The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
1992

Introduction

The English Patient tells the stories of four individuals whose lives come together at the end of World War II in an abandoned Italian villa: Hana, a 20-year-old nurse from Canada who seeks refuge from the proliferation of wartime death; Kirpal (Kip) Singh, a 25-year-old "sapper," or bomb dismantler, from India who is a member of the British Army; David Caravaggio, a friend of Hana's father who worked as a spy during the war and was severely disfigured while a captive of the Germans; and Hana's patient, a severely burned man whose identity is the mystery at the heart of this novel. Each of these characters finds him or herself far away from home, displaced by the war, and each of them finds a quiet refuge in the abandoned Italian villa to reconstruct their lives. While Hana and Kip eventually develop a romantic relationship, Caravaggio becomes more and more obsessed with the patient's true identity: Caravaggio believes that the patient may not be English, as everyone assumed, but a Hungarian who worked as a spy for the Germans. Interspersed into the story of the lives of these characters together in Italy are each character's clear recollections of the past, including the patient's hallucinatory memories of a torrid love affair, of desert exploration, and of friendship and betrayal. The novel becomes a collage of memories that explores themes of war, nationality, identity, loss, and love.

Michael Ondaatje, previously known as a poet, received immense critical and popular acclaim for The English Patient. The book earned The Booker Prize for best novel of 1992.

Author Biography

Poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje is perhaps best-known for his novel The English Patient, which focuses on an international group of characters isolated together in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. The novel explores themes of nationhood, identity, and displacement; the exploration of such themes seems to have arisen from Ondaatje's own life experiences. He was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on September 12, 1943, to parents Philip Mervyn Ondaatje and Doris Gratiaen. Ondaatje's family was what is known as Burgher—a minority but affluent class of people descended from the South Asian island's non-British European colonists. He spent his early childhood in Sri Lanka; after his parents divorced, he moved with his mother and siblings to England. He subsequently moved to Canada, where he attended the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1965. His experience of inhabiting several countries throughout his life, and his multi-ethnically influenced childhood, have greatly informed and shaped the themes of his writing.

Ondaatje started his writing career as a poet—in fact, his primary focus as a poet greatly influences the style of his prose. His first collection of poems, Dainty Monsters, was published in 1967. His first work of prose, Coming through Slaughter (1976), is an experimental biography of New Orleans jazz legend Buddy Bolden. In the latter part of the 1990s, Ondaatje published Handwriting, a collection of poetry (1998) and the novel Anil's Ghost (2000), which is about the violent civil war between the Sinhhalese government and the Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka. Ondaatje had written about Sri Lanka previously in the critically acclaimed memoir Running in the Family (1982), in which he recounts his family's history in Sri Lanka, colonialist life on the South Asian island, and his own childhood.

The English Patient (1992) was awarded the Booker Prize for that year, and became a bestseller, making Ondaatje one of Canada's most famous writers and the most well-known writer of Sri Lankan origins. The English Patient was adapted as an Academy Award-winning film in 1996.

Since 1970, Ondaatje has been a member of the faculty of the Department of English at Glendon College at York University, in Toronto. Ondaatje also serves as the editor of Brick, a Literary Journal, for which his wife, Linda Spalding, is also an editor. The journal is published twice a year out of Toronto.

Plot Summary

Chapter 1: The Villa

Near the end of World War II, a young Canadian nurse, Hana, is living in an abandoned Italian villa with a severely burned patient. Hana had decided to stay behind with her patient, who was too fragile to move, after her hospital regiment moved on. Hana does not know the patient's identity, but she tries to piece together his story from his fragmentary hallucinations. She thinks he is English.

Hana passes her time by reading to the patient from the villa's large library, as well as cleaning, gardening, and perusing books by herself. The war has left her emotionally scarred.

The patient remembers crashing a plane in the desert. A tribe of desert people find him and tend his badly burned body. They transport him across the desert as they care for him. As he heals, he serves them by identifying European-made weapons found hidden in the desert.

Chapter 2: In Near Ruins

Caravaggio, who knew Hana through her father in Canada, seeks her out at the villa. Hana had learned six months earlier that her father was killed in the war; Caravaggio knows of his death as well. Caravaggio, a former thief who worked as a spy during the war, tells Hana that his thumbs were cut off by the Germans after they captured him. When he wonders why they stopped at his thumbs, Hana tells him it is because the Germans were being forced to retreat from Italy.

Chapter 3: Sometime a Fire

A Sikh sapper (military explosives specialist), part of a British regiment, joins the group at the villa. The Sikh sets up his tent at the villa gardens. He is there with a sapper regiment to defuse the bombs of the area, which the Germans have left everywhere in the wake of their retreat.

Sometime after his arrival at the villa, Kip is working with intense concentration on defusing a bomb just outside the villa; coming upon a "trick" in the bomb's wiring he finds himself in need of assistance, and yells for help. Hana runs out and assists him, in spite of the danger to herself, until Kip successfully defuses the bomb. They curl up together, exhausted, in their very first moment of intimacy.

That evening, Caravaggio brings home a pilfered gramophone, and the foursome have a small celebration in the patient's room. Kip suddenly leaves when he hears an explosion; another sapper, Hardy, had been killed while trying to defuse a bomb. Kip returns hours later and finds Hana still in the patient's room. He crosses the room to be with her, snipping the wires of the patient's hearing aid so the patient will not hear them.

Chapter 4: South Cairo 1930–1938

Told from the point of view of the patient, this chapter consists of fragments of the patient's past: he had been part of an inter-European expedition mapping the Libyan deserts before World War II. In 1936, Geoffrey Clinton, a young Englishman, joins the patient's company in the desert, bringing with him his new, young wife, Katharine.

Chapter 5: Katharine

Told mostly from the point of view of Katharine Clifton, this chapter is a series of short accounts of the genesis of her relationship with the patient: her dreams of him; their somewhat violent lovemaking; awaking in their room in Cairo to the sound of morning prayers. He, in the meantime (although he has told her to claim no ownership over him), grows more and more obsessed with her and more and more disturbed by having to pretend in public that their relationship does not exist. She insists, for the sake of her husband's sanity, that they end the affair. The separation is heartbreaking for both of them, but neither lets the other know.

Chapter 6: A Buried Plane

Caravaggio believes that the patient is the Hungarian Count Ladislaus de Almásy, a desert explorer who helped the Germans navigate the deserts on numerous occasions. Caravaggio knows everything about Almásy because he had tracked his movement across the desert. Despite Hana's protestations, Caravaggio drugs the patient into a hallucination to get to the bottom of his identity.

In 1939, Geoffrey Clinton had attempted a murder/suicide by trying to crash his plane into the patient in the desert. Katharine was in the plane with him. He did not hit the patient, but Clifton was killed and Katharine severely wounded; the totaled plane left the patient and Katharine with no transportation out of the desert. The patient leaves Katharine in a desert cave and goes on foot in search of help. The patient is taken captive because the dessert is now a war zone, and he is thought to be a spy for the Germans. He is only able to return to Katharine years later. When he reaches the cave, he finds her body and carries her from the cave to a hidden plane. While flying out of the dessert, the plane catches fire, burning the patient, and then crashes.

Media Adaptations

• An audio edition of The English Patient, narrated by Michael York, was issued by Random House in 1993.
• A film version of The English Patient, directed by Anthony Minghella, was released in 1996. It won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Juliette Binoche, who played the character of Hana.

Chapter 7: In Situ

Kip was the second son in his family. Although it was traditional for the second son to become a doctor, he enlisted in a Sikh regiment instead and was shipped to London, where he was selected by Lord Suffolk as part of a new sapper regiment. Kip was 21 years old when he joined the regiment, and he highly valued the intimate friendship he developed with Lord Suffolk and his assistants, Miss Morden and Mr. Fred Harts, especially because his experience with the rest of the army had been one of social alienation because of his race.

Kip tells Hana of the bomb that exploded and killed Lord Suffolk, Miss Morden, and Mr. Harts; however, he does not discuss their deaths at all. Rather, his story concentrates on his own efforts in continuing Lord Suffolk's failed attempts to dismantle a new type of bomb, which he succeeds at after much suspense. In the meantime, Kip tucks away the memory of his friends, so as not to let his anguish disturb his work. He does not share his grief with Hana.

Chapter 8: The Holy Forest

Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip lead a quiet and private life, together in the villa, with the patient. They bring a ladybug from the garden for the patient to look at; they play hide-and-go-seek in the darkness of the library.

Chapter 9: The Cave of Swimmers

Told in the first-person voice of the patient, as he speaks to Caravaggio during a morphine-induced conversation, the patient continues to fill in more details about his past with Katharine Clifton. He finds himself secretly falling deeper and deeper in love with Katharine, and after she had been in their company for more than a year, it is Katharine who initiates their affair by casually informing him that she wants him "to ravish" her.

The patient's story segues into recollections of his good friend Madox who had been with him in the desert for ten years. Madox returned to England after the war broke out and the desert group was forced to disband. While at church with his wife, during a sermon praising the war, Madox shot himself to death.

The patient shifts into speaking in a third-person voice about Almásy and Katharine Clifton in Cairo, leading Caravaggio to wonder who he is speaking as now. The patient does not ever admit that he and Almásy are the same person.

Almásy brings Katharine, injured from the plane crash, to the Cave of Swimmers, and leaves her there to go for help. He walks through the desert until he comes to an English base at El Taj. The English soldiers there take him captive, thinking that he is an enemy spy because of his Hungarian name. He is unable to return to Katharine until, years later, he begins transporting German spies across the desert. When he returns to her, he cradles her decomposing body in the silence of the cave.

Chapter 10: August

Kip is in Naples in October, 1943, where a German soldier who turns himself in confesses that the harbor is wired with thousands of bombs that will explode when the city's power is turned on. The city is evacuated except for 12 sappers. They spread throughout the city and conduct the work of dismantling and re-wiring until the hour that the electricity is to return. Kip waits in a church until the electricity comes back. No bombs explode.

Back at the villa at the present moment, Kip storms angrily into the patient's bedroom, pointing his gun angrily at him. He has just heard that the United States has bombed Hiroshima. The realization of the injustice of the American and Britishled policies against the non-Western countries of the world forces Kip to question why he, as a Sikh, is fighting a British war. He walks out on the patient, on Caravaggio, and especially, on Hana.

Sometime after Kip leaves, but before her patient dies, Hana writes a letter to her stepmother, Clara, in which she openly discusses the death of her father, Patrick, for the first time. The letter represents a catharsis for Hana.

Years later, Kirpal Singh, now a doctor in India with a wife and children, sits and thinks about Hana, who is now in Canada. Hana, in her kitchen in Canada, knocks a glass from the cabinet. At that same moment, Kirpal Singh catches a fork in midair, which had been dropped by his daughter, symbolizing a metaphysical connection between Hana and himself, though they are separated by the politics of their nations and the physicality of their continents.

Characters

Count Ladislaus de Almásy

See The English Patient

David Caravaggio

A middle-aged Canadian of Italian descent, Caravaggio, who was a professional burglar in Toronto, had joined the war effort as a spy for the Allies in Italy. He is an old friend of Hana's father, and when he hears that she is staying in an abandoned villa with a burn patient, he joins her there after his release from the hospital. His thumbs had been cut off while he was held captive and tortured by the Germans immediately prior to their retreat from Italy. He has developed an addiction to morphine.

Caravaggio, like the patient, represents a father figure to Hana. He is concerned about her health and safety and often tries to convince her to leave the abandoned villa. Hana remembers him as having been a gregarious and confident man, but the war and the torture have broken his spirit. He and Hana often sadly reminisce about their lives in Toronto before the war. Caravaggio is also a sort of a nemesis to the patient, as he is obsessed with the patient's true identity: he believes that the patient is not an Englishman but a spy who worked for the Germans. Because of his obsession with the patient's identity, he drugs him again and again into lucid hallucinations in order to pry his story from him. By the end, however, the patient's tragic story has removed any trace of Caravaggio's anger towards him.

