The first bourgeois characters in the novel appear: Rowland Harris, commissioner of public works, and Pomphrey, an architect. Patrick is absent from the following chapter, which centers around Nicholas Temelcoff, a Macedonian immigrant and daredevil construction worker who is helping to build the Bloor Street Viaduct.
It is later revealed that his father is killed in a feldspar mining accident. When Patrick turns 15, his father abandons cattle farming and becomes a dynamiter, first for the Rathbun Timber Company and then for Richardson Mines. The climax of this chapter is a harrowing incident on a freezing winter day when he and his father must rescue a cow that has fallen through the ice over a nearby swimming hole. Patrick observes the day laborers who come into the town to work as loggers but otherwise have no connection with the town. He lives with his father, Hazen Lewis, who works as a cattle farmer. The first chapter describes Patrick’s boyhood in the remote farming town of Bellrock. This relentless ambiguity of tense heightens the story’s surreality. Ondaatje favors the present tense for narrating more dramatic, physically immediate scenes, while he uses the past tense for less sensational spans, or when filling in background information. Within those chapters, Ondaatje delineates subsections with breaks in the prose (typically using line breaks to separate related plot episodes and asterisks to denote significant scene changes), and the narration often shifts between present and past tense across those breaks in the text. The novel is divided into three parts, each comprising several long chapters. The novel begins with a half-page prologue setting the scene: A man relates these stories to a girl (Patrick and Hana, respectively, as will become apparent late in the novel) as they drive through the early morning darkness toward Marmora, Ontario. Looming in this historical landscape are the violence and dehumanization wrought by industrial advancement, the injustice of economic inequality, the trials of immigration, and the discomforts of forging an identity out of the complex factors of ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, and language. The story and its characters are firmly rooted in this tumultuous period of Canadian industrial history, as Patrick assumes various industrial jobs and crosses paths with immigrant workers, socialist activists, capitalist tycoons, and thieves.
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