The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

A 20-year-old Canadian nurse cares for a badly burned man in an Italian villa toward the end of WWII. A friend of her father’s and a Sikh man commissioned to clear the area of bombs join them, and their war experiences are woven into the present action in a complex and layered rhythm.

The most striking aspect of the novel is the rich visual landscape it creates. The four gathered in the countryside of Italy have traveled the world, from Canada and India to England and the deserts of Africa. Ondaatje skillfully raises up these wide-ranging scenes in quick stages, alternating through the histories of each character in repeating succession. The English patient’s memories of Africa are some of the most illuminated moments; they put me in mind at times of James Michener’s Afghanistan in Caravans.

While I found the characters fascinating and appealing, I could never quite believe that any of them could ever exist, or at least that such extraordinary people would congregate in such a concentrated fashion: Hana, the nurse, with her fortitude and integrity and endurance; Caravaggio, the friend, an improbably successful thief tapped by the government for intelligence; Kip, the Sikh, precociously successful at understanding and dismantling bombs; and Almasy, the English patient with a preternatural knowledge of the history of the world, a veritable encyclopedia encased in blackened flesh. Would we could all be so lucky to find such a cache of survivors in a rural villa at the end of a war.



The cover depicts a hazy still from the movie adaptation, and so I spent most of the novel trying to determine who the kissing couple would be, who made up the central love story. I was disappointed to find that the relationship between Kip and Hana was secondary; the affair that Almasy recalls from his time in Africa is the pivot. The English patient’s odd dalliance in the desert did not contain immediacy and necessity; it was less a coming together of equals as Hana and Kip’s was and more a mercurial and violent collision. I guess it reveals something about me, that I should find the intercultural understanding and place of comfort that Hana and Kip construct more engaging than the swift and destructive liaison of Almasy. Regardless, the interplay of the two relationships as they are presented incrementally between each other is deeply instructive.