In a novel that takes the futility of war on as a major theme, Caravaggio is a personification of this futility. As well as being the most vocal about his disdain for the war and its waste, his maimed hands are both evidence and symbols of its futility.

Geoffrey Clifton

An Englishman of high social standing, Geoffrey Clifton joins Almásy, Madox, and the rest of the Geographical Society desert expedition during the last days of his honeymoon with his new wife Katharine. He is a pilot with a good-natured personality; his wife is the apple of his eye, and he constantly boasts to the company of her beauty. It is later revealed that Clifton is a spy for the English government, keeping tabs on the international band of desert explorers.

Although Almásy and Katharine attempt to keep their affair a secret, Clifton eventually learns of the affair. On a trip back to the desert to retrieve Almásy, Clifton attempts to crash his plane into him; he misses Almásy but kills himself and mortally wounds Katharine.

Katharine Clifton

Fifteen years his junior, Katharine Clifton becomes Almásy's lover for a relatively brief and turbulent time. They had become acquainted during the Geographical Society expeditions in the Libyan desert, which Katharine's husband took her to during the last days of their honeymoon. She becomes enamored with the desert, and her growing interest in the desert is matched by her growing interest in Almásy, who is also secretly falling in love with her. She initiates the secret, and often somewhat violent, sexual affair, but the pressure of keeping it secret, coupled with her guilt, causes her to break it off—a move that breaks Almásy's heart, though he would not admit it to her.

When Clifton crashes his plane into the desert in an attempt to kill Almásy, he kills himself and mortally wounds Katharine. Almásy leaves her in a cave while he goes for help; she dies when he is unable to return to her. Katharine's death is the patient's greatest source of anguish. His inability to save her is the ultimate reason he renounces his identity.

The English Patient

The identity of the English patient is the crux of the mystery at the heart of this novel; his identity remains somewhat ambiguous even to the end of the novel. Burned beyond recognition, the patient is introduced to the young Canadian nurse, Hana, in an Italian hospital. She stays on with him at an abandoned Italian villa after her hospital regiment moves on. Through several fragments of his mostly hallucinatory monologues that pepper the novel, it is revealed that this patient, whom everyone believes to be an Englishman, was part of a Geographical Society expedition to map the Libyan desert. During his time in the desert, he meets and falls in love with Katharine Clifton, the young wife of his colleague Geoffrey Clifton. They commence a violent affair and break it off, only to have Clifton, in a fit of jealousy, attempt to kill them both by crashing his plane in the desert. Clifton is killed, and the patient leaves the severely injured Katharine in a desert cave until he can return with help. By this time, World War II has broken out, and he is captured by the English, who assume he is a spy for the Germans. He is unable to save Katharine. Two years go by before he is able to return to the cave and retrieve Katharine's body.

The patient was kept from saving Katharine because, by virtue of his name, the English assumed he was allied with the Germans. That he is thought to be an enemy by the British because of his non-Anglo name is the root of the patient's refusal to identify himself or align himself with any nation. The patient is a man of great historical and geographical knowledge, and a great passion for the desert. Both the death of his friend Madox and the death of Katharine cause him enough anguish to not be able to face his memories, except in the stupor of the morphine injections that Caravaggio administers.

Hana

Twenty-year-old Hana is originally from Toronto and was sent to Italy with the Canadian army as a nurse. The overwhelming trauma she experiences and witnesses during the war leaves her severely scarred emotionally: the experience of caring for scores of dying soldiers; receiving news of her father's death in France; becoming pregnant and having to terminate the pregnancy all leave her scarred. While working in an abandoned villa that has been transformed into a hospital, she meets a patient who is burned beyond recognition. When her regiment moves on, Hana remains at the villa alone with the patient. Later, she is joined by David Caravaggio and Kip the sapper, with whom she eventually develops an intimate relationship.

Hana idealizes her patient; she finds a fatherly type of comfort with him and regards him as a "despairing saint." Her idealism, in spite of her emotional anguish, is evident in her attitude towards nationalism and race; when Caravaggio questions whether the patient is English or is in league with Germany, Hana states that it does not matter what side he is on. Hana also idealizes Kip, whom she is drawn to for comfort and whom she also regards as a sort of saint. Her observations of him reveal an adoration of his beauty; however, her mild obsession with the brownness of his skin and with his long, dark hair seems to have more to do with a universal idea of beauty and less to do with their difference in race.

Unfortunately, Hana's idealism did not affect Kip, who left her ultimately because she, as a Canadian, is associated with the West and with what he comes to regard as its violent racist policies against non-Western cultures.

Hana does, at the end of the book, achieve a catharsis that none of the other characters seem to: she writes a letter to her stepmother, Clara, informing her of the details of her father's death and discussing, for the first time, her own grief. Finally able to openly acknowledge her father's death, Hana achieves an emotional healing.

Hardy

Hardy is an Englishman and a member of Kip's sapper regiment in Italy. Unlike the other English sappers, who are reluctant to show the senior-ranking Sikh respect because of his race, Hardy is enthusiastic in following Kip's orders. Kip and Hardy form a friendship. Hardy is killed while attempting to defuse a bomb. His sudden death is an indirect factor that propels Kip towards starting a romantic relationship with Hana.

Mr. Fred Harts

Fred Harts is Lord Suffolk's chauffeur and constant companion in his bomb disposal work. Together with Lord Suffolk and Miss Morden, the threesome is known as the Holy Trinity. Mr. Harts is killed along with Suffolk and Morden while defusing a bomb in 1941.

Kip

See Kirpal Singh

Madox

An Englishman and a member of the Geographical Society, Madox is Almásy's closest friend, having spent ten years charting the African deserts with him. The Geographical Society, an international band of explorers stationed in the desert and away from the political tensions of Europe, seems to transcend the boundaries of nationalism. The group is disbanded because of the commencement of World War II, which sadly transforms the desert into a war zone. Madox returns to England and ends up committing suicide. The patient, heartbroken at his friend's death, says that Madox "died because of nations."

Miss Morden

Miss Morden is secretary to Lord Suffolk and accompanies him during every bomb dismantlement. When Lord Suffolk chooses Kip to join his sapper regiment, Miss Morden becomes the only English woman to truly befriend Kip. He cherishes her friendship and views her as a sort of mother figure; she takes him to plays and, during one touching instant, daubs him with cologne to calm him during a bomb disposal. Her death by explosion, along with Fred Harts and Lord Suffolk, is a great source of anguish to Kip.

Kirpal Singh

Kirpal (Kip) Singh, as a sapper in the British army, is part of an elite and unique unit hand-selected and trained in bomb disposal. It is extremely technical and dangerous work. Kip is a Sikh originally from India, which is a colony of Britain at the time the novel takes place. His vehemently anti-British brother is jailed for refusing to join the British army; Kip joins in his place and is sent to London. He acquires his nickname, Kip (which he is called throughout most of the novel), from the British soldiers who derived his name from some kipper grease that got on some of his reports.

Kip faces discrimination in the army that, while it allows him to be a soldier, disbars him from social activities; that is, until he is befriended by his mentor in the sapper unit, Lord Suffolk, and his assistants, Miss Morden and Mr. Harts. Kip becomes Lord Suffolk's right-hand sapper, and he regards Lord Suffolk as a father figure. Indeed, Kip values these three English people as though they were family, and he is emotionally shattered when they are suddenly blown up by a bomb. Rather than facing his anguish at their deaths, he tucks away their memories—an act he compares to Peter Pan packing away his shadow—and heads to Italy with another sapper unit. Here, he encounters Hana, with whom he commences a romantic relationship, and the patient, with whom he forms a fast friendship, based on their similarities in taste, knowledge, and personality.

During his time in Europe, Kip falls in love with Western culture, especially that of the English. He constantly hums the Western tunes he learns through his portable radio headset; he adores English tea and condensed milk; later, in Italy, he finds himself in awe of the vast frescoes of the churches.

In the meantime, Kip's own non-white racial background is a constant factor in his relationship to the European world he now inhabits; his race is represented especially by the constant repetition throughout the text of the description of his "brown skin." The consciousness of his color is ever-present and represents his racial difference as a significant factor in his life—even during the intense, life-and-death moments of bomb disposal.

The character of Kip is very much a mirror of the character of the patient: the patient himself often refers to Kip as a younger version of himself. He also refers to the both of them as "international bastards," based on their life experience of straddling different national and ethnic cultures, seeming to not be bound in spirit by the tenets of just one national identity. However, for Kip, the patient's idealized "international" identity is shattered by the American bombing of Hiroshima. This act of violence by what Kip calls a "white nation" against a "brown nation" destroys Kip's previous idealization of the West, Europe, and especially the Britain; it makes clear to him the exploitation by these colonial nations of the non-Western peoples of the world. His explosive anger at the Americans' celebration of the nuclear bombing of Japanese civilians, and his subsequent, very sudden exit from both the villa and from Hana's life, forms the climax of the novel.

Lord Suffolk

Lord Suffolk, an English gentleman, is the head of an experimental bomb disposal unit as part of the British Army. He chooses Kip as a member of his elite sapper unit; Kip eventually becomes his top sapper. Lord Suffolk, along with his constant work companions Miss Morden, his secretary, and Mr. Fred Harts, his chauffeur, are known as The Holy Trinity. Kip becomes especially close to Lord Suffolk who, as his mentor, becomes a father figure to Kip. Lord Suffolk is killed in 1941 by a bomb, and his sudden death is a great source of sadness for Kip.

Themes

War

The English Patient is centered around the events of World War II, but markedly absent from its narrative is any mention—save the bombing of Hiroshima, which has great personal significance to the character Kip—of any of the major action or history of the war itself. Rather, it focuses on the personal experiences of war of the four main characters and, in doing so, portrays war as an endeavor that results not in glory, but destruction and, ultimately, betrayal to those who take part. Hana's letter to her stepmother Clara at the end of the novel most clearly states the betrayal of the war towards those who joined its efforts; Clara was the only one of Hana's family not to join the war effort, and Hana asks of her, "How were you not fooled like us?" What Hana—and the others—were "fooled" by was the sense of honor and duty that drove each of them to join the war effort. Hana, Kip and Caravaggio have all voluntarily left their own countries to join the Allied forces in Europe, but the novel focuses on what the war took from these characters: Caravaggio is horribly maimed; Hana loses her father, her lover, and her child; Kip, who joined the British army out of a sense of loyalty to England and the West, not only loses his best friends in a bomb disposal, but in the end is betrayed by the West by the bombing of Hiroshima, which he views as an act of blatant racism. The patient himself, who wanted nothing to do with the war, is unable to save Katharine as a direct result of the conflict and is forced to take sides; he also loses his best friend, Madox, who commits suicide as a direct result of the war. None of the characters exit the war with a sense of honor or glory; as Caravaggio notes angrily, "The armies indoctrinate you and leave you here and they f―off somewhere else to cause trouble, inky-dinky parlez-vous."

Nationhood and Identity

The patient says to Hana that the idea of nations is one that deforms people. The novel The English Patient explores the attempt of the characters to transcend the constrictions of nationhood, and their helplessness and inability to do so because of the greater power of politics, government, and the war that surrounds them.

