Michael Ondaatje’s second epigraph to In the Skin of a Lion is a quotation from John Berger’s G. Berger writes that “never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one” (iv). Reflecting this, Ondaatje’s Booker Prize nominated novel serves as a forum for the “real” histories of workers and migrants largely ignored in the official constructions of Canada’s twentieth-century historical conception of “nationhood”, using a mix of techniques and voices to present different versions of the past. In this endeavour real documents are “quoted” and real, but marginalised, histories “voiced”. However, even these “real” …
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