Cassie McCullagh

those images of the greyhounds and their long faces and their sad, mournful eyes are just some of the wonderful things.

But for me, I think this kind of, it's a bit like A Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's late play, which is kind of a bit sort of abstract.

And while Shakespeare understood what he was writing about, sometimes it's not exactly clear.

What is going on?

And then there's odd things, like the statue at the end of that play, coming back to life.

Just odd things that made sense to Shakespeare, but few other people.

And I think there's a touch of this in this novel, that Ondaatje's gone down into a kind of wormhole of his own and is entertaining himself first and not us as readers.

What about the way that he often seems to go on these little jags where he's talking about writing itself indirectly, where he's not exactly articulating it, but he's sort of talking about writerly ideas?

I thought that was a bit sort of, I'm the master writer here and I'm kind of imparting some jewels on you readers.

How did you feel, Stephen, about a Canadian writing, a Sri Lankan Canadian nonetheless, writing about London in this incredibly intimate way?

Do you think he pulls it off?

I think that war is still going on in many ways.

Easter eggs.

Easter eggs.

Yeah, well, that's fine.

And I accept what you say about the sort of formlessness, perhaps, of the structure of this book, and I see that it's very deliberate.

But I also kind of felt I was just sort of wandering on with waves of the next little scene happening.

It's a book of scenes.

Some of them are beautiful.

Some of them are sort of whitewashy or watercolourish, I think.