Re-Visiting The English Patient
The English Patient is, first of all, a major motion picture in which Canadian soldiers and Canadian nurses are there, marching "up the boot of Italy" as they did in real life (but not in any other jingoistic war movie that I can think of) along with the Sikhs and the Brits and the rest. In this war, men die and others are injured, and nurses work at keeping up their morale, and even the best succumb to post-traumatic stress. The mappers and sappers, healers and dealers are all wounded in their own ways and each is seeking a desperate balance. And the story is about THE Canadian theme of identity, of who this wounded man, this so-called "English" patient, actually is. Of how his national identity, his lack of the "proper" papers, his conflicted loyalties, handicap him during a time of war and lead both to his lover's death and to his own forced betrayal of friends and co-workers. And then there's the minor little theme of with whom we choose to fall in love and what attracts us to them. Life and love; betrayal, valour, and death. Each character at some time in the story asks the universal questions: Who are you? What are we doing in this place? So The English Patient is more than just a war story or just a love story. It is a story about the deeper meanings we humans choose to find, to apply, to the maps we draw, to the stories we choose to tell.
Do not send to know "for whom the bell tolls," as Hemingway borrowed from Donne. Everyone is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. "Every man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind." The English Patient, the novel, ends with news of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kip implodes, realizing in a flash that his brother's advice never to turn his back on the so-called civilized Europeans has been correct. In all the sad sad stories we have been listening to since people from 85 nations around the world lost their lives in the World Trade towers, this is an example that never comes up. Two hundred and five thousand Japanese civilians vapourized and burned alive on two days in August, 1945. Two hundred thousand more than died in New York. Why is this connection not made? Why do we here in
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