Michael Ondaatje is a writer of many qualities, but on the evidence of his new novel he is not, as his publisher proclaims, “a master storyteller”. The book is partly about someone who genuinely fits this description, an imaginary French writer, Lucien Segura, whose pseudonymous and hugely popular sequence of interrelated novels “gave his readers the happiness of a resolution”. In contrast, Divisadero is oblique, glancing and frustratingly inconclusive.

The narrative starts in California, where a farmer loses his wife in childbirth but, perhaps by way of compensation, brings back from the hospital not only his new daughter but another baby whose mother has died. Anna and Claire are brought up as sisters, joining a slightly older boy called Coop, adopted when his family was murdered (a melodramatic plot contrivance that seems to have left no mark on his character). Coop occupies an ambiguous role on the farm, part sibling, part hired hand. The first half of the book traces the early life of these three characters, a shared life that is shattered when Anna’s father discovers her in flagrante with Coop. The violent scene that ensues sends everyone off in different directions. Anna runs away, takes another name and becomes a writer; Coop turns into a professional card sharp; Claire stays on the farm with her father, but works during the week as an investigator for a lawyer in San Francisco. A series of coincidences brings Coop and Claire together again, while Anna broods about her lost siblings in France, where she has gone to live in Segura’s former house in order to research his mysterious life.

The novel’s title, taken with rather too big an authorial nudge from the name of the street where Anna lives in San Francisco, is the Spanish word for “division”. It is not only the quasi-siblings who are divided, however. The narrative until this point has been fidgety, but in the second half it veers off in a different direction, leaving behind the principal characters while Segura takes centre stage. Coop and Claire disappear from the story without supplying readers with “the happiness of a resolution”. Anna makes a brief reappearance at the end of the novel, rather as if what we have learnt about Segura is the result of her investigations; but the sort of detailed interior life of Segura to which we have been privy owes more to the omniscience of a novelist than to the researches of a biographer with only one witness and a few notebooks to work from.

While there are echoes in Segura’s story of what we have already been told about Anna’s early life, these are not strong enough to bind the two halves of the book into a whole. Furthermore, Coop’s peripatetic career in gambling unwisely relies upon the reader’s knowledge of poker and even includes technical diagrams to show which player holds what cards.

Ondaatje is at his considerable best when writing about the natural world and rural life. There are, for example, two marvellous and matching set pieces in which Coop mends a water tower and Segura’s neighbour repairs a church spire. Equally fine are extended descriptions of the effects of the weather on the land and upon those working in it or travelling across it. Too often, however, Ondaatje plays the literary conjuror, so beguiling his readers with his prose that they fail to notice that he occasionally produces airy nothingness. Oracular authorial interventions such as “We relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher or listener, the drummer in the background keeping cadence” have a certain poetry, but rely upon us not pausing to ask whether the first half of that sentence is, in fact, true, or indeed whether it is contradicted rather than amplified by the second half. We are carried along enjoyably on the lulling rhythms of Ondaatje’s writing, but at the end of this journey we look back across a beautifully shimmering landscape that now seems curiously insubstantial.

Buy DIVISADERO by Michael Ondaatje
Bloomsbury £17.99 pp276

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