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by Nick Ryan

THE air is uncomfortably warm. Marble busts, Persian carpets and objets d'art line the walls, and a maid busily arranges tropical flowers, wandering past an (original) oil painting of Lady Hamilton, Nelson's famous mistress.

With its mahogany furniture and colonial antiques, the place smells of old money. But Glenthorne, in England's north Devon, is no aristocratic refuge: Christopher Ondaatje, 72, its owner, is nothing if not a self-made man.

Here is someone who had it all, then lost it, then built up a billion-dollar business empire. Who in his spare time became an Olympic sportsman, a photographer and an international art collector before giving it all up to pursue a life of writing, exploration and philanthropy.

"I wanted to set myself free," explains the elder brother of Booker Prize-winning novelist Michael. Some in the British press have written of a rivalry between the two, the Daily Mail even trying to suggest there were love interests clashing within the family.

Ondaatje dismisses this with an exasperated wave of his hand. "Michael's a very close friend of mine, an unbelievable writer. He's a poet, really, [and] the literary world is his all-consuming passion.

There's no rivalry about it. I'm not a rival of his in the literary world any more than he's a rival of mine in the philanthropic world."

Tall and lean, Ondaatje wears his silver hair smoothed on to his skull; his accent is clipped, a curious blend of the post-colonial and trans-Atlantic.

"I was in North America, hacking my way through the jungles of finance," he explains of his change of life. "I'd sold my soul to the devil -- 'the devil that drives', as my hero, explorer Richard Burton, once said. I was fed up with the world of finance and greed and the uncertainty of the economic clouds, and I was worried that I would die with 'financier' written on my gravestone."

He pours coffee from a silver pot, his stern expression reflected in the paintings of him that adorn the apartment. "But I was lucky enough to be able to chuck it in."

That meant turning his back on a financial empire built up over 30 years in Canada and, from 1988, basing himself in England and dedicating himself to writing and philanthropy. During this time he has made autobiographical journeys to his native Sri Lanka and undertaken furious, dangerous travels in pursuit of his Victorian explorer heroes, voyaging to the source of the Nile River.

Two years ago he went to Africa in pursuit of his literary hero Ernest Hemingway, producing the acclaimed Hemingway in Africa. With the publication of his latest work, Woolf in Ceylon, about Virginia Woolf's husband Leonard and his time as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje seals a reputation as someone driven to follow in the (literal) footsteps of his literary greats.

Along the way he has also become co-owner of the long-established Literary Review. And he has donated tens of millions of dollars to causes, institutions, prizes and galleries across the world.

Which leads to the obvious question: why? "The philanthropy's not a drive," he says almost casually as we fetch up in his study, packed wall-to-ceiling with first-edition, leather-bound books, "it is a responsibility. I understand more than most that it's one thing to make money [but] if you don't do anything with it to help other people, it's a wasted life. I want to give something back."

He flips open a journal from one of his numerous foreign expeditions, showing me the photos within. "It's easy enough to write a cheque, it's more difficult to get involved, to make sure something works, such as with the National Portrait Gallery in London [on a pound stg. 16 million expansion] or the Royal Geographical Society's Unlocking the Archives project [which cost pound stg. 12 million].

My financial contribution is relatively small, but it's much more important from an involvement status." Such comments are typical of a man whom acquaintances describe as complex and who seems to push himself at a ferocious pace.

In Canada, he is recognised as an extraordinarily successful financier who has gifted million of dollars to galleries and public institutions, who was a member of the country's 1964 Olympic bobsleigh team, and who in the late 1960s just happened to write The Prime Ministers of Canada: 1867-1967, which just happened to sell more than 600,000 copies.

On the international stage, recognition is tied to his Sri Lankan art collection, the largest of its kind in the world, or his seven best-selling books, including the semi-autobiographical The Man-Eater of Punani and Sindh Revisited, his biography of Burton, who stole into Mecca in disguise and later translated the Kama Sutra into English.

More recently, Ondaatje helped save a Van Dyck painting for Britain with a pound stg. 100,000 donation and courted controversy after it was revealed he had donated pound stg. 2million to the Labour Party at the end of 2000. "I am a disillusioned Conservative," is how he explains this decision.

