Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, says that his new book, Divisadero, was an unplanned literary journey.

There is an air of gravitas about Michael Ondaatje as he sits forward in his chair, listening attentively, reaching for his espresso. And then his blue eyes crinkle in a smile, he gives a low, throaty chuckle, and the solemnity slips away.

He’s recounting his favourite piece of literary criticism, a Monty Python skit ‘‘about Thomas Hardy writing. It sounds like a cricket commentary - oh no, he’s doodling again. The whole crowd’s cheering him and it’s a bank holiday and then it ends with something like, ‘He’s written four sentences and it’s only taken him three hours’.”

As part of a month-long publicity tour for his new book, Divisadero, Ondaatje is in Dublin for a two-day sprint through readings, book-signings and interviews. But having been sequestered with his manuscript for the past five years, facing a barrage of questions and analysis doesn’t come easy.

‘‘You’re asked what happened to this person or that person, or why did you do this, and suddenly all the props are brought out from back stage and explained, which sort of spoils the book for me. It’s like seeing movies where you’ve seen the trailer 25 times or read the reviews for far too long.

‘‘What’s slightly frustrating is presenting a work that says just the right amount and then having to explain everything around it.”

In Divisadero, Ondaatje presents a series of narratives that shift between the landscapes of northern California and south-central France, from the 1980s to 2003 and then back to the period between the World War I and II. The result is a glorious tapestry of images and ideas, of love and loss, woven in Ondaatje’s distinctive voice as both storyteller and poet.

The first part of the novel charts the lives of Anna, her father and her adopted siblings Claire and Coop, until an act of violence sunders Anna from her family. She moves to the French village of De¤ mu,where she researches the life of writer Lucien Segura.

The second part of the book moves back in time, tracing Segura’s life from boyhood when he was in love with a married woman, to his later reclusive life as a writer who has fled from his own family.

‘Divisadero’ comes from the Spanish word for ‘division’, and is derived from the word ‘divisar’, meaning to ‘gaze at something from a distance’ - both concepts that feature strongly in the novel.

Although divided from her family, Anna revisits them from a distance in her memories, so that the past has always the immediacy of the present.

‘‘It’s like a villanelle,’’ Anna thinks, ‘‘this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said.”

Writing a book like Divisadero, Ondaatje says, takes four or five years, working at an office away from home. He writes from 9am until 4pm,working with pen and paper because he likes the ‘physicalness’ of crossing things out. Ondaatje prefers to excavate his way into a story, rather than having a view of the novel’s structure from the outset.

‘‘If I do plot out a novel ahead of time, then it takes away the energy of discovery. I need to write a book. Finding that image or finding that moment or that situation or that little clue into a situation is just the beginning point,” he says. ‘‘In Divisadero, the starting image was a family of three young people in a landscape in northern California. The first scene I wrote was the scene where the horse goes wild in the barn.”

He likes northern California - having spent several periods in Sonoma County during the five years he was writing the book - yet it is set in France.

‘‘It seemed to be important as a step in the novel. Anna escapes her world to go into the world of French literature. I knew she’d be going to France to do some research on someone and then I invented this writer called Lucien Segura, but I didn’t expect the story in France to follow him. So that was a surprise, but it seemed the right direction to go.”

Ondaatje leaves Claire and Coop on a farm road in California to follow Segura along a farm road in France. Segura’s life offers many insights into the process of wrestling with creativity. ‘‘Sometimes truth is too buried for adults,” he muses, ‘‘it can be found only in hours of rewritings during the night, the way metal is beaten into fineness.”

Segura has never wanted fame or the attention of the critics: ‘‘He had not sought judgement when he began to write, but it had somehow become crucial to his life. When all he had wanted was to dance with no purpose, with a cat.”

How hard is it for Ondaatje to face judgement as a writer? ‘‘It is quite hard,” he says. ‘‘Obviously you’re happy to have good reviews but at the same time, by the time the reviews come out, you’ve got to a stage where you believe in the book or not.”

Ondaatje agrees that there are other common elements in Segura’s life and his own. Reflecting on the ease of writing in his early years, Segura ‘‘wanted what he had done those first few times, without awareness, when the page was a pigeonnier [pigeon house] flown into from all the realms one had travelled through’’.

Ondaatje laughs wryly and says he definitely shares this feeling. ‘‘Yes, the innocence of writing those first books - it is something that someone would like, rather than being surrounded by people waiting and watching. I think that’s true of a lot of writers who have had that sense of innocence and freedom at the beginning.”

Writing, he says, gets harder and harder the more a writer’s work becomes known. ‘‘When first you’re writing, that’s all you’ve written and it’s all very new, so there’s nothing to test yourself against. The second book becomes harder and then each book becomes even more difficult because you intentionally make each book more and more difficult for yourself.

‘‘I mean, there’s no point in me writing Running in the Family again orThe English Patient again, because I did that and I now want to try something I don’t know. So then you’re essentially discovering a white space that you haven’t stepped into before. And that becomes more difficult.”

It’s 25 years since he published the memoir Running In The Family, but says he has no plans for further memoirs. ‘‘I don’t like writing about myself directly. Even that wasn’t really a memoir of mine but about my parents’ generation and my grandparents’ generation, and uncles and aunts. They took over - they wouldn’t let me get a word in.’’ Having grownup in Sri Lanka and Canada, both places, he says, have strongly influenced his life. When he went back to Sri Lanka while writing Running in the Family, he realised that the Sri Lankan literary culture - the word culture - was verbal.

‘‘I didn’t know anybody in my family who wrote or who knew anyone who wrote or even kept a diary. It was just a verbal mirage around me all the time, everyone yakking and inventing stories and gossiping. It was watching a performance. That was a big thing for me and a literary influence in some odd way.”

Writers are listeners, readers and, he says chuckling, re-writers, as he himself is renowned for writing up to 20 drafts per novel. His tendency towards reading is evident in his list of favourite authors, which include Penelope Fitzgerald, JM Coetzee, Joseph Roth, Willa Cather, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and ‘‘many, many more’’.

Together with his wife, novelist and academic Linda Spalding, Ondaatje co-edits Brick, a literary journal. ‘‘Brick we do twice a year and there are four of us involved with the magazine, so it’s quite easy. Just before I left, we had to do a paste up for the magazine which is lots of fun. It’s two days of manic putting pictures together with pieces, and selecting the order, which is the part I love.”

His love of editing comes through in his earlier work, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. ‘‘You see editing in film in a very tactile way. You can talk about a scene and how you make that scene, not so different from how you write a scene in a novel.

‘‘All the props of language, landscape, music and weather are there in a novel, except you don’t have all the people who run round on a film set. You have one person inventing the comma.”

There is something endearingly human about this Booker Prize-winning author, and his humanity, as much as his poetic voice, sings on every page of his latest masterpiece.

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje is published by Bloomsbury, priced €26.65