Topics For Further Study

• The film version of The English Patient has several differences from the original novel. Watch the film after reading the novel. Compare and contrast the differences in the plot and the characters. Why do you think these changes were made and how do they change the overall story? Take a chapter or event from the book that was not in the film, and write a scene for it. How would you have fit this scene into the film?
• At the end of the novel, Hana writes a letter to her stepmother, Clara, and discusses in detail the death of her father, Patrick. This letter signifies an emotional healing on Clara's part because she had previously been unwilling to acknowledge his death. Kip and Caravaggio, also, have been emotionally wounded by the events of the war. Do you think that, like Hana, either of them achieved a sense of healing by the end of the book? Write a letter, in the voice of either Caravaggio or Kip, that reflects what you believe their state of mind is by the end of the novel.
• Kip's brother is jailed in India for refusing to join the British army. At this time, India is a colony of Great Britain. India would gain independence only two years after the end of WWII, in 1947. Kip's brother is a protestor against the British presence in India. Write a research report on the independence movement in India. Who were the key figures? How is the British influence still seen in India today? What has been the impact of Indian culture on the British?
• The English Patient is actually a sequel to an earlier novel, In the Skin of a Lion, which takes place in Canada and includes the characters of Hana and Caravaggio. Read In the Skin of a Lion. What are the thematic elements in the earlier novel that carry over to The English Patient? How do you feel Hana and Caravaggio have changed as characters? Based on your reading of In the Skin of a Lion, how do you think their lives would have played out if they had never gone off to war?
• The bombing of Hiroshima by the United States is, to Kip, an unforgivable act of violence that he believes is fueled by racism. Kip is also angry over the way that he hears the bombing reported over the radio. Research news clippings on the bombing of Hiroshima, from the time of the bombing to the present time. How is the bombing reported? What is the tone? Is the bombing condoned? Is there ever a sense of injustice or wrongdoing that would reflect Kip's feeling? See if you can find news sources from different countries regarding the bombing. How have different cultures responded to the bombings? What is the lasting impact on those cultures today, specifically in Japan?

In the desert, the patient and his international band of friends had no need or desire to label themselves according to their nationality; being in the desert—removed, at that time, from the politics of Europe—they were able to forego their labels of nationhood. However, the war brought the politics of Europe to the desert; it forced the disbandment of the Geographical Society and therefore, symbolically, put an end to the patient's dream of transcending nationhood. The patient's best friend, Madox, shoots himself rather than be forced to ally himself with Britain against other men simply because of their nationality. Most tragic of all is the very fact that it is the patient's name, and the nationhood it implied, that kept the patient from saving Katharine's life. The English soldiers stationed outside the desert took him prisoner rather than help him rescue Katharine, simply because his Hungarian name denoted an association—albeit nonexistent—with their enemy. In the end, the patient is only able to shed his identity through the literal loss of his face, as he is severely burned beyond recognition.

Kip, too, attempts to transcend the constrictions of nationality by attempting to straddle both his Sikh culture and the Christian British culture; his attempt at assimilation into British culture is especially symbolized in his adoption of the nickname given him by the British soldiers—throughout the book, he is known as "Kip" rather than "Kirpal Singh." For Kip, however, transcendence is even more impossible because of his Asiatic race: he, a member of the British army's elite sapper unit, is indelibly marked as Indian by the very color of his skin, the "brownness" of which is evoked repeatedly throughout the novel. Even in the heat of dismantling a bomb, he is still conscious of the brownness of his skin and, therefore, his status as an outsider. Kip originally joins the British army with the conviction that he can transcend the superior racism of the British, and therefore gain acceptance, simply by ignoring the laws, written and unwritten, that impinge upon his personal freedom. However, by the end of the novel, it is the bombing of Hiroshima—an act of extreme violence that he views as motivated by the racism of the white West against Asia—that makes clear to Kip that he cannot escape the racism with which the West would regard him. He leaves the British Army and returns to his own nation, resuming his name, Kirpal Singh. Although he loves her, that Kip leaves Hana behind denotes that he completely gives in to the labeling of nationality that he had so desperately tried to overcome: he leaves because he associates Hana, as a white Canadian, with the racism of the West.

Trauma, Personal Grief, and Healing

The novel, in its focus on the private, internal lives of each of the characters through their personal memories, examines the effect of trauma and, in the case of Hana, the progression from trauma, through denial, to acceptance.

The narrative of the novel is often propelled by the characters' dealing with anguish: for example, the English patient finds himself unable to face the death of Katharine, and his emotional shock and inability to fully face her death is reflected in the very narrative structure of the novel: his conversation and hallucination greatly alters as he begins to either speak or think about her. For example, the chapter "Cairo 1930–1938," the patient is speaking with Hana of his past and discusses the beginning of his affair with Katharine; throughout this chapter, he speaks in the first person. However, during his drugged conversation with Caravaggio he is eventually forced to confront the circumstances surrounding her death. The patient's narrative style shifts considerably: rather than speaking in the first person, he begins to speak in the third person of Almásy (the patient's true name), causing Caravaggio to wonder whether the patient is speaking as himself or as another person. This third person narration disconnects the patient from the person of Almásy and thus from Almásy's pain, making it the only way possible for him to discuss Katharine's death. The patient's hallucinations and refusal to acknowledge his true identity allows him to keep separate from his personal anguish and, therefore, to not have to face it fully. As he says to Hana, "Death means you are in the third person."

But, while the patient does not seem to receive a respite from his grief except through his own eventual death, Ondaatje uses the character of Hana to show redemption through acceptance: Hana's character development is one from debilitating grief and denial, to healing and acceptance. Throughout the novel she refuses to acknowledge the death of her father, even going so far as to tell the patient that he is alive in France. The entrance of Kip into her life, and the happiness and comfort he brings her, helps Hana to be able to feel happiness again. Although in the end Kip leaves her, Hana is left with the ability to move on in her life. Her transformation is evident in the letter she writes to Clara at the end of the novel, in which she is finally able to openly discuss her father's death.

Geography

Hana, in her letter to her stepmother Clara at the end of the novel, writes, "Do you understand the sadness of geography?" Hana is discussing her sorrow at being unable to be with her father, Patrick, while he died in France and she was tending soldiers in Italy. Here, her sorrow is a helpless sorrow aimed at the impossibility of transcending the physical space of geography. In The English Patient, the physical geography of the earth symbolizes nationhood and the separateness that it forces between people. During their courtship, Hana constantly imagines Kip as an extension of his continent and as the embodiment of all of India. Indeed, their relationship is consistently described in terms of the geography they represent: for example, an intimate moment between Hana and Kip is described: "Hana now received this tender art, [Kip's] nails against the million cells of her skin, in his tent, in 1945, where their continents met in a hill town." The climax of the novel occurs when Kip, unable to separate Hana from the West he has come to despise, leaves her and returns to India. Hana returns to Canada; their retreat to their respective homes is as impossible a separation to surmount as the larger, political forces that drove them apart.

However, Ondaatje creates an ending that is almost magically surreal, allowing Kip and Hana to transcend the physical space of geography: as Hana, in Canada, knocks a glass from a shelf, Kirpal Singh reaches down to catch a falling fork in India. This ending to the novel seems to leave the hope that there is indeed a plane that transcends the constraints of both the political and the physical world.

Style

Setting

The novel takes place during World War II. The timing of the novel is integral to several of the themes it explores, including the role of nationhood in the identity of the individual, and the illusion of the honor of war.

Setting the novel during World War II also gives Ondaatje a backdrop through which to examine the effect of the colonialism of Britain on the world policies of the United States in later years: World War II marked the end of Britain's powerful colonial era, and the rise of the United States as the new world power. The emergence of the United States as the world power is metaphorically represented, in the novel, by the bombing of Hiroshima. Through the character of Kip, Ondaatje shows how the American rationale to bomb Japan with the atomic bomb is directly related to the racist colonialist philosophy of Western superiority that especially characterized the British Empire's rule over its non-Western colonies.

The large part of the action of the novel takes place in both an abandoned Italian villa, where the lives of the four main characters converge, and in the North African deserts prior to the start of World War II. The abandoned villa is a ruin, seemingly frozen in time. The paintings of a garden on the walls of the patient's room seem to blur the boundaries of internal and external physical space within the villa: this, combined with its removal from time, create an idealized space for the four main characters to attempt to remove themselves from the reality of the war and the politics of nations that surround them. The "boundary-lessness" and timelessness of the villa is also echoed in the desert: the patient and the other members of the Geographical Society find sanctuary in the desert from the political conflicts of their individual nations, as well as a freedom from the labels of their nationalities. However, both of these sanctuaries prove unable to withstand the greater machinations of the politics of nations; eventually, the war encroaches upon both sanctuaries, forcing the inhabitants to either choose sides, or to eventually die. Through the portrayal of the powerlessness of these sanctuaries against the war, Ondaatje seems to show the powerlessness of the individual against the greater political movements of nations.

Collage

The English Patient employs a narrative structure that is not, like the majority of novels, based on the chronological order of the events around which its story is built, but is rather structured like a collage. It is constructed largely of the recollection or retelling of numerous, non-sequential memories of each of the four main characters. This collage of recollections is interspersed between the main action of the story, which includes both the love story between Hana and Kip, and the uncovering of the patient's true identity by Caravaggio. Using this collaged and multi-voiced structure allows Ondaatje to do a number of different things.

By providing a collage of episodes, rather than being tied to a strict chronological structure, Ondaatje is able to reveal each of the character's private memories, most specifically those memories that they would not share with anyone else. For example, Kip's friendship with Lord Suffolk and Miss Morden is revealed only through the flash-back of his memories. The personal effect of anguish is a major theme of the novel, and through revelation of each of the characters' most private memories, Ondaatje not only provides vital background information for each character but is able to specifically explore the source of each character's most private grief, as well as how they are either able or unable to come to terms with it.

The collage of memories, all told from the point of view of each specific character, also provides the novel with a number of varied points of view. For example, because Ondaatje—having abandoned chronology in the structuring of this novel—is not constricted by time, he is able to include the voice of a dead character—that of Katharine. Her perspective, given in the chapter "Katharine," on the stormy relationship she has with the patient, provides an intimate portrait of the character of the patient that would otherwise not be revealed.

The non-linear and multi-voiced, collage-like narrative structure of the novel is echoed by the patient's copy of Herodotus's The Histories, into which the patient has pasted his own personal writings and observances, as well as clippings from other books and magazines. Like the collage the patient has created with the histories by interspersing personal anecdotes and the writings of others between the pages of the story that Herodotus tells, Ondaatje has created a collage of multi-voiced narrations and experiences. This non-linear and multi-voiced, collage-like narrative structure, then, becomes more than a narrative device. It represents an alternative to the way that history itself—also traditionally recorded in a strictly chronological manner—can be written, providing a framework for a form of written history that takes into account more than one perspective.

Historical Context

The English Patient is set largely in Italy at the end of World War II and features characters from Africa, Europe, Canada, and India. The war is the direct cause of the convergence of the main characters—Kip, Hana, Caravaggio, and the patient himself—at a bombed-out villa in Italy, several months before the war's end. The international nature of the relationships between the characters, and the effect of the war on the characters as individuals and in their relationships to each other, is integral to the development of the novel, particularly the theaters in which the war was played out, and the bombing of Hiroshima that punctuated the war's end.

World War II was a direct result of the failure of the outcome of World War I to provide a satisfactory environment for peace: Germany, who was the loser of World War I, was left in complete economic turmoil, and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles—the treaty that marked the end of World War I—left the country with little recourse for reconstruction or growth; and both Italy and Japan, who were victors of World War I, were highly dissatisfied with the spoils of war they were awarded. Eventually, these three countries formed the Axis powers that faced off with France, Great Britain, the USSR, and the United States, which formed the Allied powers in World War II.

Before the commencement of World War II, both Italy and Germany adopted a totalitarian form of government known as fascism, militaristic in structure and centered on a dictator. The rise of fascism in Germany occurred with the installment of Adolph Hitler as Germany's dictator in 1933, who offered promises to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles and restore German power by annexing its surrounding countries. Earlier in Italy in 1922, Benito Mussolini became that country's fascist dictator. Concurrently, Japan, which had already long established a military government, began the process of invading and taking over China.