Now he is launching Woolf in Ceylon, which traces the Jewish writer and Bloomsbury Group founder's time in Ceylon. These experiences, like George Orwell's in Burma after him, led Woolf to anti-imperialist beliefs and involvement with the radical postwar Labour governments in Britain.

Barely a year after he graduated from Cambridge, and having failed exams to take him into the Home Office, Woolf left behind the world of his friends Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and others, to venture to Ceylon as a young civil servant.

Travelling with his pugnacious fox terrier Charles and 90 large volumes of his favourite writer, Voltaire, Woolf must have cut a strange, lonely figure, says Ondaatje. He was just 24, his loneliness apparent in the letters to Strachey that Ondaatje frequently quotes, including Woolf's confession that he lost his virginity to a burgher girl in Jaffna.

Journeying in his footsteps through modern Sri Lanka, just days before the Boxing Day tsunami hit, Ondaatje weaves a compelling tapestry of this loneliness, the driven work ethic, sexual awakening and Woolf's growing empathy with the native Tamils, Sinhalese, Moors and others - almost everyone, except his fellow colonials.

One colleague in Jaffna was described as "an appalling ex-army [captain] with an appalling wife and appalling son", another was "a bloody unwashed boarding school bugger, who doesn't know one end of a woman from another".

Ondaatje finds an island much changed, but a place where many still remember Woolf for his first novel, A Village in the Jungle, published shortly after his return to England (he also wrote several short stories set on the island). Ondaatje believes he has found the village of the title, long thought to be fictional. He argues that the book's importance lies in its perspective: that of the colonised rather than coloniser.

Woolf's writings (on colonialism) were even incorporated into the British government's proposals for the League of Nations, though his marriage to Virginia Stephen was to eclipse much of his own achievements. "Woolf was an outsider," Ondaatje explains.

"We've both been outsiders. He was a Jew in England and studied five years at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was still an outsider. In those days being a Jew was something which was noticed. You were definitely in a minority. When he joined that small group of colonial, white administrators who were ruling the island, he realised he was an outsider in Ceylon too."

He, too, was an outsider there, he adds, "and when I left for England at 12, I remained an outsider. And so I was when I went to Canada in 1956, learning, just as Woolf did, the people, the country, the politics, and 'the game' all over again."

Ondaatje speaks of a bitter past. He is of a mixed Dutch burgher and English colonial heritage, with family connections on the island stretching back to the 17th century.

One uncle was attorney-general; another ancestor translated the Bible into Tamil. His father, a well-off plantation manager and lovable maverick, sent him away to be educated at private school in England. It was there he fell in love with cricket and he vividly recalls watching the West Indies play at Taunton in 1951.

But when Ondaatje was 17, his father died while drunk, leaving the family destitute. His son was suddenly cast out of privileged academe into the world of work. This loss, the lack of a father figure, seems to have been a driving force in his life, and in his writings he frequently refers to "the ghost of my father".

His aim from then onwards, he says, was "to rebuild the family's fortunes", becoming "an easterner going west, whilst Woolf was a westerner going east". Arriving from England in Canada with just $CN13 in his pocket, and surviving for a time on toast and coffee, he started in banking before establishing a network of publishing and corporate finance companies.

These eventually controlled assets of $CN1.2 billion: it was his understanding of "paper", he says enigmatically, that helped him achieve success. In 1988 he went on a safari with his Latvian wife, Valda, someone "who understands the devils in me. We chased this wretched leopard, and I got a book out of it [Leopard in the Afternoon].

I realised then that that's what I wanted to do. So I chose this life: exploring, living the life of my heroes, writing about my heroes" - he is stuttering, caught up in his own excitement - "in whatever time was left to me."

There's an unnerving intensity to his words. He talks of "becoming" his characters, how he "lives" his heroes as he traces their footsteps. He did so in the Congo, during his attempts to follow the famous Nile explorers of the Victorian age. "I was obsessed with these characters 99.9 per cent of the time."

Does his sense of mortality drive him? "Probably, but I'm lucky: I gave everything up because I wanted to write, to explore. And I inhabit a wonderfully satisfying world. I've got adventure, I've got writing, cricket and art: what more could I want?"

Courtesy : Australian Age

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