The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

I have a standing rule that if a book I want to read has made into a movie, I try not to see the movie until after I have read the book. That's not to say I've never seen a movie and then subsequently read the book; Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, Daniel Wallace's Big Fish, and Nick Hornby's High Fidelity come to mind. But in those cases, I had no preexisting desire to read the book; it was the quality of the movie that drew my attention to the source material.

In other cases, though, I have long delayed seeing a film in anticipation of first reading the novel. In the past year, I have made some real advances on that front, reading Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Ian McEwan's Atonement, and Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. Of the three, I have already seen Atonement, which I found to be a surprisingly effective adaptation.

Thus when I finished Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient this week, I made progress on multiple fronts. It was the 90th book I read this year, making this my most prolific year in reading yet. It was the basis for a widely acclaimed film that I put off viewing for over a decade but am now eager to see. And it won the Booker Prize, furthering my circuitous quest to read all the winners of that award.

Though The English Patient was published more than 15 years ago, and turned into a successful film just a few years later, I managed to remain ignorant about the content beyond its title character being a plane crash survivor with severe burns. So I entered the story with few preconceptions or foreknowledge of what was to come. And this is certainly the way to read a book like this; Ondaatje has made an art of the slow reveal. In the waning days of World War II, four people have been drawn together to a crumbling Italian villa. The English patient, whose identity is a mystery, and his Canadian nurse Hana are leftovers from the building's time as a military hospital. Hana refused to let her patient (or herself) be moved when the rest were relocated to safer confines, and she has been alone with him for some time:

Some nights she opened doors and slept in rooms that had walls missing. She lay on the pallet on the very edge of the room, facing the drifting landscape of stars, moving clouds, wakened by the growl of thunder and lightning. She was twenty years old and mad and unconcerned with safety during this time, having no qualms about the dangers of the possibly mined library or the thunder that startled her in the night. She was restless after the cold months, when she had been limited to dark, protected spaces. She entered rooms that had been soiled by soldiers, rooms whose furniture had been burned within them. She cleared out leaves and shit and urine and charred tables. She was living like a vagrant, while elsewhere the English patient reposed in his bed like a king.

They are eventually joined by Caravaggio, a friend of Hana's father whose skills as a thief were put to use by Allied intelligence; captured, mutilated, and released, he overheard talk of Hana's whereabouts while in another hospital and left his bed to join her. The foursome is complete upon the arrival of Kip, an Indian volunteer in the British Army whose job as a sapper has him roaming the Italian landscape in search of mines planted by retreating Germans soldiers:

At first he will not come into the house at all. He walks past on some duty or other to do with the dismantling of mines. Always courteous. A little nod of his head. Hana sees him wash at a basin of collected rainwater, placed formally on top of a sundial. The garden tap, used in previous times for the seedbeds, is now dry. She sees his shirtless brown body as he tosses water over himself like a bird using its wing. During the day she notices mostly his arms in the short-sleeved army shirt and the rifle which is always with him, even though battles seem now to be over for them.

From this point, Ondaatje uses his poet's touch to slowly unveil the stories of each of the four. The English patient's story is, of course, the most enigmatic, with hints of a love affair and wanderings in the desert unfolding as the others, particularly Caravaggio, converse with the patient. But I was particularly moved by Kip's tale, how he came to England as an outsider, despite the Indian nationalism of his older brother, how he was initially shunned as a foreigner but found a group to welcome him, only for that to end in tragedy.

These four people are linked not just by physical proximity, but a shared status as victims of trauma. Hana's work as a nurse exposed her to the extremes of death and destruction and she is still in shock over the death of her father. Caravaggio was mutilated by his captors. Kip fled to Italy to escape his own losses in Britain and constantly undergoes the stress of defusing bombs that might kill him. The English patient's physical wounds are obvious, but his psychological wounds are revealed to be equally damaging.

Their isolation in this abandoned villa heightens the awareness of their every physical movement; the lack of activity elevates the drama of their memories. The way they seek solace, distraction, and recovery in each other, within themselves, and the ways in which these attempts fail, is the heart of the book. It is an exploration of the meanings and consequences of warfare at an individual level, the lovely frailty of human bodies and human psyches and human interdependence. A book well worth your time.