In the Skin of a Lion

By: Michael Ondaatje

Narrated by: Tom McCamus

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth.

Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient.

©1987 Michael Ondaatje (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Perhaps my new favorite book & Narrator

I think that I have just found my new favorite book. I could be bias, the book is set in Toronto, Canada & the Muskoka region (a very beloved area of mine) & I do love Toronto. I spent ten formative College years there & hearing all of the street names and areas was very fun, while learning of the cities infrastructure history quite fascinating, but no, it’s Mr. Ondaaje’s writing: he is a genius with the vernacular. The Narrator absolutely top notch. I think I’ve read every work of Ondaatje’s now, so this Narrator will be my new obsession. 😉

Fine story

Very well done. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the author introduced the main characters almost casually and then proceeded to develop them more fully, taking them through turns and twists that I would not have anticipated or expected. I appreciated the continuity over a long span of years. Could not help but respect the protagonist even more as I learned how his character had been formed and infused by his interactions with his father. An interesting array of friends. Imaginative situations.

A poem to the men and women who built a nation.

Traditional histories celebrate the wealthy industrialists for creating buildings and public works. They forget the day-labor workers that walked the steel and bucked the rivets. The forget the women who cooked and shopped and worked for their laborer families. None of the drawings and plans could have been made real without the nameless thousands that actually built them. Even when they died building the great works their names were never recorded.

This is a poetic love-letter to those nameless men and women. Michael Ondaatje writes their stories and the everyday heroism of living and working with care and lyricism.

Tom McCamus is a perfect narrator for the voices of true heroes who built nations.

Transported

Listening to The Skin of a Lion on Audible transformed my day. I’m a fussy reader often irritated. This novel changed the room. The kittens in my house stopped raising hell. We were immobilized. The audio version’s reader’s gravelly bass performance played a role, but it was the author’s voice, intelligent and beautifully intimate vision captivated us. Each scene kind of luxuriates in the eddies like a poem swirling around itself but then deftly spirals from one vortex to the next, flowing in all directions of time and space, leaping inward, outward, dreamward from one point of view to another, while still moving the story forward for the central character. Highly recommend.

Narration Pulled This Book Down

This is a book about the retelling of individual events until they are shaped and cohere into a story. The story is not what is recorded in historical archives but rather an evolving narrative woven from the parts the teller chooses to share. The title, "In the Skin of a Lion" harkens to the promise made by Gilgamesh when his closest friend, Enkidu, has died: to grow his hair like a lion and wander, ostensibly to tell his friend's story to all who will listen.

The style is purposely fragmented in the beginning leaving the reader to find connections and begin to stitch together a narrative. OK. This trophe is used successfully by many novels. It requires additional work on the part of the reader but can lead to great rewards when done well.

Alas, if you are listening to this Kindle edition and have not read the book before, you'll never know how big the reward might be for all the up front work. The reader has chosen to make book's early fragmentation the cornerstone of his delivery. Every sentence is read as a separate data point with a rising or (mostly) lowered intonation to isolate the sentence from the one that follows.

There is no flow in sections that have a legitimate narrative flow. Dialogs are hard to follow since everyone has the identical voice and chopped speech pattern. Instead of being lyrical (which what I think the reader intended) the style inevitably leads to monotony.

In the end, I liked the book. But I'll never know if I would have LOVED it unless I go back to read In the Skin of a Lion on the page where I can experience it with a more natural rhythm and pacing.