The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
Summary
In a bombed villa north of Florence in 1945, four people are waiting for a war that has moved on. A Canadian nurse named Hana has stayed behind to care for a burned man who cannot be moved. He remembers almost nothing and talks constantly. With them are Caravaggio, a thief turned Allied agent whose thumbs were removed under interrogation, and Kip, a Sikh sapper in the British Army who spends his days defusing the mines and booby traps the Germans left behind.
The patient's story emerges in fragments: prewar desert expeditions mapping the Libyan sand sea, an affair with the wife of a colleague, an aircraft on fire. The question of who he actually is turns out to matter a great deal to Caravaggio and not at all to Hana.
Ondaatje is a poet and the novel reads like one, moving by association rather than sequence, dwelling on hands and books and the mechanics of a fuse. Readers who need chronology will struggle.
The ending is the reason it lasts. News reaches the villa of the bombing of Hiroshima, and Kip, who has spent the war dismantling European explosives for a European army, understands in an instant what that army would never have done to a white city. He walks out. Nothing in the book prepares you for it and everything has led to it.
Read it slowly and do not expect the film, which is a considerably simpler and more romantic thing. Best for readers who like Ondaatje's poetry or who want a war novel that is really about colonialism and finds that out in its final pages.
Historical Context & Significance
The English Patient shared the Booker Prize in 1992 with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, only the second tie in the prize's history. The judges said the decision to split it reflected the passion of feeling among them for both books.
Michael Ondaatje was the first Canadian to win. Anthony Minghella's 1996 film adaptation took nine Academy Awards including Best Picture and made the novel a global bestseller, at the price of fixing it in most people's minds as a love story, which is roughly a third of what it is.
In 2018 the novel won the Golden Man Booker, a one off public vote to mark the prize's fiftieth anniversary in which one winner was chosen from each decade and then put to readers. It beat Naipaul, Lively, Mantel and George Saunders.