Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165
The scientific aspect of explorations was replaced by the camouflage of agents like
George Clifton whose motive is to exploit scientific knowledge for colonial expansion. Clifton,
who belonged to the British Intelligence and who had joined the Almasy-Madox expedition
during 1931-37 as an amateur, was actually spying on the group as the desert was being
controlled by the armies during the war. “He was not just an innocent Englishman . . . . As far as
the English were concerned, he was keeping an eye on your strange group in the Egyptian-
Libyan desert” (267).
The conflict between the nations degraded the feelings of humanity and compassion
towards the fellow beings. The war made the people very wary and suspicious of everything
around them. Almasy, who had been in deep love with Clifton’s wife, Katharine rescues her
burnt body from the plane crash. He sought the help of the officials to assist him in nursing her
back to life but they hauled him up into the truck as they suspected him to be “a possible secondrate
spy. Just another international bastard” (267). He could not save her life as his movement
was constantly spied over by the Allied troops. He was able to find only her decayed body when
he managed to enter the cave with the help of the German spies. Her whole body was covered in
bright pigments that reflected the work of cartography marked by nature, by herbs, stones and
the ash of acacia.
Ondaatje exposes the horrors of the Second World War on the European countries by
presenting the damaged condition of Italy within the larger context of Europe in ruins. In this
scenario of chaos, the villa that is located outside Florence metonymically represents the
destruction of civilization. The villa, which draws together the central characters in the novel, is
in a state of despair. The hill town in which it is found was besieged for a month during the war
and the building and another homestead were the focus of much of the bombing in the area. The
hill town is torn apart by fire shells; parts of the villa’s top storey have crumbled under
explosions. There was no electricity and so the villa became an unwelcome beacon for robbers.
The villa is damaged in such a way that “there seemed little demarcation between the house and
landscape, between damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth” (45).
The Second World War littered the entire country with dead, half-eaten animals and with
the rotting bodies of people hanging upside from the bridges. He evinces that the city is also
considered unsafe for people to live. The delayed action bombs were mined into the walls of
public buildings and nearly every vehicle that crossed the road was rigged. The retreating
German army had left pencil mines within the musical instruments with an intention that the
returning owners who opened up the piano would face the danger of losing their hands. They
retaliated by killing ten Italians for every German killed. The bombs were sometimes attached to
taps, to the spines of books, into the fruit trees and so the apple that would fall from the branch
would detonate the tree in some cases. The harbor scuttled ships were freshly mined and a
German confesses that “there were thousands of bombs hidden in the harbor section of the city
that were wired up to the dormant electrical system” (294).
The war office took over responsibility for bomb disposal, and then it handed it over to
Royal Engineers. Twenty five bomb disposal units were set up during this period. “Eighty
percent of bombs dropped by airplanes over Britain were thin-walled, general purpose bombs.
They usually ranged from a hundred pounds to a thousand” (195). The most dangerous bombs
were those dropped from low altitudes, which were not activated until they had landed. These
unexploded bombs buried themselves in the cities and fields and remained dormant until their
trembler contacts were disturbed by a farmer stick, a car wheel’s nudge, the bounce of a tennis
ball against the casing – and then they would explode.
Vol. II. Issue. III 167 September 2011