Michael Ondaatje is best known for his book turned movie The English Patient.  Yet before he wrote The English Patient, Ondaatje penned In the Skin of a Lion, a hypnotically evocative novel set in 1920’s Toronto.

The Subject Heading in WorldCat for In the Skin of a Lion says, “Poor—Ontario–Toronto–Fiction.” Assigning subjects to fiction inevitably falls short. A story that can be summed up with a simple subject is not one I want to read. It’s true that welded to the frame of Ondaatje’s novel are the poor, immigrant laborers who have come to Toronto for a better life, yet, missing from this explanation, is the purity and force of Ondaatje’s words. He writes like an animistic god, inserting visions in his reader’s brain.

Here is social justice novel. Here is historical fiction, but mostly, here is a lyrical  exploration of living. What motivates a person to be active in the world, to fight injustice? Ondaatje asks. Then he answers with a series of images, vivid, luminescent.

I sought out In the Skin of a Lion because of an NPR story I heard over the summer. Part of the You Must Read This series. The commentator, Kamila Shamsie, called the novel “gloriously intoxicating.” She was so effusive about this book that I felt compelled to check it out.

I was disinclined to like Ondaatje. I had not read any of his work, but I was one of the only people—it seemed—that thought the movie the English Patient was a beautiful waste of time. Ondaatje’s career, I thought, rested solely on the fact that he had the good fortune of selling the rights to a mediocre story, turned Oscar winning movie.

I read the first few sections of In the Skin of a Lion with this chip on my shoulder. I constructed eviscerating reviews in my head. Found myeslf, mumbling things like “Oh, please,” as Ondaatje layered words upon words. Gradually, my criticism faded. I began to get involved with the characters. I started thinking about them when I was working, driving home, falling asleep. And when I thought of them, my thoughts were heavily textured things, weighty with both imagery and emotion. Anger, Love, Justice, Sex, Death. In the Skin is ripe with all the stuff of life, and Ondaatje got under my skin. He won me.

I cannot recommend this book more highly.