AS IF TO REPRESENT the cloven nature of the lives of Anna, Claire and Coop, the central characters of his new novel, Michael Ondaatje builds a structure of divisions and breakages, open-ended narrative arcs that sometimes stop abruptly or barely cohere, the links and alliances tenuous, ghostly, even poetic and metaphorical. The hint in the title is flagged up: “Divisadero, from the Spanish word for division, the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio.”

In the 1970s in Petaluma, northern California, the motherless Anna and Claire are raised on a farm by their father. The other member of this household is the farm-hand Coop, also an orphan, and only four years older than the girls. The violent act that fractures their lives and sets them spinning into different trajectories is the father’s discovery of Anna and Coop making love: he almost kills Coop while Anna tries to save him by driving a shard of glass into the shoulder of her blindly enraged father.

Fast forward nearly two decades. Coop, now a gambler and cardsharp, fetches up in Tahoe where he is discovered in a café by Claire, now a lawyer in San Francisco, only for her to lose him and find him again. Anna, meanwhile, had moved to Dému, in France, and lives in the last house inhabited by a reclusive (fictional) poet and novelist, Lucien Segura, who disappeared after the war.

She takes as her lover the gypsy Rafael who had travelled with Segura all over the region, and tries to reconstruct the writer’s life.

It is a narrative of loops and switchbacks, of serendipity and coincidence – an Ondaatje trademark – orchestrated with mastery and grace. The first section is taken up by the California story, past and present, with brief flashes of Anna’s life in Dému.

The final two sections move to France; the last part, “The House at Dému”, Anna’s imaginative narrative of Segura's life, is astonishingly beautiful, achieving a metaphorical and empathetic resonance with Anna’s own life at once elusive and devastating.

If the California section fails to convince, especially the bathos of the act that ruptures the lives of the protagonists, and Claire and Coop never really come to life, it is in France, in the fiction-within-fiction section, that the book catches fire.

Ondaatje writes about love as if in a fever, the prose reaching a delirious beauty. Had it not been for the apparently artless control over every sentence, this prose, forever teetering on the edge of precious, could easily have cloyed. Instead, its emotional impact can stun you into silence.

Buy Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Bloomsbury, £17.99; 288pp

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