Roger Brunyate's Reviews > The English Patient

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.