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The English Patient
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The English Patient
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The English Patient begins in April 1945 in the Villa San Girolamo, a nunnery-turned-hospital located 20 miles north of Florence, in Tuscany. There, at the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to two unnamed characters: "the burned man" (subsequently "the English patient"), and the nurse who has stayed to care for him, though the villa has been nearly destroyed by a mortar shell attack and everyone else has moved on (the war in Europe has just ended, with the Germans retreating up the Italian countryside). The English patient is struggling to survive life-threatening burns sustained during a plane crash in Egypt's Western Desert. The nurse is battling shell-shock and grieving the recent death of her father, a Canadian soldier in France. (Readers familiar with Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion may be surprised to discover that the nurse, whose name we don't learn for several chapters, is Hana, daughter of Patrick Lewis and Alice Gull, and stepdaughter of radio actress Clara Dickens. Now twenty years old, Hana trained as a nurse at Women's College Hospital in Toronto before travelling overseas in 1943 during the Sicilian invasion.) Hana and the English patient are soon joined at the villa by David Caravaggio ("the man with bandaged hands"), 45, whom Hana and her father knew in Toronto before the war (Caravaggio, too, was first introduced as a character in Skin of a Lion), and by Kirpal "Kip" Singh, a Sikh serving as a sapper in the British army, who has come to defuse remaining German mines in the area. The story in The English Patient is told from the points of view of each of these characters (Hana, the English patient, Caravaggio and Kip), in a patchwork of recollections which move back and forth in time from the spring of 1945 at the Villa San Girolamo, to exploration of the Western Desert by members of the Royal Geographic Society in the early 1930s, to the Gilf Kebir in 1942, to the Westbury white horse in 1940. In a similar vein, the narrative shifts at intervals from the first person to third person, a device which serves -- among other things -- to heighten confusion as to the true identity of the English patient. The result is a fairly disorienting read, and despite my efforts to read attentively, I often felt frustrated by my inability to track what was going on. The English Patient is beautifully written, and its exploration of the impact of WWII on a diverse group of individuals makes a significant contribution to the body of literature set in this era. But reading it was hard work -- not my favourite way to experience a novel. Barnes & Noble has online study notes for The English Patient here. |
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