In 1938 Hitler began his quest to conquer Europe with the forced annexation of Austria, an event that was backed by Italy and not stopped by France or Great Britain, who were surprised by Germany's show of sudden power. World War II officially began when Germany invaded Poland, a country that had a mutual protection agreement with France. The act of aggression against Poland caused both France and Great Britain to declare war on Germany on September 1, 1939. In the coming years, Germany proceeded to invade much of Europe, including France itself.

The grisly hallmark of Hitler's reign in Germany and his actions in World War II was the mass extermination of Jews and other minority groups in concentration camps, which has come to be known as the Holocaust. His aim was creating what he saw to be a "pure" German state.

The United States, which had taken an isolationist stance and was reluctant to become involved in another large-scale conflict in Europe, managed to stay out of the war until December 7, 1941, when the Japanese launched an attack on the military base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, provoked by the United States' freezing of Japanese assets that threatened to cripple that country's economy. The United States entered into a war with fronts both in Europe and in the Pacific Ocean.

The involvement of Great Britain in the war brought in people to the war in Europe from its commonwealth territories and its colonies all over the globe, including Canada—an independent state that nevertheless has strong ties to Great Britain—and India, which was still under British colonial control. The physical theater of war also extended outside of Europe to the colonies of France and Great Britain in Africa, as seen in the novel. In The English Patient, the war was one that brought many people from all over the globe to fight to defend lands they had never seen, and the sense of disconnectedness brought on not only by the act of war, but of fighting in a foreign land, is a major theme of the novel. Likewise, especially for India, Indians were at once fighting to defend the British Empire, while at home a burgeoning independence movement was taking hold—only a short 2 years after the end of WWII would India force Britain to give it independence, in 1947. The tension between Great Britain's control over India, its movement towards independence, and the complex results of the racism that characterized the imperialist attitude of the English towards the native people of the Indian subcontinent whom they governed, is especially played out in the character of Kip and his own attitude towards the West, which profoundly changes by the end of the novel.

Although in the early years of the war the triumph of the Axis powers seemed imminent, by 1941, with the involvement of the United States, the tide had begun to turn in favor of the Allies, with the British, Canadians, and Americans taking Italy in the summer of 1943. On June 6, 1944, which is known as D-Day, Allies surprised the Germans and took the beaches of Normandy, finally beginning the reclamation of France; the Allies succeeded in breaching the German border in the Spring of 1945. May 8, 1945, known as V-E Day, Germany officially surrendered.

The atomic bomb was dropped by the Americans on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively, killing an estimated 240,000 people. Japan formally surrendered on September 2, 1945.

World War II was especially characterized by the prominence of new and more lethal technology, most notably the atomic bomb. In terms of loss of life and destruction of property, World War II is the most destructive in history. It was the framework for the use of the most horrific weapon that humankind had ever created; it was the theater of the gruesome genocide of the Jews by the German Nazis. It was characterized by air raids that took the lives of many civilians. It left the once powerful British Empire and the overall economy of Europe in shambles, providing a power gap into which the United States and the USSR became the new superpowers, touching off a new era: the cold war between the capitalist democracy of the US, and the communist USSR.

Critical Overview

Although Michael Ondaatje had published several collections of poetry and novels prior to The English Patient, it is this novel that propelled him into worldwide fame as a writer. The English Patient was a bestseller in 1992, the year that it was published and received highly favorable reviews in the major North American newspapers. He was awarded the Booker Prize in 1992, sharing this prize for Best Novel with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. Ondaatje was the first Canadian to be awarded this prize.

Ondaatje was previously known as a poet, and the critics picked up on the influence of poetry on the narrative style of The English Patient. A review in MacLean found the poetic influence a strength of the novel. John Bemrose wrote:

Michael Ondaatje … who began his writing career as a poet, has managed to recast the traditional novel in his own peculiar way, so that the measured dance of his poetic rhythms and images leads the reader ever deeper into a story. His new novel, The English Patient, is one of the finest Canadian novels ever written … Ondaatje has somehow found a way to give an abstract narrative the illusion of physical presence. That accomplishment also depends on his masterly command of rhythm.

While the novel received almost entirely highly favorable review by the general readership, it has also held its own as a subject for critical literary interpretation during the 13 years it has been in publication, providing in its unconventional construction a rich critical source for narrative studies, and in its subject matter, a source for post-colonial literary studies, among other subjects.

Criticism

Tamara Fernando

Fernando is a writer and editor living in Seattle, Washington. In this essay, Fernando examines how the narrative structure of The English Patient serves as a criticism of traditional historiography.

In The English Patient, the title character is a nameless, severely burned man cared for by a young nurse at the end of World War II. His only possession is a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, into which he has pasted his own writings as well as clippings from other books, creating a collage of knowledge, observations, and unrelated events.

As the patient discusses his love of The Histories with Hana, his nurse, he says of Herodotus:

I see him more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage. "This history of mine," Herodotus says, "has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument." What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history.

Like the patient's personal version of The Histories, Ondaatje's novel is a collage; its narrative structure is not based on chronological events but is constructed largely of numerous non-sequential memories and experiences of the four main characters. This non-linear narrative structure, however, is more than a narrative device. It is through this use of non-linear narration that Ondaatje not only tells the personal stories of the four main characters of the novel, but deconstructs the way history itself is recorded, narrated, and understood.

The "cul-de-sacs" and "the supplementary to the main argument" that so interest the patient in the quote given above are the occurrences and points of view that existed and do exist outside of the chronology of a history (what the patient calls "the main argument.") This idea is illuminated by Amy Novak's essay on the narrative structure of The English Patient, in which she discusses the traditional process by which history is written—that is, the act of historiography. She summarizes the philosopher Hegel's influential theory of historiography thus:

According to a received Hegelianism, which still informs conventional thinking about the past, History is constructed as a linear movement, through erasure, toward an already predetermined meaning…. In order to ensure this coherency of this totality, contradictory moments that do not record the present's coming to Being are erased or expelled from signification.

In other words, the conventional practice of historiography is the telling of history chronologically, that "linear movement" to which Novak refers. That chronology, by its very nature as a linear progression, is therefore singular in its point of view not only of the past, but of the state of the present to which the historical narrative is pointing. The singularity of the point of view of a chronologically written history, in order to remain coherent, eliminates any occurrence or interpretation that not only does not contribute to a forward-moving chronology, but offers a contradiction to that singular, linear point of view. These "erasures" are indeed the supplementary, the "cul-de-sacs" to which the patient refers in the quote above.

What Do I Read Next?

• In the Skin of a Lion (1987) is the prequel novel to Ondaatje's The English Patient. Set in Canada between the World Wars, the novel features the characters Caravaggio and Hana, who are important figures in The English Patient, but focuses mainly on Hana's father Patrick. The novel shares some of its major themes with The English Patient, including the examination of personal grief and anguish.
• Like The English Patient, Ondaatje's novel Coming through Slaughter does not stick to a chronological narrative but rather pieces together the life of jazz legend Buddy Bolden through a collage of imagery and anecdotes. It was first published in 1976.
• Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (2000) is set in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje's native country. The novel is about the work of a forensics specialist sent by the United Nations to investigate the brutal civil war that tore the island nation apart for the better part of the latter twentieth century.
• Ondaatje's memoir Running in the Family (1982) is an account of two trips he took to his native country of Sri Lanka and, through the stories he learned during these trips, is an account of his family's history and his own childhood.
• Ondaatje has published several collections of poetry since the late 1960s. The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989) is a collection of previously published poems.
• The God of Small Things (1997), the 1998 Booker Prize-winning novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, examines both personal grief and loss, as well as the inescapable power of government, politics, and society over the individual. The novel takes place in mid-twentieth century Southern India during a time of political unrest. Told through the eyes of two children, it portrays the taboos of caste and sexuality that pervaded their society.
• Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul's novel The Mimic Men (1967), which features a character of Indian descent who lives in the British Caribbean, examines, through the dysfunctional and globe-trotting life of the main character, issues of identity pertinent to a Third World shaped by British colonialism.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), one of Ernest Hemingway's best-known novels, is set during the civil war in Spain. It is a tale of camaraderie in wartime that ultimately portrays war as futile and destructive, rather than honorable and just.

History looms large in The English Patient; the novel takes place during World War II, which is, arguably, the event given the most significance in the commonly known historiography of the twentieth century. But the most familiar stories and people named in the commonly held historiography are strangely absent from this novel. Instead, it seems that Ondaatje seeks to tell what can be called a "supplemental" history of World War II, one that focuses on the private stories of four characters profoundly affected by the war, on those types of stories that would be cast aside as Novak's erasures. Ondaatje's abandonment of the mainstream history is not merely evident in the subject of his novel, but is manifested in the very structure of the novel itself. Like the traditional historiography that Novak discusses above, the traditional structure of a novel—a chronological plot with a beginning, middle, and end—is linear. But Ondaatje wrote The English Patient not as a linear, chronological story. It is built from individual scenes, collaged in a non-sequential order, from both the main characters' respective pasts and their present lives together at the Italian villa.

This can be seen in, for example, the progression of Chapter 8, "The Holy Forest." This chapter, a non-linear collection of stories, abandons chronology in its construction and therefore does not give the reader a sense of the movement of time, either forward or backward. These self-contained accounts include: the careful delivery of a ladybug to the patient from Kip; a discussion among the characters of Indian sarongs; Hana recording her thoughts in a book; an extended section detailing a single bomb disposal carried out by Kip and his assistant sapper Hardy, which delves not only into Kip's state of mind while defusing a bomb, but provides intricate specifics of the technicalities of his job; Kip and Hana washing their hair; almost six pages of Kip, Caravaggio, and Hana playing hide-and-go-seek in the darkened villa; Hana and Kip laying in his tent, recalling his childhood.

Each of these small episodes is what the patient referred to as the "cul-de-sacs," the "supplements" of history. They do not contribute to the forward movement of chronologically ordered historiography, but are rather encapsulated in themselves. However, the fact that these stories do not denote a forward motion in time does not mean at all that they do not develop. Rather, Ondaatje has skillfully woven together these seemingly self-contained episodes into a composite, like a quilt made of many pieces. The reader comes away from Chapter 8 with a clear sense of the intimacy developed between the characters during their days together at the villa, with a sense of the refuge from the war they take in each other, and the way that their lives are constantly subject to the strong undercurrent of the threat of sudden death during wartime. With the wartime experiences of the four characters—noticeably away from the battlefield and away from the more familiar theaters of World War II—Ondaatje does succeed in creating a narrative that veers completely away from the over-arching action of the war.

The abandonment of chronology not only allows for the inclusion of the supplementary stories (additional stories deemed unnecessary to the linear plot), but it also allows for the inclusion of points of view that are not, as Novak noted, allowable within the constraints of chronology. Ondaatje is able, because he is not constrained by the element of time, to provide the point of view of a character who is dead. Chapter 9: "Katharine" is told in the third-person voice but from the specific point of view of Katharine Clifton, the patient's dead lover.

Throughout the novel, the reader is given clues to the patient's past through his fragmentary, hallucinatory memories, and slowly the reader learns the tragic story of his affair with Katharine Clifton, and her subsequent death. However, by including a chapter told from the point of view of Katharine, the reader is given a perspective on the affair that would never have surfaced strictly from the patient's own recollections and interpretations. Through this chapter, readers learn that about his self-righteous talks, his pompous insistence on refusing to be beholden to their relationship, her feeling of extreme guilt for being unfaithful to her husband. With such details that only Katharine's point of view could provide, this chapter not only provides additional details about the nature of the affair that is at the heart of the mystery of this novel, but also provides a perspective on the patient that further develops his character.

