The English Patient
Kelvin Ha
BRIEF FLASHES OF LIGHTNING
The English Patient won Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian novelist and poet, the 1993 Booker Prize. It has since been made into an acclaimed film starring Ralph Fiennes, and that is probably why it is being reviewed here this week. When I first picked up the novel back in 1994, I couldn't get past the first ten pages because I found it very tedious and dry reading. The novel revolves around a foursome who somehow manage to converge in an Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, and I read only up to the melancholic descriptions of the nurse Hana as she potters about the villa tending to the mortally wounded English Patient.
When I heard that the book had been made into a film, I thought "How can they make a film out of such a boring novel? It's the only book, next to Mrs. Dalloway, that can put me to sleep. Eager to find out how Hollywood could find a story in this book, I picked it up again and this time concentrated on finishing it.
After getting to the part where I stopped the last time, I started regretting ever having put the book down the first time around. It is a very rich novel, very stylistically written, about the lives of four individuals whose lives have been damaged by the war. There is the nurse, Hana, who has lost her father and lover in the war and is so immune to death that she fears she has lost the capacity to feel. She walks around the villa like an empty shell tending to the mysterious patient who has been badly burnt beyond recognition in a plane crash in the Libyan desert.
Everyone assumes he is an Englishman because of his speech and mannerisms, and it is probably his story which provides the script for the film. Then there is the former thief, Caravaggio, who has lost his thumbs during the war and cannot steal anymore. The only thing he can do is come to the villa to find Hana, his friend's daughter whom he knew back in Canada before the war, and try to reimagine himself. Stumbling upon them is the Sikh sapper, Kip, who has lost himself fighting the war in the uniform of his imperial masters. Through his interactions and affairs with them, he comes to see who he is. However, to reveal how the novel unfolds at this point would be grossly unfair to it’s potential readers who might want to pick up the novel before they see the film.
This is a novel of revelation, and just as the identity of the English patient is slowly revealed as the novel progresses, so too are the inner selves and spiritual identities of the other characters in the novels. Ondaatje writes his novel of discovery very much in the manner of Virgina Woolfe, revealing things only briefly, like "flashes of lightning." Indeed, lightning abounds in this novel, lighting up the dark and melancholic landscape for a very brief period, but long enough to reveal hints of the truth.
The truth, however, is never be fully known in this novel. Surrounding these flashes of lightning is a heavy and dreary darkness in which the characters navigate, trying to find themselves and others. It is almost as if the novel is an exploration of the way we understand things and discover the truth. People are always meeting in the dark, and the only way we can know them is through casual, occasional bumps in that darkness and through brief flashes of light. Here Ondaatje borrows from Woolfe, but in his own way, Ondaatje has written a masterpiece which I had impatiently dismissed two years ago. If only I had been more patient, I would have enjoyed this beautiful novel much earlier.
Kelvin Ha could have been a spy at one point in his life, but he was turned down because he refused to cut his hair.
Kelvin Hahas been taking flying lessons and in his free time would love to learn how the inkpot masters the dynamics of flight.
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