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Re-Visiting The English Patient

© J. M. Bridgeman

It isn't a book about Canadian history, but it is a book written by a Canadian writer about Canadian characters who are playing a role in the larger world picture. Michael Ondaatje's international award-winning novel The English Patient was adapted into an award-winning movie by British filmmaker Anthony Minghella. Although it was released in 1996 and is set in 1945, the story seems relevant today. There is a war, a very long war. It is almost over. Four characters meet in a makeshift hospital, a bombed-out Italian villa, after V-E Day. The Canadian nurse, Hana, is burned out with all the dying. Her mysterious unidentified patient is burned alive and hanging on by a thread. They are joined by Caravaggio, a wounded spy who is a thief and a friend of Hana's father from Toronto. Then the Sikh sapper Kip arrives, charged with deactivating the land mines and booby traps left by the retreating forces. Beautiful ancient works of art are bullet-pocked or toppled. Yet memories of love linger and new gardens grow in the bombed-out ruins.

The English Patient, the movie, is, for me, more easily accessible than the book, where the poetry seems to get in the way of the story. The bedazzling shimmer of language and image is distracting, keeping the reader on the page and on the surface, hiding the story in the style. The ever-shifting point of view, from character to character, from present to past to present, from Italy to Africa to England to India to Italy connected to the world by radio, is confusing. But the screenplay writer has magic in his fingers. It's as if he cracked the spine of the book, flip-flapped the pages, and up popped characters, plots, settings, and themes stitched together with a thread of logic.

I like that The English Patient is BOTH a breath-catching romance (between the Count and Katherine Clifton, between Kip and Hana) AND a war movie where the British and their allies fight the Germans in North Africa and Italy. I love the breathtaking sweep of the desert landscapes, and the desert caves painted with the red ochre images of swimmers from another time, before the seas and the sands shifted. I love that it is a story told in two times, with the horror of flashbacks that actually work, with the tinkle of the healer's glass vials signalling the shift from past to present to past. I love that the secrets of all human history and of one man's love affair are hidden in the patient's battered text of Herodotus, his "Holy Book." And that the ruins of civilization are still breathtaking in their beauty. In Minghella's adaptation, Kip rigs a swing in a ruined church and gives his lover the gift of wings, of flight, with a torch to light the past.