On a late-summer weekend in Paris, Michael Ondaatje is speaking intently about inner demons. Since lives are “dangerous and brief”, he says, “any writer is using art to protect themselves – to give order to what seems chaotic. You shape your demons if you can”.

The author of The English Patient, the novel that shared the Booker prize in 1992 and was turned into one of modern cinema’s most successful love stories, is better known as a creator of desert romance than as a wrestler of demons. But, as we stroll beside the Seine, Ondaatje, in a pale-blue wind-cheater that is no match for the intense blue of his eyes, shrugs off his image as the great romantic. “It’s not a very real thing to me now,” he says with bemused detachment of Anthony Minghella’s film. “I’m not missing it.” Though he wrings comedy from being recognised at airports (“Mr Ondondangle, I’m your greatest fan”), he is vigilant about privacy. Yet his reputation as the “Greta Garbo of Canadian letters” belies a gregarious warmth. At lunch, he volunteers to snap a photo of the group at the next table – the modest citizen, not the celebrity author.

Ondaatje, who turned 64 on Wednesday, has lived in Canada since he was 19. France is the start of a European tour, and the partial setting of his new novel, Divisadero. Sexual love in various forms drives the book, from near-incestuous and forbidden to addic-tive, from teenage ardour to “late summer” tenderness. But it opens on a farm in northern California in the 1970s, with a family brutally splintered by a widower’s violent possessiveness towards his 16-year-old daughter, Anna.

“As usual, I didn’t have a plan,” says Ondaatje, whose novels appear at seven-year intervals, the last two spent editing, the first five “writing in the dark”. Divisadero grew from a stay in the Californian landscape. The adult Anna moves to France to write about the life of Lucien Segura, a forgotten author of musketeer-like adventures in Gascony, and looks anew at her past. This includes an estranged adoptive sister and Anna’s first love, Coop, the orphaned farm hand with whom the sisters grew up. Coop’s foray as a card sharp provides hard-boiled drama, down to a tensely annotated poker game.

For Ondaatje, it’s about “people who are not on the map, not part of history – below the radar”. His books shine a rare light on his characters’ working lives, whether clock-makers or bomb-disposal experts. “What you do in your daily life affects how you are with other people,” he says. Ondaatje is driven partly by curiosity, partly by fear. He once said he wrote In the Skin of a Lion (1987), with its daredevil bridge-builder in 1920s Toronto, because he was scared of heights. Violence, a constant fear, erupts in his fiction. “I didn’t have any in my life, but I know people who have,” he says. “We’re surrounded by incredible brutality, car accidents, war.” Wars happen in the wings of Divisadero, from the first world war to the two Gulf conflicts – seen as a “video game” above the poker tables. Ondaatje and his wife, Linda Spalding, also a writer, were in San Francisco when the Iraq war broke out in 2003. “We went on protest marches, but then drove back to Toronto through 10 states that were pro-war. It seemed wrong to ignore it in a supposedly private world of families.” The families in his fiction are splintered and nomadic, their ties improvised. “I’ve been obsessed with this,” he says. He has a son and a daughter with his ex-wife, the Canadian artist Kim Jones, as well as six stepchildren from his two marriages. His own family is scattered. He was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1943, with a “real salad” of Tamil, Sinhalese and Dutch ancestry. His memoir, Running in the Family (1982), began as a “restoration comedy” on a tea estate, but darkened as his father, Mervyn, drank the family fortune away. After his parents split up when he was five, and his mother, Doris, left for England, “the gap was filled by 200 uncles and 300 aunts”. At 11, he joined his mother, wrenched by the loss of an ayah, an “almost mother”. He never saw his father again: Mervyn died after a drunken fall when Ondaatje was at university in Canada.

His early life seems a layering of losses. “I suppose I’m dealing with that in the fiction,” he says. “It didn’t hit me except in retrospect.” At school in England, he says he was trying to survive with new rules and new outfits – he still shops obsessively for the sarongs he had to give up at school. His mother hit hard times, running a boarding house and working at the Criterion, in Piccadilly Circus, where Ondaatje had “little jobs – on the elevator and washing dishes”.

The enigma of his absent father may have shaped his books. He later noticed that his novels were “about searchers trying to find the mysterious central character”, starting with the notorious outlaw in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and the New Orleans jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter (1976). But, in the novels, “everything is a portrait of yourself with a different mask and costume on.

It’s like a theatre or a jazz piece. The characters have their solos, then converge”.

He missed this musical ensemble in The English Patient movie, which became “only about the patient’s love story”. The novel’s ending hung on Hiroshima. “It was filmed, but it looked like somebody had put in the wrong reel,” he says. “It didn’t work.” What he missed most was Kip, the Sikh sapper. “He’s a major character, but he almost disappeared.” Kip was his first south Asian character, and Ondaatje still sees Sri Lanka as one of his real homes. Writing Anil’s Ghost (2000), set during the Sri Lankan conflict of the 1980s and 1990s, he immersed himself in a “world of disappearances and decapitations. I was wiped out by that book”.

Yet Divisadero was harder artistically.Its parts, he says, “echo, reflect and rhyme off each other in intricate ways”. As Anna shapes her demons, finding parallels for her own life in Segura’s, the novel reveals how we all scan others’ lives, whether real or fictional, for echoes that make sense of our own. “We’re never sure how much Anna is remembering and how much rewriting,” Ondaatje says. “You underline things that become central to your own psyche. You’re always bringing the past into the present.”

Readers may feel tantalised by secrets and gaps. But, for Ondaatje, the white space makes us equal participants. “I don’t think the novelist knows everything. I don’t like being talked down to as a reader. I want tact and silence, something left unsaid.”

Divisadero is published tomorrow by Bloomsbury at £17.99

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

Times Recommends

• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
• Burning is too good for them
• Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik