero constantly exchange quips about the worst movies ever made, or the best screen line.

Beyond stylistic affinities, the characters that populate Ondaatje’s novels are also clearly related in nature. His most memorable creations tend to be salt-of-the-earth types who are good at using their hands – woodcutters, barbers, bridge-builders, sappers, card-sharks, thieves. They are displaced, scarred physically and emotionally, living on the fringes of society or sanity. Often, as in The English Patient and Divisadero, they are orphans. They seek redemption or succour, and find it only in similarly damaged souls.

They inhabit ruins, whether the ruins of their own ravaged bodies, or the ruins of destroyed buildings – a bombed Italian villa in The English Patient, an abandoned walawwa (a Sinhalese nobleman’s residence) in Anil’s Ghost, the shell of Lucien Segura’s house in Divisadero. “The idea of a shelter is important to me,” Ondaatje says. “That’s where you start healing yourself, or evolving, or resolving something. It might be that it’s only within that solitude that you can go deeper into a character.”

Crucially, these are places where characters’ memories can roam free. “The raw truth of an incident never ends,” Anna warns in Divisadero’s opening page. She later compares memory to a villanelle that refuses to go forward in linear development, “circling instead at those moments of emotion”. In such utterings lie, perhaps, the keys to deciphering Ondaatje’s elliptical narratives.

Each of Ondaatje’s books has a different setting, but a recurring narrative theme is war. His characters are often left reeling from events they have no control over. They share, as it is put in Divisadero, a “sense that history was around them, not within them”. The second world war rumbles through The English Patient; Anil’s Ghost exposes the atrocities committed in times of upheaval.

Divisadero is also set against the backdrop of war. Lucien Segura is a survivor of the first world war, and Coop’s gambling days unfold as the Gulf war plays out on television screens. Here, however, the fighting is muted. Or it plays a more distant role in this story. “Anil’s Ghost was a head-on version of war. I wanted to step away from it, go back into a more private book, a more intimate book.”

The archetype of the honourable thief is persistent. One of his most remarkable characters, the elusive thief Caravaggio, first appears in In the Skin of a Lion, and is central to The English Patient. In Divisadero, the father of the Roma family is a Caravaggio-like figure. He remains nameless, but enough information is offered to suggest he might be the same person.

When I point out the resemblance, Ondaatje laughs. “Yes, he does look like Caravaggio. I’ve never admitted to it, but there’s a possibility that it’s the same man.” This would make Divisadero the latest volume in an impressive trilogy. Yet Divisadero stands powerfully on its own. It represents the distillation of Ondaatje’s style but is unique in its immediacy.

While his peers take on the great questions of our day – most recently the events of September 11 – Ondaatje has continued to carve out a fictional world that appears mostly removed from contemporary life. With each of his five novels, however, he has inched closer to the present - this one takes us from the 1970s to the early 1990s. It’s more difficult to write about your own place and time, he says, explaining why he has shied away from composing fiction set in modern Canada. Then he adds: “Someone said any historical novel is about the period you’re living in.” Ondaatje’s fiction may seem to linger in the past – but his thoughts have never been far from the here and now.