Book review: Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje

Late in Michael Ondaatje’s remarkable new novel, the narrator, working in a department of an unnamed branch of the secret service, writes “In this post-war world, twelve years later, it felt to some of us, our heads bowed over the files brought to us daily, that it was no longer possible to see who held a correct moral position.” Though Warlight is set mainly during the Second World War and in the years immediately following it, this observation makes it very much a novel of our confused and confusing time. Which of us can sensibly say what is the correct moral position to adopt with regard to Syria or indeed anything in this benighted world of crude, dishonest and violent politics?