This inclusion of Katharine's point of view gives voice to a character who would otherwise, within the constraints of a strict, forward-marching chronology, be silent. She is a character who is already dead by the time the novel's present time commences. In fact, even in the writing of a linear historiography, the biggest flaw is the very fact that, by its nature, it leaves existing but competing points of view out of the narrative, thereby rendering these points of view silent. Novak relates that the philosopher Ernesto Laclau goes so far as to call traditional history an "ideological fantasy" that "[conceals] the fundamental split or antagonism around which the social field is structured." The linearity of history is inaccurate because it does not allow for the natural fact of multiple, and opposing, points of view in society.

Ondaatje's nonlinear narrative construction goes farther than simply being an alternative narrative device. It becomes a physical criticism of the chronological writing of history that is inaccurate and incomplete in that it omits and erases. That the novel is a critique of the writing of history is strongly evident not just in its alternative structure, but in its content—in particular, at the climax of the novel, when Kip discovers that the United States has dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Kip, an Indian Sikh and a loyal member of the British army, is horrified, enraged, and disillusioned by the bombing of Hiroshima's civilians by the United States, an act he sees as motivated by a racist sense of superiority of what he terms the "white nations" over the "brown nations." But what is interesting about this scene in the novel is that Kip can hear, over the radio, the immediate construction of a narrative that excuses this blatant act of violence. He says to his friends: "I'll leave you the radio to swallow your history lesson…. All those speeches of civilization from kings and queen and presidents…. Listen to the radio and smell the celebration in it."

Two opposing points of view are portrayed in this scene: Kip's anger at the racist motivation and violence of the atomic bombing, and, represented by the radio broadcast's "celebration," the immediate interpretation by the Allied forces of the bombing of Japanese civilians as a just measure to bring an end to the war. This broadcast represents the creation of a historiography to describe the bombing as it is happening. By the end of the war, the United States will emerge as the victor and, therefore, will be the dominant interpreter of history. Kip's opposing point of view, representing the members of "brown nations" facing the exploitation of the more powerful West, will become one of the erasures, a valid voice rendered silent by the chronological writing of history.

The bombing of Hiroshima represents a turning point for Kip's character, and therefore a climax in the novel: it is the occurrence that propels him to leave the villa, leave the British army, and even to leave Hana. As a climactic point in the novel, Kip's interpretation of Hiroshima seems to be the point to which the novel was leading—not only in its development of characters and plot, but in its very structure. For Ondaatje, through the character of Kip, is offering a sharp criticism not only of the bombing of Hiroshima, but of the very historiography that excuses the bombing and, by its exclusive nature, would render any opposing view-point silent and, therefore, written out of existence. This criticism extends not only through the characterization and actions of Kip, but through the very structure of the novel itself. In its success in creating a non-linear narrative made from what the patient terms "cul-de-sacs" and what Novak terms the "erasures" of history, Ondaatje's novel calls for no less than a new paradigm of historiography, away from the chronological and therefore exclusive, and towards a model that seeks to include opposing interpretations and myriad voices.

Source: Tamara Fernando, Critical Essay on The English Patient, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Susan E. Hawkins and Susan Danielson

In the following essay excerpt, Hawkins and Danielson examine how the film version of The English Patient "erases the geopolitical stakes at issue" in the novel to sustain a Western imperialist view of World War II.

In the end it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois certainly, but above all aristocratic, that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality. Benedict Anderson

The public reception of the film The English Patient (1996) constitutes a particularly notable example of America's allegiance to the unquestioned story about World War II, one that constantly rationalizes the "ending" and thus reaffirms a continued commitment to a politics of liberal consensus. Arguably this century's most powerful cultural myth, the narrative of western sacrifice, heroism, and ultimate triumph in the "Good War" tacitly informs Anthony Minghella's version of this story and accounts in part for the film's extraordinary popular and critical success. The fact that the film's release followed closely upon the heels of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum's (NASM) decision to effectively cancel the Enola Gay exhibit in January 1995 provides a larger historical and cultural intertext within which to read the film's American success. By substituting passion for history, Minghella erases the geopolitical stakes at issue in Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel and instead nostalgically celebrates western imperial adventures in the African desert.

In order to effect such an enormous transformation, Minghella makes two crucial editorial decisions. First, he refuses the novel's all-important climactic moment, "the reaction of the characters in the monastery to the news of the bombing of Hiroshima" (Katz 138). In so doing, he displaces Kip's (Naveen Andrews) reaction to that horrific news onto his reaction to the death of his sergeant and friend, Hardy (Kevin Whately). This historical elision is covered over by Minghella's second major editorial decision, to privilege the obsessive, adulterous love story between Katherine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas) and Count Ladislaus de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), controlled by the latter's point of view. Such a refocused lens foregrounds traditional masculine fantasies of desire—for the secrets of the desert, the unattainable woman, the unknowable other—and repeats yet again an old story of mythic romance dependent upon hackneyed orientalist tropes. While such decisions ostensibly were made, according to the film's editor, Walter Murch, in the interest of both economy and "weight," their ideological implications reveal a reactionary sexual and nationalist politics. For in the grammar of the film, white Anglo-European men such as Almasy, Hardy, Madox, and Clifton emerge as the ultimate victims of World War II, their "suffering" and deaths serving as an opaque screen for millions of war dead, Asian as well as European.

In this way, Minghella's film rescripts the Anglo-American myth of the "Good War," the European war, and muffles the unresolved controversies concerning the Pacific front. In this construction of history, Americans serve as the unquestioned heroes in both Europe and Asia and the Japanese as aggressive war mongers. For their infamy at Pearl Harbor and its exposure of American vulnerability, and to save Americans from the slaughter that would follow any invasion of Japan, the myth argues that Japanese more or less deserved atomic obliteration. Any other reading would call into question American decisions and raise the specter of racist motives. As in the Smithsonian's decision to replace the original Enola Gay exhibit with a highly revised exhibit plan "that eschewed controversy" (Thelen 1029), film critics and most book reviewers collude in the culture's preference for nostalgia and historical misprision in which Americans can once again rest in the familiar and comforting story, the story without those A-bombs as an ending.

That the film figures such a preference becomes clear through the sheer critical and emotional excess surrounding its reception. From Siskel & Ebert to Time to The New Yorker, key modifiers occur again and again—"ravishing," "voluptuous," "beyond gorgeous," "epic." This is a "big film" (Corliss 82), "an old-fashioned movie-movie—extravagantly romantic" (Ansen 72). The crown, however, for the most enthralled reviewer, must go to Anthony Lane of The New Yorker: "[N]othing in recent cinema […] had prepared me for the palpitating shock of 'The English Patient' […]. Man to man, this is awfully close to a masterpiece" (118,121).

While film critics waxed eloquent over Minghella's "masterpiece," American book reviewers had expressed lukewarm responses to the novel; in particular, they almost universally rejected the ending which is set in motion by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At one extreme, this rejection figures itself through total denial, for example in Linda Hutcheon's six-column review article, "The Empire Writes Back," in The Nation. In her reading, which obviously points to issues of empire and its others, she at no point mentions Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Most often, however, the critics reject that portion of the novel with either a dismissive shrug, "a political ending for an apolitical book" (Balliett 162), or with a "structural" objection: "the author's designs become almost too insistent" (Iyer 72); the "dissonant political note" "seem[s] an error of literary, if not political, judgment" (Bell 73-74). At the other extreme from outright denial, reviewers clearly express their rejection regardless of the magazine's ostensible politics. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Hilary Mantel finds nothing to admire. Aside from "underrealized characters," "colossal, crushing ironies," and plot in all the wrong places, the novel's explicit critique of western motives for dropping the bomb constitutes "a crude polemic […] exploding into the final pages of the book" (22;23). Craig Seligman, writing in The New Republic, moves closer to the actual source of discomfort radiating out from the novel's flashpoint:

And though there's no dismissing the elements of racism in the bombing, only a sentimentalist would feel comfortable lumping Japan with "the brown races" of the Third World. […] The destruction of Hiroshima doesn't implicate us as Westerners—it implicates us as human beings […].(41)

No matter what position they occupy on the political spectrum, the reviewers' message throughout reads loud and clear: Ondaatje goes too far when he has Kip assert an alternative perspective on America's historic decision. In the novel's most emotional and terrifying moment, Kip hears the news of the bombing on his radio headset. Outrage and shock galvanize him. He awakes to the reality of his own position as a colonial subject, as a brown man in a white world. At this moment, he speaks as his father's son and his brother's comrade rather than as an admirer of "all things British":

Americans, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have [f―ing] Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English […].

Just as Hutcheon erases the bombings responsible for the deaths of a quarter of a million people, Seligman refuses the United States's real and hostile treatment of the Japanese and Japanese Americans. Seligman's insistence that the United States was not "lumping Japan with the 'the brown races' of the Third World" ignores a long, bad chapter in American history that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, includes the following: the deployment of Asian exclusion laws; the United States Supreme Court's 1916 denial of American citizenship to Takao Ozawa "because he was 'clearly' 'not Caucasian'" (Takaki 208); and, most shameful, the shipment of thousands of Japanese-American citizens to concentration camps after Pearl Harbor.

While Ondaatje's novel directly challenges the liberal anticommunist consensus that still informs cold war discourse, Minghella makes a different choice. Despite his avowed purpose to "dramatize the individual in the midst of world-historical events," his representations of the "historical" aspects of World War II merely function as the vehicle for "the catastrophic love at the heart of it all" (qtd. in Thomson 43). By substituting passion for history and dramatizing doomed love, his film is powered by the usual motor for classical romance whether it be medieval or Gothic or Hollywood forties. Thus, melodrama, a term invoked enthusiastically in numerous film reviews, serves as a financially viable and emotionally satisfying vehicle that works through clear generic conventions.

Oriental Time, Desert Romance, Pre-national Bodies

In his opening sequence, Minghella replicates the imperial gesture implicit within orientalist discourse through his construction of the landscape as feminine and sexually unconstrained. His North African desert functions as the "permissible" space for impossible love, heterosexual as well as homosexual. This desert world and its evocation of the hidden and exotic—the Cave of Swimmers, sudden sandstorms, Bedouin tribes—establishes the archaic, timeless narrative within the film, cinematically determined as the most powerful and arresting.

We are drawn immediately into this world as we watch a hand paint sepia-colored strokes of delicate swimmers on what appears to be parchment. The imagery suggests flight which links the opening sequence to the next, that of the lovers flying over the desert. Only later, after the discovery of the Cave of Swimmers, do we know that this is Katherine's hand, painting examples of the ancient figures on the cave's walls. This image subtly dissolves into a stylized, undulating pattern like softly folded material. The swimmer fades into shadowy superimposition, gradually transforming into another shadow, that of a tiny toy-like plane as it moves across what we now recognize as sand dunes, the camera panning up above the cockpit, giving us a view of two figures. This sequence establishes one of the film's major visual echoes and locates the lovers within this register of beautiful swimmers, exotic desert places, sensuous curves, and flight. Cinematically the mysterious, undulating images and unknown locale exist prior to our knowledge of what we might term, for the sake of simplicity, the "realistic" or "historical" register in the film signified by gun fire.

The plane, at first clearly dwarfed by the vast and feminized desert, now fully enters the historical frame as screaming German voices break the airy idyll and violent blasts of anti-aircraft fire interrupt the calm suspension of the plane's movement. These two separate images, the first visual and oriental, the second aural and occidental, converge through the unwitting agency of the couple in the plane. Only later do we learn that Katherine, one of the plane's occupants, is already dead. The remainder of the film will explain for us how she and its other occupant, Almasy, arrived at the convergence of the archaic calm of the desert and the insistent violence of contemporary Europe, here shatteringly dramatized by the plane's fiery explosion. Almasy's body, burned beyond recognition, survives the plane's explosion to become, ironically, the site for multiple national and moral misrecognitions of, and in, that Europe. A double irony we don't believe the film intends is that the cartographer Almasy achieves in the emblematic wreckage of his own body one of his greatest desires, a world without recognizable, national borders. Reduced to dust and voice, or "toast" as he quips to the officer in the Italian field hospital, his body signifies, on one level, the death throes of an older European, patrician imperial attitude. Similarly Almasy's "amnesia" allows him to resist his caretakers' various desires to read him, to contain him within an identifiable European discourse with an identifiable role in the European war that has led them all to this place. His determination to transcend nationalist borders in the midst of a nationalist war motivates the couple's final undoing.

