Editors Reads Verdict
Ondaatje's most politically engaged novel is also one of his most beautiful — a tribute to the invisible labour of immigrants who built a modern city, written with the lyrical compression of his poetry and a structural elegance that connects directly to The English Patient.
What We Loved
- The bridge-building and waterworks sections are some of the most vivid writing about physical labour and its dangers in modern fiction
- Toronto itself becomes a genuine character — the novel gives the city a history it has largely chosen to forget
- The connection to The English Patient enriches both novels: reading one transforms the experience of reading the other
- The prose throughout has the density and precision of Ondaatje's poetry, making every passage worth close attention
Minor Drawbacks
- Even less plot-driven than The English Patient — readers seeking conventional narrative momentum will find this demanding
- Some characters are only partially realised, appearing with great vividness and then receding before they feel fully inhabited
- The political material — immigrant labour, class conflict, anti-colonial feeling — is present and important but not always fully developed
Key Takeaways
- → The cities we inhabit are built by people whose names are never recorded and whose labour is absorbed invisibly into the infrastructure
- → Immigration is not a single event but a continuous negotiation between the world left behind and the one that will not fully receive you
- → Love does not soften political reality — it is experienced alongside it, shaped by it, sometimes destroyed by it
- → The physical act of building — bridges, tunnels, waterworks — is also an act of claiming, even for those who will never be acknowledged as having claimed anything
- → Stories told in darkness to someone you love are the oldest form of the novel, and the novel has not outgrown them
| Author | Michael Ondaatje |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
| Pages | 243 |
| Published | April 1, 1988 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Readers who have loved The English Patient and want to understand where it came from, those interested in the hidden histories of immigrant labour, and anyone drawn to fiction that prioritises language and image over plot momentum. |
Patrick Lewis and the City
Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto from rural Ontario in the 1920s — a young man with no connections and no clear purpose, drawn to the city the way people are drawn to things they cannot name. He finds work among the immigrant labourers who are, in this period, building Toronto into a modern city: the Bloor Street Viaduct, the Waterworks, the tunnels beneath the streets. These workers are largely Greek, Italian, and Eastern European men who live in boarding houses, speak English imperfectly, and will leave almost no trace in the historical record of the city they are constructing.
Ondaatje’s achievement in these sections is to make the physical labour of city-building as vivid and specific as any action sequence in more conventional fiction. The night the workers walk across the bridge on planks in a blizzard, roped together, with lanterns strapped to their heads illuminating nothing but fog and the void below — this is among the most arresting passages in his work. Patrick moves through this world not as an immigrant but as a witness, an outsider who is also inside: he speaks the language, has white skin, and can disappear into the city in ways the men he works alongside cannot. His position gives the novel its moral complexity — he is not a figure of oppression, but he is not a figure of solidarity either, and his drift through the city is partly a drift through his own ambiguous relationship to its injustices.
The Women
The novel’s emotional life is organised around two women. Clara Dickens is a performer whom Patrick falls for early and loses — she disappears into the orbit of Ambrose Small, a millionaire whose own disappearance is one of the period’s genuine mysteries, and Patrick spends years searching for her at the margins of the city’s underworld. Alice Gull is an actress and political activist whom Patrick eventually loves, and who is killed in an explosion connected to the labour conflicts that run through the novel’s second half.
Ondaatje does not write love straightforwardly — in this novel as in The English Patient, love is experienced as simultaneity rather than sequence, as the persistence of feeling alongside and through everything else rather than as an emotion that takes over the narrative. Alice’s politics and Patrick’s attachment to her are inseparable: she is the person who names for him what he has been witnessing in the city, the person who connects the labour of the men building the bridges to the wider structures of power that render that labour invisible. Her death is the novel’s emotional crisis, and it produces in Patrick a clarity about what he is willing to do — the attempted bombing of the Waterworks that ends the novel — that is morally ambiguous in the way that all of Ondaatje’s most interesting material is morally ambiguous.
The Connection to The English Patient
Ondaatje did not announce In the Skin of a Lion as a prequel to The English Patient — it was written first, and the later novel emerged from its world. But reading them in sequence reveals a structural elegance that makes both richer. Hana, the Canadian nurse in the Italian villa, is Patrick’s daughter. Caravaggio, the thief who appears in The English Patient with his war wounds and his knowledge of Hana’s father, is introduced here as a young man in Patrick’s Toronto underworld. Characters who feel fully formed in the later novel have their origins here, and knowing their histories changes how we read their silences in the villa.
What this means for In the Skin of a Lion is that it is not merely a self-contained historical novel but the foundation of a larger architecture. The invisible workers of 1920s Toronto, whose labour built the city that Hana and Caravaggio grew up in, are the root system of the world Ondaatje has constructed across two novels. The novel is dedicated to the workers, and the dedication is the argument: that fiction can be a form of historical memory for people whom official history will not remember, that the lyrical reconstruction of invisible labour is an act with moral weight. Ondaatje makes this case not through assertion but through the quality of his attention.
Our rating: 4.1/5 — A luminous tribute to the immigrants who built a city that forgot them, and an essential companion to The English Patient — enriching the later novel while standing on its own as a work of extraordinary lyrical precision.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "In the Skin of a Lion" about?
Toronto in the 1920s and 30s: immigrant workers build the bridges, waterworks, and tunnels of a city that will barely remember them. Patrick Lewis, a searcher who drifts between the city's construction projects and its underclass, is the novel's haunted centre.
Who should read "In the Skin of a Lion"?
Readers who have loved The English Patient and want to understand where it came from, those interested in the hidden histories of immigrant labour, and anyone drawn to fiction that prioritises language and image over plot momentum.
What are the key takeaways from "In the Skin of a Lion"?
The cities we inhabit are built by people whose names are never recorded and whose labour is absorbed invisibly into the infrastructure Immigration is not a single event but a continuous negotiation between the world left behind and the one that will not fully receive you Love does not soften political reality — it is experienced alongside it, shaped by it, sometimes destroyed by it The physical act of building — bridges, tunnels, waterworks — is also an act of claiming, even for those who will never be acknowledged as having claimed anything Stories told in darkness to someone you love are the oldest form of the novel, and the novel has not outgrown them
Is "In the Skin of a Lion" worth reading?
Ondaatje's most politically engaged novel is also one of his most beautiful — a tribute to the invisible labour of immigrants who built a modern city, written with the lyrical compression of his poetry and a structural elegance that connects directly to The English Patient.
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