of friends, Patrick plans to dynamite the plant. Once the charges have been laid, however, he runs into Harris, sleeping in his office for fear of just such an occurrence. The exchange between Patrick and the Public Works Commissioner is a showdown between living space and abstraction: – You forgot us. – I hired you. – Your goddamn herringbone tiles in the toilets cost more than half our salaries put together. – Yes, that’s true. – Aren’t you ashamed of that? – You watch, in fifty years they’re going to come here and gape at the herringbone and the copper roofs. We need excess, something to live up to. I fought tooth and nail for that herringbone. – You fought. You fought. Think about those who built the intake tunnels. Do you know how many of us died in there? – There was no record kept.49 Patrick sees specters rather than Harris’ spectacle. Harris’ presence, however, is enough to prevent the plant from being destroyed, as he talks to Patrick until the latter falls asleep. For a final time, Ondaatje shows lived experiences of space in opposition to abstract visions of space, but he has complicated readers’ understanding by reversing the characters’ roles. Patrick has lived the plant’s space by constructing it and attending shows in it, but now he perceives it in an abstract way, seeing it as a manifestation of excess and inequality. Harris, on the other hand, is literally living in the space, not building it, still primarily admiring it visually, but living in it nonetheless, making it his own private space (much better furnished than those of Nicholas and Patrick). Patrick’s vision of the plant, like all visions, is not complete knowledge; he has not lived the space as Harris has and has not seen it the way Harris does. Destroying the herringbone tiles in a symbolic gesture would have left huge swaths of the city without water, causing disruption that could not be targeted by income. The plant is unnecessarily ostentatious, but it still serves a purpose. In this scene, the novel’s priorities remain the same, but they are personified differently. Characters fall into the same fallible readings of space condemned on earlier. Nothing is so simple as to signify one thing only – this 49
Ondaatje, p.237.
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