From Publishers Weekly
A spellbinding writer, Ondaatje exhibits a poet's sensibility and care for the precise, illuminating word. The author of Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid again paints an impressionistic picture mixing real events and intersected fictional lives. We meet Patrick Lewis in his youth, living in the harsh but beautiful Canadian back country, with his father, a dynamiter of log jams. The action then segues to Toronto in the 1920s, where daredevil bridge builders, immigrants from many countries, are engaged in erecting an enormous span. A scene in which a young nun is swept off the unfinished bridge on a stormy night will make readers gasp; descriptions of the skill and agility of the bridge workers and the laborers who build a tunnel under Lake Ontario, going about their work in the yawning maw of danger, are also graphically stunning. When Patrick comes to Toronto, feeling himself an immigrant from the provinces, his life becomes entwined with those of actresses Clara Dickens and Alice Gull, with whom he experiences love, despair and, eventually, compulsion to commit a violent act. Ondaatje everywhere uses "a spell of language" to spin his brilliantly evoked tale. He writes, "The best art can order the chaotic tumble of events" and "the first sentence of every novel should be: 'Trust me, this will take time, but there is order here, very faint, very human.' " Both statements aptly describe this beautiful work. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In the Canadian wilderness, early in this century, Patrick Lewis grows up a child apart. Some time later in Toronto, an immigrant worker, suspended beneath the bridge he is helping to build, rescues from mid-air a nun swept away by the wind. The paths of these three people eventually cross, with explosive results. Born in Sri Lanka and now living in Canada, Ondaatje writes feelingly of the immigrant experience. That experiencethe ethnic mix, the battle against nature, the battle of worker against exploitationis familiar in outline but subtly different in detail because of the Canadian setting and Ondaatje's particular gifts. A fine poet, he gives us a series of piercing, beautifully controlled passages. If the novel finally spins out of controlepisodic, it seems not so much to resolve as dissolveit remains evocative throughout. Highly recommended for readers of serious fiction. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
"Splendidly evocative and entertaining." ? The Toronto Star

"Beautiful?I urge you to read this book." ? The New York Times

"A triumph ? a powerful and revelatory accomplishment." ? The Times Literary Supplement


Book Description
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. 256 pp.


From the Inside Flap
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. 256 pp.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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. 256 pp.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Michael Ondaatje's fiction is as original and evocative as any being written today....Brilliantly imaginative. — Russell Banks