Review: The English Patient

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I started this one without having seen the movie but with images of Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas imposed on some of the characters. Then, as I read, I found the prose so hypnotic that – even as I found the story initially bewildering (as I think we are supposed to experience it) – I fell in love with it as a book. Something in the sentences was almost hallucinatory. And I came to be surprised at the thought that anyone could make a movie that would do justice to a book so tied to such language.

And then, as I came to the final third of the book, the story gradually resolved itself, and I fell in love with this in an entirely different way. I did see how you might construct a movie from its material, and I got a clearer sense of how this is simultaneously a great war novel, a great love story, and an impressive post-colonial work.

The title character may be the one who’s burned beyond recognition, but all the central characters are damaged. He, Clifton, and Katherine all fall from the sky, all literally tumble from a great height but metaphorically fall from a delusion of happiness, from a sense that love might save them. Caravaggio, the slightly older British intelligence officer who suspects the patient’s true identity, has been mutilated by his one-time captors. Hana, the young nurse, can’t overcome the trauma of her father’s death. And Kip, the bomb-defuser who threw in with the British against the impulse of his Sikh family, can’t forget how close he’s been to death dozens of times.

Against the backdrop of a world war, each glimpses someone to love, someone who seems to offer escape from a conflict so vast that it seems to have no end. And each [SPOILER] is disappointed. One part of wisdom tells everyone in such a world that there is no such thing as safety, no such thing as the privacy that their shared time in a monastery turned hospital turned abandoned outpost might promise. Yet one part of being human means pushing against that doubt, means imagining it might be possible to fly a plane above the clouds and into something like a sunset.

I love the sense of scale here. This is a huge canvas, one as busy as World War II and as vast as the great desert, but its characters are finely drawn within it. Because these people seem so small against it, though, the possibility they find in love is all the more poignant.

I also love the way Ondaatje mines history. Most of the actions are set in what seems a distant past, an inter-war/war-time moment when a whole generation was young. (It was my parents’ generation, so I’ve always felt I’ve known it.) And then, in one of the many gorgeous tremors of the final pages [SPOILER] the fact of the atomic bomb rips that past away and injects the story into a recognizably contemporary moment. Kip, who’s risked his life to defuse so many bombs, can’t forgive the West for such a devastating attack. He can’t even forgive Hana, with the result that he snaps the love they share. They’re just people, after all, just individuals caught up in different forces tearing the world apart. They never really had a chance to be happy; Kip merely acknowledges that and, leaving, rides back into the Sikh world he’s rejected for a time.

I’m looking forward now, a quarter century late, to watching the movie. I’m going to wait a little while, though, to savor a book that’s powerful and so beautiful.


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