The classical romance theme that develops through the film's continual flashbacks conflates imperial and sexual desire. In this desert realm the colonial impulse both masks and allows the potentially disruptive consequences of adultery and homosexuality. Here white men can transcend "legitimate" borders of nation states, heterosexuality, and marriage. In a crucial sequence, Almasy sketches a map as his Bedouin guide compares the outline of the desert cliffs to a woman's spine. This map metaphor rehearses a comparison found throughout orientalist discourse: "The geology and topography of the land, then, is explicitly sexualized to resemble the physiology of woman" (qtd. in Shohat 675). In his quest to map Katherine, Almasy will ask Madox for the name of the little hollow at the bottom of a woman's throat. In naming the spot, he writes the map. Aurally echoing the opening sequence, the conference between Almasy and the guide is interrupted by an airplane's droning engine. Clifton (Colin Firth) and Katherine are flying into the base camp for the first time. Later, just as the Muslim guides gather for one of their daily prayers, Almasy breaks from the rest of the group and struggles up the rock face he had sketched in the previous scene. He stops, raises his head, and then deliberately places his hand into an ancient stone hand-print, a perfect fit. The scene ends as he proceeds to discover the cave and its ancient drawings of swimmers while the Bedouins continue their chanting in the background. The cave has been waiting to be discovered by its true, its "natural" owner, the man whose hand fits the mold, whose key fits the lock.

After Almasy's discovery, the rest of the exploration team moves equipment into the cave. As Almasy enters, he sees his colleague, Bermann, comforting a young Muslim guide who has bumped his head on the stone walls. Soon after, in a ride back to base camp, Bermann engages in a sexual flirtation with the guide who is perched, like a monkey or a bird, atop the jeep they are driving. Bermann turns to Almasy and asks, "How do you explain to someone who has never been here feelings […] which seem quite normal?" And just as the Count answers, "I don't know," the young man flies off the roof into the sand as the jeep careens out of control and crashes. This calamity provides the occasion for the next calamity, the launching of the affair between Katherine and Almasy.

Minghella's creation of this entire sequence refigures orientalist clichés of the most pernicious sort—the exotic desert provides yet again a space of unconstrained social, libidinal, and sexual freedom. Only here can Bermann engage in his homoerotic desires, only here may Katherine and the Count begin an affair that defies the boundaries of "civilized" Europe. For the young Bedouin's body, Katherine's body, and the Cave of Swimmers constitute prenational bodies, entities ultimately incapable of resisting European invasion. While Minghella's text clearly posits an equivalency between interracial homosexual desire and illicit heterosexual desire, only Katherine will be sacrificed for such desire.

The Cave of Swimmers (the Gilf Kebir), which will become Katherine's death chamber, represents the film's preeminent symbol of archaic time. Now devoid of the water the name Gilf Kebir invokes, the walls are peopled by swimming figures, suggesting that sometime in the remote past even this desert space was fluid and life-giving. That Katherine dies here, quite literally killed by her husband as he crashes his plane just outside the Cave of Swimmers, completes the identification between Almasy's two quests: to map the desert and to map her body. The opening flight over the desert becomes, in retrospect, not only a funeral cortege for Katherine but for the entire post-Enlightenment project to possess the other. Insofar as Katherine, with her continual desire for water—the green gardens of England—is aligned with the swimmers she paints, Almasy's quest for her is a quest for a life which cannot be supported in the present. Archaic life-present death. Romance traditionally posits this equivalency, for their love in its impossibility is already an anachronism. It can no more survive than Bermann's attachment to the young guide can survive outside the desert, or the gentlemen of the International Sand Club can survive the devastation of World War II. Aspiring to join the nomadic world of their Bedouin guides, the Europeans gathered on this quest long to reenact a pre-national, protohistorical moment of discovery, yet every space they enter insists not only that such desire can never be fulfilled, but that the final victim of their quest will be the very persons/places they wish to map.

Occidental Time, Historical Romance, Modernist Bodies

The fiery explosion of Katherine and Almasy's plane which initiated the retrospective narrative is intercut with the film's narrative present, Italy, 1944, and Hana's (Juliette Binoche) experience of the war. Here too the setting exhibits a kind of exoticism, redolent of the past, but it is European and medieval rather than archaic and mythical. The bombed-out monastery that Hana chooses as "her" place in which to watch over the English patient suggests Gothic overtones, alludes to a world of sacred books and knights, painted gardens now exposed to the elements. In other words, this is a classic and "tame" war-torn Europe, its familiar tourist territory established through long-shots of the monastery's Renaissance architecture. And it is in this familiar albeit damaged space that Minghella attempts to script a romance in contrast to Almasy's obsessive desire for Katherine. Despite Minghella's reduction of their presence in the movie, Kip and Hana, as a couple, reflect the novel's evocation of an utterly different, one might even say, contemporary relationship, one based on mutual recognition and awareness of difference, and an evolving realization of the other as an object of desire. The film retains Kip's rescue of Hana from the wired piano, the mined garden, and her insistence on helping him dismantle it. She has hacked off her hair in slapdash fashion while Kip carefully maintains his traditional, long hair bound up in a turban. Hana admires the beauty of his undone hair as she watches him wash it outside in the garden. She goes to his bed; he does not go to hers. However, in the chapel scene, so radically revised and expanded from the novel it may be called "original," Minghella conveys the delicacy of their relationship and its differences from Katherine's and the Count's. While it echoes the Cave of Swimmers in terms of a darkened, interior space, it also puts Kip in the role of guide as he orchestrates the logistics for the purpose of surprise and pleasure. When Kip hoists Hana up into the nave of the chapel to observe the remains of western culture's art, the frescoes lit by flares, Hana becomes the living swimmer/flyer rocking back and forth on the pulley device he anchors. She sees the art because of the flare's controlled fire, and the entire event becomes his gift to her which she accepts openly, joyfully.

However, the film ends by reinserting Hana and Kip into the narrative conventions of western romance, thus undoing the contrast between the two couples that it had set up and developed in the first half. Once again this emphasizes Minghella's decided move away from the novel's central perspective. Two scenes illustrate this point dramatically. The first locates Kip's motivations for leaving the monastery within his loyalty to the Allied project and western individualist ideology, not, as in the novel, with his sudden and complete recognition of the western racism in which he has been complicit. In the film, he breaks from Hana and their life at the monastery after the bomb they hear explode in the local village kills Hardy, his sergeant and partner. Kip, a Sikh, colonial subject, and lieutenant in the British Army, functions throughout the film as a bomb disposal expert; his job is to undo the arbitrary destructiveness of the Allied and Fascist forces. Despite his incredible expertise, he is powerless to save Hardy who, in celebrating the European war's end, has drunkenly climbed to the top of a statue. At the moment of the explosion, Kip is celebrating with Hana; they are clearly in love; they are dancing, and he is too caught up in his own life to care deeply enough about his English friend. Although Kip's departure from Hana and the monastery occurs as a consequence of orders to ship out, his emotional estrangement from Hana cannot be separated from his guilty recognition of what he sees as his own self-absorption. Hardy's death registers as Kip's personal failure; he must leave Hana in order to redeem himself for having failed to save Hardy.

Minghella's creation of this sequence functions as the film's preeminent example of historical displacement. As Walter Murch indicates (we hope naively), "the film just didn't seem to want to accommodate [the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki]; Hiroshima intruded as an extraneous political event […]" (Katz 138). For those of us familiar with the novel and with the material events themselves, such displacement posits, perhaps unwittingly, a version of filmic essentialism in which film and romance are "naturally" equivalent and political critiques of western adventurism are dismissed on ostensibly aesthetic, apolitical grounds. Thus Ondaatje's insistence on the horror of atomic warfare through Kip's recognition of western imperial racism and his decision to find a home among the world of his father and brother are disavowed. Instead, once again the film substitutes passion for history; in this case personal guilt is borne, not by the westerners who planted the land mines that killed Hardy, but by the East Indian man who has spent the war defusing such bombs. While Kip's despair over Hardy's death strikes the audience as touching and tragic, Minghella's exploitation of their homosocial bond is inflected by the lost-buddy motif found in every war movie every made. Thus, unlike Bermann's flirtation with the Bedouin youth, Kip's attachment to Hardy is coded within the conventions of heterosexual romance, the "Good War" narrative contextualized as it always is within the tropes of personal sacrifice and national honor.

The film's final scenes complete the undoing of the early contrast between the two couples, continuing to silence the powerful transformation Kip undergoes in the novel. Rather than projecting the narrative forward into the potentially new world, one in which Kip can be at home in India and find productive life-affirming work as a physician-healer-father, the film loses sight of Kip as he roars away from the monastery on his motorcycle. In the last scene, Hana and Caravaggio also abandon the monastery by climbing into a waiting truck, the camera zooming in on Hana as she turns to smile wistfully at a young girl seated beside her. They are returning home to Toronto. Just prior to this scene, however, a clear conflation between Hana and Katherine occurs as Hana reads Katherine's last letter to Almasy, pasted into the back of his beloved copy of Herodotus's Histories. Hana's voice dissolves into Katherine's, Hana's image flickers into Katherine's. Visually and aurally Hana reenacts the ending of the obsessive romance, speaking Katherine's dying words for Almasy: "[W]e are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps by powerful men." Minghella's choice here suggests that, despite the differences in her relationship to Kip, Hana is in some way the inheritor of Katherine's romantic destiny.

Although Hana's departure suggests great confidence and self-possession, the film's layered editing—Katherine/Hana/young girl—reaffirms passion even as its own logic has attempted to do something else. For after Hana's smile, her acknowledgment of the younger generation and the camera's momentary look at the possible future, the film cuts from her face back to the initial image of the lovers in the plane flying across the desert and then cuts back to Hana's face and the sun through the trees, the end. The future, as such, is replaced by the past, by an image of endless flight over endless desert over endless time; in short, the romantic nationalism embodied through Katherine and Almasy's affair is here resuscitated and reaffirmed. This image constitutes Hana's consciousness, what she carries with her as she leaves. Doomed romance triumphs and the triangulation of the three women suggests their essential similarities, still Woman above all, whose project is romance, not to be disrupted by the exigencies of history, racism, or atomic bombs.

Through its focus on the romance of Almasy and Katherine, the film continuously reasserts the clichéd opposition between the idealized, primordial space of the desert with its unmapped terrain and mysterious peoples; and the realistic, industrial west with its gunfire and planes, its noisy and destructive invaders of that ahistorical realm. In the midst of World War II, Almasy attempts to map a middle ground between the oriental and occidental. But his desire, this space he longs for, is without foundation. He and Katherine have no place to land. For Minghella, and for those who find nostalgia more seductive than history, this irony and their tragedy are more than sufficient for a film. Ondaatje's novel, however, chooses to do more; it disrupts representations of the desert and of Europe from its opening chapters; the Arabs are already part of an ancient history and culture; they live in the present and tend to the downed Almasy not out of selfless generosity (read: "noble savage") but for his knowledge of guns; colonizers such as Almasy and his friends are part of the cultures that drop atomic bombs on people of color. And Kip, far from remaining enthralled in western politics, returns home to India.

