From the November, 1987 New York Times review of In the Skin of a Lion:

This book more closely resembles the writing that is being done on the Continent these days: episodic, fragmentary, structurally loose and shifty. And he's a beautiful writer. What he writes about most beautifully is work. Mr. Ondaatje is passionate about process, the way work, particularly construction of all kinds, is done and how it feels to do it. This is, of course, a rarity in fiction at any time, and one can only be grateful for a man who is not focused on the classroom, the bedroom and the bar:

''Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat. The rope roars alongside him, slowing with the pressure of his half-gloved hands. He is burly on the ground and then falls with terrific speed, grace, using the wind to push himself into corners of abutments so he can check driven rivets, sheering valves, the drying of the concrete under bearing plates and padstones. He stands in the air banging the crown pin into the upper cord and then shepherds the lower cord's slip-joint into position. Even in archive photographs it is difficult to find him. Again and again you see vista before you and the eye must search along the wall of sky to the speck of burned paper across the valley that is him, an exclamation mark, somewhere in the distance between bridge and river. He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These knit the bridge together.''

But equally important was his appreciation of the transition from one culture to another, a key theme that emerges in the book. ''Toronto is a city of immigrants,'' he said, ''but there is very little official history about who they were, what their lives were like. I didn't want to talk about politicians or historical figures. I wanted to talk about the people who were unhistorical - all those invisible professions that lay behind history.'' A self-acknowledged slow writer, Mr. Ondaatje took eight years to finish his new novel. ''I write very freely,'' he said, ''but then do a lot of rewriting to alter it, change it, dip it into other colors.'' Having also worked as a documentary film maker, he defends his method of weaving many stories together simultaneously by comparing it to similar techniques in the visual arts and contemporary music. ''The novel has been quite slow in picking up what the other arts are doing,'' he said. ''For years they have been doing things that are much more suggestive, much freer of chronological sequence.''

Once settled on a subject, Mr. Ondaatje said, ''I'll try anything to bring the figure into focus. That is why I think my books have been perhaps a little more bizarrely structured.'' When all of the pieces fit together, the result ''is like hugging someone, instead of just giving them a peck.''

[Bloor Street viaduct, City of Toronto Archives]