BTK

Ondaatje’s collection was very interesting to me, because while reading it I didn’t exactly get the feeling that I was reading poetry or a narrative story. I guess it kind of felt like reading a book of short stories with the same theme or characters sprinkled throughout them. I’m not really sure, but it felt different than most books I’ve ever read, and I definitely enjoyed it.
This collection’s goal seemed to be one of recording a life (perhaps a “famous” or “infamous” life) through the lenses of many different people, people that didn’t like Billy, people that did, authority figures out to get him, close friends, lovers, and Billy himself. Though I don’t know how much truth is inside any of these accounts, their stories are lively and beautifully written.
I found a close attention to lighting throughout the book’s entirety. The first page of the book begins this obsession as the speaker notes to “please notice when you get the specimens that they were made with the lens wide open and many of the best exposed when my horse was in motion” (5). Lighting seems as if it is something very close to Billy’s heart, though perhaps I am reading it wrong and it is close to Ondaatje’s heart, or it has a deeper symbolic meaning throughout the book that I haven’t grasped yet. Either way, the light in the house of the Chisum’s is constantly mentioned. The way Sallie shuts out the light from 11-3 in the afternoon, the way Billy wakes up in the white room of their house feeling happy and as if the walls have been pushed back to make the room wider, more inviting.
The writing is often very exact, pointing out every cobweb in a room, every dust particle stirring in a face, every glint of light from a doorway (“I am 4 feet inside the room / in the brown cold dark / the doorway’s slide of sun / three inches from my shoes” (74).) The sun is wonderfully personified. Its hands pluck the hair off Billy’s head and pull the skin raw, causing blood and bubbles and pain.
Many of the characters in the book seem to see death as ordinary, everyday, mundane, so much so that they continue a poker game since they cannot bury a body until morning. There are gruesome descriptions strung against eloquent accounts of the human body and the natural world. There is humor and an unemotional quality about death that makes reading about it all the more emotional. Overall a very multidimensional and well-written biography of a multidimensional man.

Nicolette Telech