Book Review: The English Patient

There is only one story in this book. A story of how war damages people and how they survive. Four people come together in an Italian villa just as World War II has ended. The English patient who was burned beyond recognition. His real name is a mystery throughout novel. He is the main narrator in a morphine filled haze. Hana, a young woman, who had been a nurse in field hospitals full of the never ending dead, dying and injured, feeds him and cares for him, gives him the morphine to ease the pain of his scarred burns. From Toronto, she goes through each day in the routines she learned in this broken land, and misses home. The villa they were in had been a field hospital. 

All patients and staff left to a better location but Hana and the English patient refused to leave. Caravaggio, also Canadian and an old friend of Hana’s father, arrived after he learned of Hana’s whereabouts. He had been a thief and pickpocket before the war and became part of the secret spy world. Tortured and both thumbs removed, he was also addicted to morphine. The fourth person in this single story was Kirpal Singh, nicknamed Kip as a joke, part of a team of sappers. Sappers that defused the thousands of bombs that had been laid by the Germans during the war and on their retreat. 

So each story within the single story of devastation and always potential death, is woven into the other until they become their own unit. But never really together in their minds and hearts. The English patient takes us on many treks through the desert and an impatient love he had in that lost time. Kip’s job doesn’t stop. Michael Ondaatje describes the meticulous, focussed actions of this young man. How and where he learned about bomb defusing. The daily danger that he puts out of his mind to solve the puzzle of the next bomb. Ondaatje also describes beautiful scenes of the sharing of human touch, sometimes love making, sometimes just being together. There is much beauty in the relationships that do blossom out of that need for the human touch. There are games that they play. Hana reads books to the English patient. One belonging to him, but some from a bombed out library of books in the villa. Caravaggio does not seem to have a place in the story which may be because of the life he had always lived in shadows. Never really there, but being present. One name keeps cropping up: Almásy. A master spy that no one could catch. The end of this story comes over Kip’s radio phones. The radio phones that kept him away from the world while he worked in a pit, or in an ordinary room, to diffuse a bomb that could kill. 

Were any medical issues believable? The severe burns, the physical care that would be required, and the amount and availability of morphine. Not to my mind, but I was able to discount all of these for the sake of the story. The reality of the destruction to not just the land and homes, but to the minds and spirits of those involved in war. This single story is a beautiful metaphor of the lives of four people: The English Patient, Hana, Caravaggio and Kirpal Singh.

“A novel is a mirror walking down a road.”

~ Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Title: The English Patient

Author: Michael Ondaatje

Copyright: 1992

Publisher: Vintage Books Canada

Format: Soft Cover

Type: Novel

ISBN: o-394-28013-x

ISBN: 9780307700872 (hard cover)

ISBN: 9780676514209 (Paper back)