The Cat's Table

The Cat’s Table is a 2011 novel by the critically acclaimed Canadian author and poet Michael Ondaatje. Using his own experiences traveling from the newly independent Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England when he was eleven, Ondaatje creates a fictional version of this three-week ocean trip. Part coming of age story and part immigration narrative, through the eyes of its eleven-year-old narrator and his encounters with the many different and complex people aboard the ship, The Cat’s Table explores the loss of innocence that occurs when adolescents encounter the adult world.

The first part of the book is told in the third person. In 1954, Michael, the son of a divorced couple, has been living with his uncle in Ceylon but is now eleven years old and ready to go to school in England, where his mother lives. As he boards the ship Oronsay, a retrofitted troop carrier, he doesn’t say good-bye.

As soon as Michael is on the ship, the narration switches to the first person. He quickly falls in with two other boys who are also on their own on board: the slightly older Cassius, a troublemaking tough guy whom Michael knows from school, and Ramadhin, a shy and somewhat sickly boy who is nevertheless eager for adventure. Michael (now nicknamed Mynah, like the bird) also discovers that his seventeen-year-old cousin Emily is on board.



The three boys are assigned the least prestigious table in the dining room – the cat’s table, so called because it is the opposite of the Captain’s table, where the most important passengers dine. The highest ranking of these is Sir Hector de Silva, a man slowly dying of rabies in his cabin. But the boys quickly learn that the adults at the cat’s table are each interesting in their own way. They include Mr. Mazappa, a jazz musician who teaches the boys obscene songs; Mr. Daniels and his collection of benign and poisonous plants stored in the ship hold; Miss Lasqueti and her thirty pet pigeons, Mr. Nevil, a ship dismantler who explains to the boys how the Oronsay’s engines work; and Asuntha, a deaf girl who is friends with Emily.

The boys decide to go feral and to do one forbidden thing every day – after all, for three weeks they have no responsibilities and almost no supervision. As they comb every inch of the ship, they eavesdrop on passengers, smoke pieces of chair cane, and steal food from the first class breakfast table. Michael and Cassius decide to experience the full blast of an ocean gale by tying themselves to the railings – and get yelled at by the Captain for their foolhardiness. Michael gets roped into climbing through vents to ransack the first class cabins of rich passengers by a petty thief named Baron C. Michael has a crush on Emily, but she is attracted to Sunil, the headliner of the troupe of acrobats and magicians who provide the cruise’s entertainment. The most exciting thing happens every night when a chained up prisoner who is also being transported on the ship is taken out for exercise. Rumor has it that the prisoner, a man named Niemeyer, killed a judge.

The adult Michael steps into the story and tells us that in the present, he is an author. He stayed very close friends with Ramadhin, who died at age thirty in compromising circumstances involving a fourteen-year-old girl. Michael was also briefly married to Ramadhin’s sister Massi. Cassius, whom Michael hasn’t seen since getting to England, has become an artist whose art is mostly focused on his experiences on this voyage.



Back in the past, we learn that several of the passengers on the ship are connected to Niemeyer. Asuntha is his daughter. When she was younger, she was a member of the same circus troupe that is now on the ship, and she and Sunil are pledged to support each other. On the ship, the boys overhear Sunil and Emily plotting something and later see Miss Lasqueti hide a small gun. It also becomes clear that two of the prisoner’s guards are the specially trained Griggs and Perera, who are there specifically to prevent him from escaping. The next night, the boys overhear but don’t see an interaction between a seemingly drugged Emily and Perera, who ends up dead after a scuffle. When Michael asks her about it the next day, Emily doesn’t seem to remember what happened and has no knowledge of Perera.

The next night, during his walk, Niemeyer takes one of his guards hostage and threatens to break the man’s neck if he isn’t unshackled. All of his chains except his handcuffs are removed. In the moonlight, Asuntha moves towards her father, who grabs her and heads for the railing. Just as he is about to be shot by Griggs, Miss Lasqueti (who is secretly a sharpshooter) fires a pistol at Griggs from a sniper position to make him drop his weapon. Because Emily knows where to look to find the hidden Miss Lasqueti, Michael deduces that she has been in on the plan all along. Niemeyer and Asuntha jump overboard.

Fifteen years later, Michael and Emily reunite. She has never fully gotten over what happened on the Oronsay and now lives alone in a remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness. When Michael presses her for details about what happened, Emily can’t or won’t answer in detail. She is not sure whether she is the one who killed the guard Perera, and she doesn’t know whether Asuntha and Niemeyer drowned in the ship’s wake or whether Asuntha was able to use the handcuff key she had hidden in her mouth.



This book did not garner the same level of acclaim as some of Ondaatje’s other works. Although there are wonderful individual set-pieces and moments of luminously ingenious description, critics complain about a missing core to the novel. As Neel Mukherjee puts it, “Hanging over everything is an air of slackness and dispersion, as if a magnetic core that binds everything into coherence, into direction, is missing.”