At the conclusion of Michael Ondaatje's 2000 novel, Anil's Ghost, a dynamited statue of Buddha is painstakingly made whole by the efforts of a bibulous Sri Lankan artisan named Ananda. It's one of those telling, layered moments that tend to turn up in Ondaatje's atmospheric, hallucinogenic, and above all fractured tales: There's the scarring aftermath of violence (Ondaatje has something of an explosives fixation), the patient application of arcane skill (viaduct builders, jazz cornetists, and bomb defusers are among typical protagonists), and the encounter between a faulty mere human—in Ananda's case, a drunk—and the heady realms of history and myth.

With Divisadero (Knopf), Ondaatje's fifth novel, the Booker Prize–winning author of The English Patient ups the ante with a story so magnificently splintered that, one suspects, not even Ananda could glue it back together. The title is a tip-off; it's taken from the San Francisco street that once divided the city from the outlying fields of the Presidio. If we think of novels as little machines packaged between two covers that braid together multiple narratives and characters into neat wholes, then Divisadero—which is mainly set in the countryside around the Bay Area and in the South of France—explodes that expectation, sending story lines off in all directions.

"It felt like about five novels in one," Ondaatje recently recalled, speaking of the book's origins over the din of a crowd at Chez Panisse—like Divisadero, another ingenious, soulful enterprise that links California and France. After putting to bed a 2002 book about the legendary film editor Walter Murch (the novelist has always had a healthy interest in all things cinematic), Ondaatje, along with his wife, Linda Spalding (with whom he puts together the Canadian lit magazine Brick), and their dog, road-tripped from their home in Toronto to Berkeley. It was at a cabin up in Petaluma—without e-mail and other distracting mod cons—that Divisadero then took shape. The novel centers around a 1970s California farm where teen sisters Anna and Claire share a rivalrous affection for the resident farmhand, Coop, an orphan who grows up to become a cardsharp, eventually facing down a ring of born-again gamblers at the dawn of Desert Storm.

Ondaatje, who's known as much for meticulous research as dreamlike imagery, hung out with enough practitioners in Vegas and Tahoe to get a good working knowledge of Texas Hold 'Em. Yet Divisadero's biggest gamble comes halfway through, when the action shifts to France, following Anna as she ditches California to pursue research on the late Lucien Segura, author of pulpy, swashbuckling novels (she moves into what was once his farmhouse), and an affair with a louche musician whose father just may be Caravaggio, the enigmatic thief who popped up in both The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje's 1987 novel. Ondaatje—who, with glinting blue eyes and skin as pale as moondust, remains a striking figure at 63—genially refuses to confirm the reappearance. "But I love the idea of it," he says with a note of mischief, "and I really don't mind people thinking it might actually be him."