In the Skin of a Lion

By: Michael Ondaatje

Narrated by: Tom McCamus

Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

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.

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. 😉

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.

A rare gem of a book

Beautiful, intelligent, mesmerizing
I pity the person who cannot appreciate such a masterpiece
The different threads form a rope that twists and turns, doubles back and then returns to wrap around you
Perfectly performed by Tom McCamus
There are scenes that will never leave me

Lush but Often Bewildering Prequel

When I think of Ondaatje’s work – and all I’ve read before this is the marvelous The English Patient – I think of internal experience. I think of narrators who are trapped in a bed or confined to an abandoned hospital, or recuperating from amputated thumbs. I think, that is, of characters in the midst of reflection.

As I look at his method of narration, though, it’s actually steeped in the external. As he writes, he pans across landscapes. He gives us lush descriptions that become almost cinematic. In this book in particular, I often found myself lost in the larger story, but I never felt bored. I was always confident I was in the hands of someone who knew how to make words bring scenes (and, implicitly, characters) to life.

It’s a challenging method. Part of the inspiration of The English Patient is that it’s claustrophobic. Characters recall experiences of vast spaces and of epic love, but they don’t get to leave the scene of the hospital for the setting of the story’s present tense. That novel, tangled as is it, has a clear and tight focus. Everything points to the experience of our nurse and patient who, without quite knowing it, sit as the culmination of a number of great emotional arcs.

Skin of a Lion, though even shorter, is expansive in its scenery and in its setting. We go from the wilds of Canada in the days of timber empire, to the building of Toronto’s sewer system, to the birth of a radical workers’ movement in the years before World War I. It doesn’t have the same inspired focus of The English Patient. It’s never boring and always reflective of great passion, but it spins in different directions.

As an elevator pitch, this is an inspired plot: a young man who learns dynamiting from his father goes to Toronto, contributes to the great physical work of building the city, becomes radicalized through a betrayed love and from seeing the greed of the city’s capitalists, and determines to assassinate his arch enemy by swimming through the very sewer tunnels he helped build.

Given Ondaatje’s method, though, I rarely saw that plot as it unfolded. (In fact, I have to acknowledge various on-line sources as helping me sort out how one scene connected to another.) I loved the reading experience of being caught in the lush exterior reflections of the characters, but I was generally confused about how they combined. I respect the ambition behind all this – as a scholar of American multi-ethnic literature, I admire Ondaatje’s seeming goal to celebrate the mix of immigrant labor that made the city, and I recognize the philosophical claim that, when dismantling the master’s house, one cannot use the master’s tools. That is, I think I understand that he’s challenging conventional chronological narrative as a means of critiquing our received history. Still, he’s asking a lot of us. He writes brilliantly but here, in what turns out to be a prequel to The English Patient, he never lets his story cohere.

I’m all in for more Ondaatje, and I do recommend this one, but be prepared for a challenging ride once you begin.

beautifully told adventure

loved it. these twisted lives grow around each other like vines. The English Patient is the perfect sequel.

Surprising!!!

When I started this I wasn't sure I would finish it. I did and very glad I did. I went back several times over some parts to get them right. This was a book I had to pay very close attention to as there are several story lines going on that seem to be unconnected but it all comes together in the end. I seldom read a book twice but this one I will.

superb

it is rare when literature and historical fiction mesh so beautifully. Ondaatje is a master of atmosphere and character, so this small masterpiece does not disappoint.

You must be engaged

Beautifully written and narrated – – mesmerizing really, but it requires your full attention. If you go with the flow you will be rewarded.