FICTION: The Cat's TableBy Michael Ondaatje Cape, 286pp. £16.99

ONE NIGHT, in the early 1950s, a small boy is driven to the port in Colombo by relatives. Once there he is to board an ocean liner. No one is speaking; there are no farewell hugs. It will be a long voyage, lasting three weeks, all the way from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England. The huge ship will cross various seas and oceans. It sounds a great adventure: it is.

Michael Ondaatje’s fifth novel begins with a sombre prologue in which the small boy is described as if he were a stranger. He seems to be unknown even to the narrator, whose first comment is telling: “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper or little cricket, as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future.” What seems a random comment quickly acquires significance.

This is a beautiful oddity, as elusive as it is candid. It is presented as a novel, if one with a heavy sprinkling of autobiography. The older Michael takes up the narrative; he was that boy and it is his story. He is bound for England to meet his mother, who moved there some years earlier after her marriage ended. The boy has been living as a self-contained unit, never quite belonging to the wider family of relatives with whom he has been left.

The long sea journey appears to be a symbol for the slow process of rejoining a mother he no longer knows. It would seem to be Ondaatje’s intention, in a work that is rich in symbol and metaphor, to explain how lives change shape. This is a coming-of-age novel with a difference.

Ondaatje's finest novel, I n the Skin of a Lion(1987), remains overshadowed by his most famous work, The English Patient(1992), which shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.Here, in his deceptively gentle style, he exposes human experience in all its harshness. The Cat's Tableis about many things, including truth, survival and emotional detachment, but its most pressing theme is the end of childhood.

Michael becomes friendly with Cassius and Ramadhin, two boys on board, who nickname him “Mynah” and share his enjoyment of running wild on the ship and breaking most of the rules. This is interesting as he makes no secret of having been a lonely child. “Because I had no brothers or sisters, the closest relatives I had while growing up were adults.”

In the early mornings, while the other passengers are still asleep, the boys swim in the pool and explore the places they are not supposed to venture into, such as the first-class deck. By chance Mynah discovers his distant cousin, the lovely if wayward Emily, is also on board, destined for an English school for ladies.

Life on board the vessel is brought to life through the narrative, which is lively and generously populated by the unusual characters who share the lowly “cat’s table” with the three boys. These include Miss Lasqueti, an eccentric spinster with a collection of pigeons, and Mr Mazappa, a jazz musician and the man in charge of the kennels. Among the wealthy passengers is the ailing Sir Hector, who, having been bitten by his dog, is going to England in search of a cure. There is also the smartly dressed Baron, who is an unabashed thief, and the prisoner, a murderer, whose presence on the ship is kept a secret until the boys see him being walked by night.

On one level this could be seen as a simple story, an account of a voyage recalled after many years. And, as will be expected of Ondaatje, there are some beautiful descriptive passages, such as the slow entry by night on to the dark waters of the Suez Canal. Before that the ship stops at the port of Aden, where the boys visit the market. So many things happen; so many stories, some far-fetched, unfold. There is death, there is a murder, and there are lies aplenty. But there is also much more: Ondaatje intersperses his account with darker asides, and at times the narrative moves closer to memoir.

Minor liberties with the structure jar. The narrative begins to drift from the journey to Michael's later life, when it becomes clear that the boy is now a writer. These shifts seem hasty and at times as random asides. The later lives of Ramadhin and Cassius, his two boy companions, are also hinted at. Reference is made to Michael's marriage to Ramadhin's sister. Finally a self-contained account, in the form of a letter, of the earlier life of Miss Lasqueti is also included. It has echoes of the world contained in The English Patientand sits awkwardly in the book.

Grace, humanity and despairing romance are central to the art of Michael Ondaatje. Although the narrative flutters and sighs and even drifts, this is such an attractive, melancholic and engaging work of connections and disconnections that it does not matter.

“Sometimes we find out true and inherent selves during youth,” recalls Michael. “It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow.” Michael the storyteller, quick to report whatever it is he sees or hears, becomes the writer, and as he admits late in the narrative, “Writers are shameless.”

His curiosity knows no bounds, and everything he discovers he goes on to tell, including the most painful truths.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times