Some desert concepts related in this novel are not too far from home

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	• The English Patient Michael Ondaatje Vintage, 1993 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 288 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Enjoyable....the film is good too.

I watched the film long ago and have enjoyed reading the book as its own piece. The characters are humbling and facing true tragedy and change in life. I was drawn in by where their intermingling would take them.

Fragments, shards, and drifts of sand

In reviewing Michael Ondaatje's recent novel DIVISADERO, I remarked that his narrative technique involved writing short fragments, loosely connected in theme but jumping around in subject and time, and leaving it to the reader to connect them. Such an appeal to the imagination is rare and gratifying, and the results are complex and evocative. If I try to forget the movie, the same could be true of the earlier ENGLISH PATIENT, although here Ondaatje is dealing with a subject of greater historical resonance -- the Second World War in Egypt and Italy -- and the interplay of personal narrative and hard fact is more difficult to bring off than the largely private scale of DIVISADERO.

Both books are about people recovering from trauma. In DIVISADERO, the scarring was psychological; here, it is physical as well. The setting is a ruined Italian villa north of Florence, just after the German retreat. It had been used as a temporary hospital, but now only one patient remains, the supposed Englishman of the title. He is attended by Hana, a young Canadian nurse, who has seen so many men die that she can no longer weep the recent death of her own father. She is joined by David Caravaggio, an old friend of the family, a professional thief recruited to work in intelligence, who has had his thumbs cut off during an interrogation. And camping in the garden is Kirpal Singh (Kip), a Sikh bomb-disposal expert, who has only his rigid self-discipline and skills to protect him from disaster. The English Patient himself is an unrecognizable figure, burned all over his body, brought out of the North African desert by Bedouin tribesmen. It later becomes clear that he is not English at all, but a British-educated Hungarian count, Ladislaus de Almásy, an explorer of some renown.

Each of the characters is gradually opened out. Caravaggio is the least fully realized emotionally, but he becomes increasingly significant in the back-story. Conversely, Hana's history needs little filling-in, since we see life in the villa mainly through her eyes and feel through her skin. Her relationship with Kip is one of the loveliest things about this rich book, and the Sikh's character is developed in considerable depth, especially as he finds a purpose to his life during his training in England. His work as a bomb-disposal expert is described in always fascinating and sometimes breath-stopping detail.

But the most space is devoted to Almásy's time in the desert, his years of patient exploration of the Great Sand Sea and the Gilf Kebir in the 1930s, his passionate but intermittent affair with the wife of a colleague, and his activities during the war itself. These things are dug up gradually, as shards of memory, some relatively objectively, some under the influence of morphia, some that might even be hallucinations. The events of the thirties emerge most clearly, but more recent happenings must sometimes be pieced together from the briefest of references. I am not sure that a fully coherent scenario would ever emerge from reading the book alone, or that it was intended to.

Here, of course, I have to mention the 1997 movie. Anthony Minghella, the director, has in fact written such a scenario, connecting the fragments into one persuasive interpretation of the novel. Largely focusing on Almásy's story, he has tidied the narrative and greatly compressed the time-frame to create a combination of war story and grand romance with the epic sweep of Tolstoy or Pasternak. The movie is filled with such unforgettable imagery and such strongly-acted characters that his version cannot easily be put aside. But the fact that Ondaatje approved this adaptation does not make it the only possible one, and it is now much harder to enjoy the open-ended quality of his story-telling in its own terms.

For those who have seen the movie, the greatest pleasure in the book may come from the elements that Minghella played down: the stories of Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio, and Ondaatje's quiet portrayal of life in the ruined villa. Consider his description of a bonfire of weeds that Hana would gather and burn "...during the late afternoon's pivot into dusk. The damp fires steam and burn, and the plant-odoured smoke sidles into the bushes, up into the trees, then withers on the terrace in front of the house. It reaches the window of the English patient, who can hear the drift of voices, now and then a laugh from the smoky garden. He translates the smell, evolving it backward to what had been burned. Rosemary, he thinks, milkweed, wormwood...". It is simple writing, but a passage that excites the imagination, involving all the senses, creating its own images in the mind. The whole book will do the same, if you are lucky enough to be able to come to it without preconception.

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I loved it.

This book was given to me on an airplane and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I had seen the movie and thought it was OK. The book however, I absolutly loved. The movie focused primarily on the English Patient, but the book was different in that you got to know each character quite intimately. They all were in the house for different reasons and each of them had very unique and intrieging backgrounds. I was sucked in immediately. Each charachter is developed and you are able to understand who they are and why. All of their strengths and weaknesses are revealed and they are quite vulnerable. If you are someone who likes to bond with a characters and watch them develop, this book is for you.

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Some desert concepts related in this novel are not too far from home

To Hana the nurse, English patient is `a white lion'. I've come to expect movie characters to bear a marginal resemblance to those of the novel from which they are extracted. Seldom do the people in the novel voice anything resembling the clever lines from the film. Ondaatje describes brilliantly his story settings and the psychoanalytical introspections of his characters like an omniscient Nanny narrator.
Some of this book's visceral content presents itself as juvenile voyeuristic, not to be confused with the sort of obligatory 'adult content' that's required to provoke a publisher to finish reading a manuscript submission.

While the main storyline describes some heroic coping mechanisms adopted by it's characters to survive their various war-induced neurosis', the English patient suffers physical and emotional wounds which will kill him. maybe it should have been called 'The Great Escape'. Except that the author seems to have wanted a title that would be hemorrhaging irony. The critics called Ondaatje, 'poetic'. And his skill with words may be described as accomplished. he has been researching the writings to the Royal Geographic Society by explorers of the Libyan Desert. We have a glimpse into "the tact of [Ondaatje's] words." "In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth."
"Here nuance took you a hundred miles." AND
"A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water."

I know the feeling of being enveloped in the 'emptiness' of the Mojave Desert, which sometimes can belie the impression that there maybe is nothing, maybe never was nor ever will be anything to come back to.

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Poetically beautiful

Ondaatje's prose is lyrical and poetic. More than anything, Ondaatje creates an atmoshpere that is as much a presence in this book than any single character. The story delves into the lives of four people living in a war-damaged Italian monastery as World War II ends. Hana, a nurse, attempts to nurse the English patient back to life. Caravaggio, Hana's childhood friend, and Kip, a skillful bomb difuser, make up the rest of the cast of characters. Beautifully and evocatively written but slow at times.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

With unsettling beauty and intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II.

The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions?and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

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