Source: Susan E. Hawkins and Susan Danielson, "The Patients of Empire," in Literature Interpretation Theory, Vol. 13, 2002, pp. 139-53.

Mark A. R. Kemp

In the following essay excerpt, Kemp examines "Almasy's allegorical role as functionary of imperial Europe relative to Kip's 'Oriental'" in The English Patient.

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Source: Mark A. R. Kemp, "Italy and the Ruins of Western Civilization: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient," in Nemla Italian Studies, Vol. XXI, 1997, pp. 131-55.

Stephen Scobie

In the following essay, Scobie explores poetic imagery in The English Patient and how Ondaatje uses it to manifest the themes of fire and desire.

I: A Man Falls, Burning, from the Sky

This image—arresting, violent, beautiful—occurs towards the beginning of Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient. For Ondaatje himself, quite literally, it was this image that began the novel. He has explained in an interview, "I usually begin books in a dream-like—no, that sounds a little esoteric. But I had this little fragment of a guy who had crashed in the desert. I didn't know who he was, or anything" ("In the Skin" 69).

It is typical of Ondaatje that he would begin his book with an image, rather than a character or a plot; his sensibility as a writer is grounded in poetry, and all his "novels" may be described as poetic novels. As his international reputation has grown, and as reviewers in Britain and the United States have attempted to introduce his previous work to their readers, even The Collected Works of Billy the Kid has been described as a novel. That is a very loose description, but it is symptomatic of the way in which Ondaatje's approach to narrative by way of the image has been assimilated, sometimes misleadingly, into more conventional categories. Billy the Kid is in fact a mixture of genres—prose narrative, lyric poem, collage text, and illustrated text—but it is perhaps best summed up by its seldom quoted subtitle, Left Handed Poems. Poems, that is, that come to you in a devious manner, like the reversed photographic negative that first gave rise to the legend that Billy the Kid was a left-handed gun. A gunman's poems; sinister.

Often, then, a critical response to Ondaatje's novels will have to adopt the techniques of talking about poetry as much as, if not more than, the techniques of talking about fiction. An examination of patterns of image, symbol, and metaphor will lead the reader into the book as readily as a more conventional investigation of characterization or plot. Over the years, Ondaatje has moved closer to the stance of a traditional novelist, and The English Patient is perhaps his most accomplished novel so far, but it is still an image that engenders and dominates the book.

This image, of a burning man falling into the desert, has all kinds of symbolic or mythological resonances (Lucifer, for instance, falling into hell—and the third page of Ondaatje's novel does cite the Miltonic phrase "the war in heaven"), but it also poses obvious questions of narrative. "I didn't know who he was," Ondaatje confesses, so the business of the novel becomes the telling of a story to explain who he was. How did he get there? Why was he burning? What happened next?

So a story begins, and unwinds compellingly before us; and as Ondaatje slowly, deviously circles the plot back towards its opening/climactic image, the moment when a man falls burning from the sky, the narrative grips us with a kind of horrified awe. At the same time, a series of related images—of fire, scars, mutilated hands, bombs, warfare and healing, desert esoterica—plays itself out with the precision of an extended poem. And out of these two matrices, of plot and image, emerges also a cast of four characters, each of them a strongly drawn individual, yet each of them also balancing, mirroring, and complementing the others, so that their total seems greater than the sum of their parts. These four characters together form another image: a constellation, perhaps, of the four elements. But especially fire.

II: "The Streets of Asia Full of Fire"

Fire dominates the novel, right from the English patient's first account of his crash: "I fell burning into the desert…. I flew down and the sand itself caught fire. [The Bedouin] saw me stand up naked out of it. The leather helmet on my head in flames." A later revisiting of the same scene provides an even more vivid image: "Then his legs are free of everything, and he is in the air, bright, not knowing why he is bright until he realizes he is on fire." (The intertextual echo is, surely, the line from Thomas Nashe: "Brightness falls from the air" [283]).

But not only the English patient is haunted by fire. The nurse Hana is devoted to caring for him at least in part because, as we learn only late in the novel, her own father died of burns: "So burned the buttons of his shirt were part of his skin, part of his dear chest." The thief Caravaggio, escaping his torturers, rests for a moment on a bridge, but the bridge explodes. "Light was pouring into the river. He swam up to the surface, parts of which were on fire." Caravaggio's ascent through burning water thus parallels and inverts the English patient's fall through burning air. The mined bridge links Caravaggio to the fourth character, Kip, whose whole element is fire: he works as a sapper, defusing bombs, in daily and imminent danger of going up in flames. Another passage describes one of Kip's colleagues who "had been working in a shaft with frozen oxygen and the whole pit had suddenly burst into flames. They hauled him out fast, already unconscious in his harness." Thus the image pattern extends: a burning man rising from the ground to meet the burning man who falls from the sky. And the man who swims to the surface of a burning river. And the man who dies of burns in a dovecote….

The insistence on fire may be followed in two directions: the political and the personal. The English Patient is vitally concerned with the interaction between private identity public events, and with the inescapable intrusions of geopolitical forces into people's lives. The Italian villa in which the four characters gather is (or they try to make it be) a refuge from history, a place where the war is over. But the war is not over; and the observant reader will realize that the date of the action is moving inexorably closer to August 1945, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Some critics have seen the sudden reference to Hiroshima at the end of the novel, and Kip's violent reaction to it, as clumsily handled: too abrupt, too unprepared for, too simplistic in its judgement that "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." (At a purely realistic level, it certainly seems implausible that any contemporary radio broadcast could provide Kip with enough details for him to react, as he does, with the full horror of a post-nuclear sensibility; but everything about the novel has surely indicated to the intelligent reader that the logic of the imagery will take precedence over any strict adherence to the conventions of realism.)

This criticism has been especially strong in the United States. As I indicated in my first endnote, an earlier version of this essay appeared in The World and I, a monthly magazine put out by the Washington Times. Each month, its book section features one text, publishing extensive extracts and three or four review articles; in February 1993, the featured book was The English Patient. This choice does not seem to have gone down well with the "Editor and Publisher" of The World and I, Morton A. Kaplan, who devoted his editorial to a bitter attack on Ondaatje's novel, principally on the grounds that it gives a historically inaccurate account of what Kaplan argues was the entirely justifiable decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima ("War often forces cruel choices," and so on):

Fine writers such as Mark Twain or Herman Melville portrayed serious faults in society and character without stooping to hatred of their own society. Self-hatred is not a constructive emotion. And it is not fine or even good or acceptable literature to pander to this nonsense. That the author has undeniable talent only makes the perversion of those talents more deplorable. (17)

The tone of outrage here would be comic if it were not so "deplorable." The line about "hatred of their own society" suggests that Ondaatje is some kind of race traitor; the impulse to censorship is barely held in check in the notion that some forms of literature are not "acceptable"; the idea that literature should express only "constructive" emotions is equally disturbing; and the proposition that Mark Twain is a more historically accurate writer than Michael Ondaatje is simply ludicrous. (One wonders what Mr. Kaplan makes of that paragon of historical accuracy, William Shakespeare.)

But what gives Kaplan's rant its special piquancy is the fact that it is entitled, without even the benefit of quotation marks, "The English Patient." Richard Van Oort has commented on this bland appropriation:

Kaplan becomes a player on a stage that Ondaatje's novel has already pre-inscribed, has already predicted. No doubt Kaplan feels he is a reader of Ondaatje's novel, but it seems to me that the novel reads Kaplan, indeed, reads us all, in the sense that it invites us to master its narrative while at the same time confounding our attempt to master it…. Kaplan is not so much the victorious critic and interpreter of Ondaatje's failed novel, but the victim, "the patient" par excellence…. The production of narrative implies a teller and a listener. In traditional psychoanalytic terms, the patient is the teller of a faulty narrative, which the analyst, the listener, must interpret to produce the correct, intelligible, consistent, truthful narrative. Clearly, this is the role Kaplan sees himself in: the sane, intelligent, objective analyst filling in the unfortunate gaps in the English Patient's failed and faulty narrative. But does it not seem strange that a novel that foregrounds the act of narrative representation as a dialogical construct, as dependent upon the context of its telling, should be reprimanded in this manner for neglecting to represent the facts, for failing to represent the one and only true narrative?

Van Oort's comments are relevant not only to the question of the novel's historical accuracy or responsibility, but also to a wider question—to which I shall return in my third and fourth sections—of the reading of the English patient (and of The English Patient). For the moment, however, I would just like to emphasize his point that Kaplan's reaction, in its naïve literalism, again assumes that the book ought to be approached as a realistic novel rather than as a poetic narrative in which, as I said earlier, the logic of the imagery takes precedence over the logic of characterization. It is this logic of imagery that I see right from the start of the novel. So my reaction to the charge that the Hiroshima theme is introduced clumsily or abruptly is twofold: first, I believe that it is pre-pared for, if only subliminally, both by the progression of the dates and by the pervasive imagery of fire; and, second, I feel that it has to be abrupt, it has to have the quality of an intrusion, to shatter the sanctuary the novel has provided for its readers no less than the villa for the characters.

The imagery of fire culminates in Kip's horrific vision: "he sees the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them, the shadow of humans suddenly in the air. This tremor of Western wisdom." This image echoes all the way back to the very first sentences of the novel, where Hana senses "a buckle of noise in the air." The picture of Hana's dead father, with the buttons of his shirt burned into his chest, is reminiscent of photographs of the victims of Hiroshima. Immediately before Kip hears the news, he is remembering the story of how the electrical system of Naples had been mined, so that "When power was turned on, the city would dissolve in flames." If the English patient is indeed, in one symbolic association, Lucifer, the falling angel expelled from heaven, then the brightness that falls from the air has always been the hanging fire of nuclear apocalypse.

III: "I Wanted to Erase My Name"

But the imagery of fire also extends in more personal directions. As the English patient himself proclaims, in a passage Hana reads from his diary, "the heart is an organ of fire." Thus, the imagery of fire extends to the intricate patterns of personal relationships presented in the novel. Love, too, burns and consumes; love, too, falls, bright, from the sky.

All of the characters in The English Patient are bound together by love and loss, by absence and desire. At the centre of the pattern, controlling it by her terrible absence, is Katharine Clifton, whose death forms the awful secret of the English patient's memory, and of the novel's plot. It is in their affair, presented in a series of short, intense, almost hallucinatory scenes, that the fire of the heart burns brightest. But her death becomes a literal fire, which burns away every trace of her lover's identity, leaving him as an anonymous patient in an English hospital. This anonymity, this willed (or faked) loss of identity, fulfils what had already been his conscious desire:

Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Sbaduf. I didn't want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert. Still, some wanted their mark there…. Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations. Then Bauchan outdid him, having a type of sand dune named after him. But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from.

The "mark" of the name is like an inscription on the blank page of the desert—or like a scar on the blank page of the body. So the English patient's desire to erase his name leaves him indeed name-less, professing ignorance of his own identity, and with his body reduced by fire to one all-encompassing scar. It is an ironic and bitter reversal of figure and ground: leaving no mark or scar upon the desert, he has become all scar, all mark. And is thus himself unreadable.

Or else, perhaps, multiply readable. As Van Oort comments,

The English patient is at once signified and signifier: he is, on the one hand, a burnt body, devoid of demarcation, a black hole completely unreadable; but for that very reason he becomes a signifier infinitely interpretable, an anonymous text to be read….

The patient's anonymity, and his (un)readability, make him the perfect blank screen onto which the other characters can project their own devious passions. Patient, passive, he receives the identities they desire him to have. He is the English patient: the subject, that is, of a language, of a discipline. (This book will be studied, patiently, by the patients of English, the academic students of English.)

