Running in the Family Summary

Michael Ondaatje’s memoir is divided into seven sections organized by subject, rather than chronologically.

The memoir begins with a nightmare that Ondaatje has while living in Canada about his father, Mervyn. In the dream, Mervyn is surrounded by vicious, thrashing dogs in the jungle. When Ondaatje wakes, he realizes that he does not know who his father truly was, or much about his family history at all. As an adult, Ondaatje feels as if he skipped past his own childhood, and does not understand the world or the people he came from. This prompts him to make two journeys back to Ceylon, accompanied by his sister Gillian. Gillian and Ondaatje meet with old relatives like Aunt Phyllis, who reminisce about memories and stories of the past, particularly about Ondaatje’s parents.

In the second section, Ondaatje recalls his parents’ early years in the 1920s and 1930s. When Mervyn is 18, his wealthy parents send him to Cambridge for university. Mervyn lies to them for two years, claiming that he is enrolled in college though he's actually been spending the tuition money on lavish rooms and parties. When Mervyn's family travels to England to personally and furiously confront him, he deflected their anger by quickly becoming engaged to a respectable English woman. However, two weeks later, after returning to Ceylon, Mervyn asks Doris Gratiaen to marry him instead, to the shock and fury of his parents. They marry one year later. Like all of their wealthy friends at the time, Mervyn and Doris spend most of their early adulthood drinking, partying, gambling, and having affairs, remaining “wild and spoiled.” The parties wind down after Mervyn’s close friend Francis drowns to death while intoxicated. However, Mervyn keeps drinking for the rest of his life and squanders his father, Philip’s fortune until Mervyn’s death.

In the third section, Ondaatje speaks of the history of colonialism and invading foreigners in Ceylon, which includes his own Dutch ancestors in 1600. Gillian and Ondaatje visit an ancient church and find the tombs of many of their ancestors, who were nationally important figures in their day. Despite his Dutch ancestry, Ondaatje is critical of the Europeans who came to rob the country of its national resources and beauty. He includes poems and writings by English and Ceylonese writers that give a damning view of the colonizers. As a Sri Lankan Canadian, Ondaatje feels both that he himself is now a “foreigner” but also the “prodigal who hates the foreigner.”

In the fourth section, Ondaatje visits his Aunt Dolly, who revisits the past and tells him about Mervyn, and especially about Ondaatje’s grandmother Lalla. Lalla marries Willie Gratiaen, a man who is kind but also incredibly strong-willed. After Willie dies, Lalla is able to flourish as an individual, running her own dairy farm and making a name for herself as an eccentric socialite. People in the community love Lalla, who loves being the center of attention in turn, but her own children seem to have a strained and distant relationship with her. When her children are grown, Lalla spends much of her time with her brother Vere. When the dairy farm goes broke and Lalla is forced to sell it, she becomes a transient, living with other people for days or weeks at a time, still partying, stealing flowers, and having affairs even into her 60s. When she is 68, Lalla happens upon some money, she and Vere drive up into the mountains and spend days drinking and playing cards. Lalla knows that her life will end soon. After days of drinking, Lalla steps out the door and into a flash flood, which carries her down the mountain and drowns her.

In the fifth section, Ondaatje describes the sensory details of Ceylon’s nature and wild animals. He relays the sounds and smells and makes recording of the jungle’s bird calls. Accompanied by his wife and children, he drives into the jungle and camps for several days in a bungalow. He takes his family to Rock Hill, a garden estate he and his siblings used to live on. While they are traveling around Ceylon together, Ondaatje describes Mervyn’s middle years, when Ondaatje’s siblings were very young and Ondaatje himself not yet born. Mervyn forms the habit of taking long trips and getting wildly drunk, which prompts increasingly erratic and delusional behavior. He steals a fellow military officer’s gun and hijacks trains several times, causing hours of delays. On one occasion, he is convinced that the Japanese have hidden bombs on the train, so he orders the train to stop, again armed with a pistol, and throws 25 pots of curd into the river, imagining that he's just thwarted a massive military plot. In one episode, Mervyn strips naked, jumps off the train, and runs into the tunnel ahead of it, hoping to be struck dead. He waits there for hours until Doris, now his wife of six years, marches into the darkness after him and convinces him to come back home.

In the sixth section, Ondaatje visits his half-sister Susan and relays details about Mervyn and Doris in their later years. Mervyn is private and reserved while Doris is loud and dramatic, but when Mervyn is sober they share a very close bond and a mutual dark sense of humor. However, Mervyn’s drunken bouts are an inevitable source of conflict and Doris often enlists her three older children in trying to convince Mervyn to quit. After 14 years of marriage, Doris takes the children and leaves with no money and no help. She supports herself and her children by working at a hotel. One of the siblings later recalls their childhood as “a nightmare.” Ondaatje was only an infant when the family was still together, and the absence of his father through most of his life has left him with a sense of loss he only truly recognizes as an adult.

In the final section, Ondaatje writes about Mervyn’s later years. At one point, Mervyn sits all day in the hotel where Doris works, hoping she’ll come speak to him so they can make amends. She doesn't, however, and Mervyn goes home to drink, reflecting on all that he's lost in his life. Ondaatje records various memories of Mervyn in the latter years of his life. Jennifer, a daughter from Mervyn’s second marriage, remembers the days when the chicken farm was successful. Mervyn was a kind, gentle, and loving father when he was sober. He was monstrous when drunk, however, so Jennifer learned to simply disappear during those days. Mervyn’s two closest friends remember that even in old age, Mervyn had an active mind and founded The Ceylon Cactus and Succulent Society, but he occasionally sank into such deep depression during his last year that he wouldn’t even speak to them. Shortly before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage, Mervyn confessed to his friends that he’d long suffered from crippling fear and anxiety, which played a large part in his alcoholism.

At the end of his writing, Ondaatje reflects that he still does not truly know his father, but he does love him. He recognizes the pain that Mervyn was in and decides that whatever substance or measures Mervyn took to ease that pain are ultimately forgivable. On his last morning in Ceylon, Ondaatje listens to the sounds and smells of native Ceylon, committing them to memory. They are the sensations of his childhood, the world to which his family belongs.