The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
Poetry in Explosion: The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
Working in Cairo during the early days of the war, he had been trained to invent double agents or phantoms who would take on flesh. He had been in charge of a mythical agent named “Cheese,” and he spent weeks clothing him with facts, giving him qualities of character-such as greed and a weakness for drink when he would spill false rumours to the enemy. Just as some in Cairo he worked for invented whole platoons in the desert. He had lived through a time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. He had felt like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird. But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.
I only vaguely remember the 1996 movie version of this, but the book is definitely different. Set toward the end of WWII in a mostly deserted villa where allied-occupied Italy is dealing with an abundance of mines and other explosive booby traps left by the retreating Germans, it centers around the interactions of four characters: the title character, who has been brought, seriously burned and partly amnesiac, from the desert; a Canadian nurse who becomes obsessed with tending to him; an Italian spy seeking information about the English patient’s past, and a sapper from India whose efforts to disarm unexploded bombs (UXBs) provide some of the most suspenseful moments of the book.
All three of the male characters flirt with the lone female to some extent, and the English patient’s backstory involves a love triangle. This, interspersed with the sapper’s adventures and the patient’s injuries, are meant to underscore that playing with hearts is like playing with explosives, a theme that Ondaatje tackles with much more finesse than, say, Richard Ford did with Wildlife (my Bookpost, October 2012).
The movie version shifts a great deal of focus from the interaction of the four major characters to the patient’s backstory; in fact, the woman from the backstory becomes the major female lead, whereas in the book, the nurse is almost the protagonist of the whole book, and those plot elements not set in and around the villa are placed in chapters much shorter than the others, as if to emphasize that they are side themes, far from the main action. Other historical events, also very far from the main action, have major effects on the central characters later on.
As with Small Remedies(my Bookpost, this month), the plot moves back and forth in time, and the writing is dreamlike and poetic; however, I found Ondaatje much easier to deal with than Deshpande. This may be because the patient’s recovered memories and drifts in and out of consciousness lend themselves to dreams and flashbacks, or because Ondaatje gives less culture shock to my occidental mind for cultural reasons. Regardless, The English Patient is a modern classic, and it’s easy to see why it won the Booker prize the year it was published.
Working in Cairo during the early days of the war, he had been trained to invent double agents or phantoms who would take on flesh. He had been in charge of a mythical agent named “Cheese,” and he spent weeks clothing him with facts, giving him qualities of character-such as greed and a weakness for drink when he would spill false rumours to the enemy. Just as some in Cairo he worked for invented whole platoons in the desert. He had lived through a time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. He had felt like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird. But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.
I only vaguely remember the 1996 movie version of this, but the book is definitely different. Set toward the end of WWII in a mostly deserted villa where allied-occupied Italy is dealing with an abundance of mines and other explosive booby traps left by the retreating Germans, it centers around the interactions of four characters: the title character, who has been brought, seriously burned and partly amnesiac, from the desert; a Canadian nurse who becomes obsessed with tending to him; an Italian spy seeking information about the English patient’s past, and a sapper from India whose efforts to disarm unexploded bombs (UXBs) provide some of the most suspenseful moments of the book.
All three of the male characters flirt with the lone female to some extent, and the English patient’s backstory involves a love triangle. This, interspersed with the sapper’s adventures and the patient’s injuries, are meant to underscore that playing with hearts is like playing with explosives, a theme that Ondaatje tackles with much more finesse than, say, Richard Ford did with Wildlife (my Bookpost, October 2012).
The movie version shifts a great deal of focus from the interaction of the four major characters to the patient’s backstory; in fact, the woman from the backstory becomes the major female lead, whereas in the book, the nurse is almost the protagonist of the whole book, and those plot elements not set in and around the villa are placed in chapters much shorter than the others, as if to emphasize that they are side themes, far from the main action. Other historical events, also very far from the main action, have major effects on the central characters later on.
As with Small Remedies(my Bookpost, this month), the plot moves back and forth in time, and the writing is dreamlike and poetic; however, I found Ondaatje much easier to deal with than Deshpande. This may be because the patient’s recovered memories and drifts in and out of consciousness lend themselves to dreams and flashbacks, or because Ondaatje gives less culture shock to my occidental mind for cultural reasons. Regardless, The English Patient is a modern classic, and it’s easy to see why it won the Booker prize the year it was published.