Katharine's death leaves an absence in him too, an absence that he refuses to fill by reclaiming any name. So Hana, obsessively nursing him as her only patient, sees him as the image of every man who has died under her care in the course of the war; and, most obviously, she sees him as Patrick, her father, dying of burns. Kip, who insists (against Caravaggio's mounting body of evidence) that the patient is in fact English, also sees him, by virtue of his Englishness, as a dead father. For Kip, the patient represents Lord Suffolk, his patron in the bomb-disposal squad, who also died in a moment of fire. And, at a wider level of political allegory, the English patient and Lord Suffolk (who eats Kipling biscuits) both stand for the paternal relation of England to India, the imperialist power celebrated in Rudyard Kipling's Kim and rejected here by Kip.

More complex is Caravaggio's projection of desire onto the English patient. Caravaggio is a thief, but an unorthodox one, often distracted by the personal idiosyncracies of the people he is robbing. In a sense, he steals not so much their property as their identities. (In the earlier novel In the Skin of a Lion, there is a strangely evocative scene in which Caravaggio enters a house at night only to watch a woman reading by lamplight. The scene is duplicated by his first sight of Hana in The English Patient.) Working as a spy in the war, he steals and creates identities. "[H]e 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." It is this desire, for the theft of identity, that Caravaggio now turns on the English patient. Feeding him morphine in stronger and stronger doses, Caravaggio elicits a confession in which the English patient becomes the central figure in one of Caravaggio's spy dramas.

At this point, Ondaatje's narrative becomes complicit with Caravaggio's desire. Whether Caravaggio's version of the English patient's identity is true or not scarcely matters, but what does matter is the fact that the story he tells satisfies, precisely, the need for story. It answers the questions implied by Ondaatje when he remarks, "I didn't know who he was, or anything." So, even as the English patient slips into talking about himself in the third person, the supposedly authoritative third-person narrative of the novel begins to refer to him by the name, Almásy, that Caravaggio has ascribed to him. The English patient becomes the character that both Caravaggio and Ondaatje will him to be—indeed, insofar as Almásy goes along with Caravaggio's decoding, he becomes also the character that he wills himself to be. No less than the other characters, Almásy projects a fiction of identity onto the blank screen of his own burned body.

As I stated earlier, there is a further, political dimension to this projection of identities onto the English patient. It is Kip, most of all, who wants the English patient to be English—so that he can project onto him all the ambivalences of his response to the imperial centre, both his colonial emulation of the English master (Lord Suffolk) and his postcolonial rejection of the English warmonger (complicit in the bombing of Hiroshima). But as Ondaatje allows his narrative to align itself with Caravaggio's version, it also undermines any such easy postcolonial reading. The English patient may represent the centre of Empire, but as a patient he is no longer an active force, and as Almásy he is no longer even English. Englishness is thus written out of the novel; always already, the centre is empty. Always already, there is only the post-.

IV: Cradled within the Text

In this pattern of personal relationships, then, there is a recurrent theme of deferral or substitution. Each character deflects his or her true desire through the image of another, and the English patient especially—passive, nameless—becomes their screen. But in his story, too, in the tragic memory of his affair with Katharine Clifton, there is a similar displacement and deferral. He first falls in love with Katharine when he hears her read aloud the story of Candaules and Gyges.

Candaules was an ancient king who was so proud of his wife's beauty that he did not believe that any other man could even imagine how beautiful she was. So Candaules forces his friend Gyges to view her naked, as if his own belief in her beauty could only be authenticated at one remove, by another man's testimony. But the queen sees Gyges in his hiding place, and later tells him that he must either kill Candaules or else die himself. Gyges does kill Candaules, marries the most beautiful woman, and becomes a great king.

As Katharine reads the story, she allows the clear implication that she is the queen, her husband, Geoffrey, is Candaules, and the English patient must play the role of Gyges. But the novel allows for other parallels too. It is Geoffrey, rather than the English patient, who attempts to kill his rival; and it is Caravaggio who most often plays the role of spy, watching women from secret places. The characters of the ancient story shift around, according to the characters' desires. One narrative projects itself onto others. A preexisting story affects the course of stories still in progress. As the English patient (deep in his morphine dream) explains it to Caravaggio:

So the king is killed. A New Age begins. There are poems written about Gyges in iambic trimeters. He was the first of the barbarians to dedicate objects at Delphi. He reigned as King of Lydia for twenty-eight years, but we still remember him as only a cog in an unusual love story.

[Katharine] stopped reading and looked up. Out of the quicksand. She was evolving. So power changed hands. Meanwhile, with the help of an anecdote, I fell in love.

Words, Caravaggio. They have power.

Katharine reads the story of Gyges and Candaules out of a copy of Herodotus's The Histories. It is a book that the English patient has carried with him for years, and he not only reads it, he writes in it. "It is the book he brought with him through the fire—a [book] that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations—so they all are cradled within the text of Herodotus." This image may be read as a dramatization, on Ondaatje's part, of the ideas that critical theorists would designate as "supplementarity" or "intertextuality."

As it is set out by Jacques Derrida, the "supplement" stands in a paradoxical relationship to its "original." It presupposes both that the original is complete in itself, a finished work to which any addition must come from the outside, as a supplement; and, simultaneously, that the original is incomplete, that it contains within itself an emptiness or lack that the supplement comes to fill. For the English patient, Herodotus's The Histories is both complete (the act of cutting and pasting in pages from other books foregrounds itself as the addition of something extraneous) and incomplete (what he writes into the text responds to a lack, and a demand, that the text already exhibits). In thus supplementing the text of Herodotus, the English patient is duplicating the supplementary nature of the original; he quotes Herodotus as saying, "This history of mine … has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument." As Derrida phrases it, "One wishes to go back from the supplement to the source: one must recognize that there is a supplement at the source" (304).

The idea of intertextuality has been one of the mainstays of recent literary theory. Far more than simply influence or allusion, intertextuality is both an active interaction between texts and the sense that the possibility of such interaction is the precondition for the very existence of a text. In The English Patient, Ondaatje translates this theoretical concept into literal images. The English patient writes his own observations into the blank spaces of Herodotus's pages. Hana does the same, for books are "half her world"; she pulls down volumes at random from the library shelves and makes notes about the men who share her life.

She opens The Last of the Mohicans to the blank page at the back and begins to write in it.

There is a man named Caravaggio, a friend of my father's. I have always loved him….

She closes the book and then walks down into the library and conceals it in one of the high shelves.

Cradled within the text, Hana confesses and hides what she cannot declare. Cradled within the text of Herodotus, the English patient falls in love with Katharine Clifton. Cradled within the text, Michael Ondaatje's novel quotes unceasingly: Kim, The Last of the Mohicans, The Charterhouse of Parma, John Milton, Christopher Smart, Anne Wilkinson. Cradled within the text, books (like everything else) become weapons. Caravaggio remembers a German spy who used Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca as a codebook with which to report on English troop movements. For Kip, booby-trap bombs can be found anywhere: in the metronome of a piano, in "the spines of books." Kip reads the bombs he defuses as he would a particularly difficult, intricate (and dangerous) text.

Words have power; words are dangerous. A book is what you take with you through the fire.

V: Punching the Glass

It is characteristic of Ondaatje that he should thus celebrate the power of words (the lover's power, the poet's power) in images that simultaneously suggest their destructive potential. In previous novels and poems, he has shown his fascination for the fine and uneasy balance between creation and destruction, between the book as revelation and the book as booby-trap bomb, blowing off the unwary reader's hands. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid explores the parallel between the artist and the outlaw, and the "works" are both poems and killings. Coming through Slaughter portrays a musician who goes mad at the height of a parade, and collapses into silence. Ondaatje is fascinated by these figures, though in his poems he also distinguishes himself from them, holds them at arm's length:

   Why do I love most
   among my heroes those
   who sail to that perfect edge
   where there is no social fuel
   Release of sandbags
   to understand their altitude—("White Dwarfs" 70)

As a writer, Ondaatje is drawn to the moment when balance collapses, the moment when his characters lose their fine control; but of course he himself, in the precision of his work, always maintains his own balance, his own control.

In many of these works there is a recurring image of damaged hands. For both Billy (the gunfighter) and Buddy (the cornet player), the hands are the vehicle of artistic work. Buddy dreams of smashing his hand into glass, of raising his wrist into the path of a circling overhead fan, of crawling over barbed wire. At the moment of his death, Billy's hand smashes through a window and his arm goes "manic." The moment the hand goes through the glass is, in Ondaatje's imagery, the moment the self-destructive artist most fully declares himself, both as artist and as victim—victim of the violence he evokes in those around him, and victim also of the violence within himself, within his own art.

Though none of the characters in The English Patient is explicitly an artist, they all share the same fascination with esoteric knowledge and detailed manual skills. And the same imagery recurs. The thief Caravaggio, dependent on his hands for his breaking-and-entering skills, loses both his thumbs, and the mutilation reduces him to a state of helplessness akin to Buddy Bolden's silence. The injuries from which Katharine dies include a broken wrist. As his plane crashes, the English patient "thrusts his hands up against the cockpit glass…. Begins punching the glass, cracking it, finally breaking it, and the oil and the fire slop and spin everywhere." Having broken the glass, he falls, burning, from the sky.

But there is also, in this novel, healing. While Caravaggio and the English patient remain lost, locked in their world of morphine and pain, Hana and Kip slowly, tentatively, reach beyond the war. Near the end of the novel, there is an image of Hana, "her hands in her pockets now, the way Kip loved to see her walk. So relaxed, as if she had put her arms away for the night, now in simple armless movement." But this image is benign in comparison to Caravaggio's ruined hands or Katharine's broken wrist: Hana's hands are simply put away for the night. In the morning they will again be a nurse's hands, moving over the patient's burned body.

Similarly, for Kip, there is a moment when, defusing a bomb, he realizes that "If he were wrong, the small explosion would take off his hand." But the explosion does not come for Kip, at least not in this form, and our final image of him is one that combines his manual dexterity with an instinctive, unspoken connection between himself and Hana, persisting across years of silence and continents of separation. Hana is in Canada, a figure unknown now even to her author; Kip is in India, working as a doctor, and is a husband and father.

And so Hana moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.

Left-handed catch. Left-handed poems. A novel that comes from the left hand of history, out of the sinister heart of fire.

Source: Stephen Scobie, "The Reading Lesson: Michael Ondaatje and the Patients of Desire," in Essays on Canadian Writing, Vol. 53, Summer 1994, pp. 92-106.

Sources

Bemrose, John, Review of The English Patient, in Maclean, Vol. 105, No. 42, October 19, 1992, p. 71.

Novak, Amy, "Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer 2004, pp. 206-32.

Ondaatje, Michael, The English Patient, Knopf, 1992.

Further Reading

Herodotus, The Histories, Oxford University Press, 1998.

In The English Patient, the title character's only possession is a copy of The Histories by Herodotus. Herodotus, who lived during the 5th century b.c., is widely regarded as the father of the study of history. The Histories records the customs and practices of peoples of what is today known as the Middle East; the book also covers various wars between the Greeks and Persians.

Keegan, John, The Second World War, Penguin Books, 1990.

A chronology of World War II, this one-volume history also includes chapters specifically devoted to the details of such components as weapons production and espionage.

Kipling, Rudyard, Kim, W.W. Norton, 2002.

First published in 1901, Kim is the British author Rudyard Kipling's masterpiece novel. Set in British colonial India, it is the story of an Indian-born British boy who lives among the native people of India and becomes a follower of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Ondaatje makes numerous references directly to this novel in The English Patient.

Said, Edward, The Edward Said Reader, edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, Vintage Books, 2000.

Edward Said was one of the most influential figures in the field of post-colonial studies, especially pioneering the study of the effect of colonialism on the reading and writing of literature. The English Patient, especially through the character of Kip, broaches many of the themes of identity that post-colonial studies examine: this collection is a worthy introduction to Said's works on the subject.