Toward the end of World War II, in the Villa San Girolamo in Italy, four shattered survivors cope with the physical and emotional suffering the war has brought about. They come from different parts of Europe and the dissolving British Empire, but they share similar kinds of pain.

Hana, a Canadian nurse, has lost her lover to the war; after his death, she had aborted their unborn child, and then she learned that her father was burned to death on another front of the war. She has suffered a triple loss, and she is also worn out from being immersed in death on a day-to-day basis. When an unidentified burn victim proves too weak to transport as the unit moves out to follow the troops onward, Hana requests permission to stay behind and nurse the so-called English patient, but she is also using him to assuage her sense of loss for her burned father. Her patient is actually the Hungarian explorer Count de Almásy, who had been involved in an international effort to map the Libyan desert during the 1930s.

Stationed in the nearby town is an Indian officer, Kirpal Singh (“Kip”), trained in England as a “sapper,” one who locates and destroys unexploded landmines, booby traps, and bombs. He has seen his comrades killed by the bombs they are trying to disarm, but he remains confident of his ability to carry out this dangerous work. He visits the burn victim, thinking him to be an Englishman, a representative of a distinguished and admired culture, and falls in love with Hana, who returns his love and rediscovers hope through this relationship.

The chief complication to the plot arrives in the form of David Caravaggio, who was tortured in North Africa as a spy by German intelligence agents. He had been a friend of Hana’s late father; when he learns that she has remained behind at the villa, he comes there to comfort her. In listening to the hallucinatory reveries of the English patient, he begins to suspect that this man is really Count de Almásy. Caravaggio believes that Almásy provided information to the Germans — information that led to Caravaggio’s arrest and torture — in a doomed attempt to save his injured lover, Katherine Clifton. Vengeance now seems at hand; however, as conversation reveals the details of Almásy’s tragic love story, Caravaggio’s rage softens.

Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian born in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) and educated in England, builds a complex narrative that reaches across the boundaries of space and time while remaining anchored in the Villa San Girolamo. By using several smaller stories that the characters relate to each other, Ondaatje is able to contrast different kinds of love, from the destructiveness of Almásy’s adulterous obsession with Katherine to the nurturing care that Hana pours out for the doomed man after he has lost his reason to live.

Since the smaller stories are set during the earlier stages of the war, and the frame-story in the villa occurs at the war’s end, the author is able to examine the ways that war, the most destructive form of hate, leads to disastrous and unavoidable choices that expand outward, ripplelike, with unforeseen consequences for unknown individuals. Good intentions sometimes lead to painful results, and ill will is sometimes transformed into pity. Thus, in multiple layers of irony, the novel’s conclusion sees Caravaggio save the man who probably caused his own torture from an attacker whose only grudge against him is the mistaken assumption that he is English. For individuals, intention and outcome remain frustratingly dependent on the uncontrollable workings of the larger world in which they are inextricably enmeshed, leading to unavoidable tragedies alleviated by mere moments of joy.

bibliography

Barbour, Douglas. Michael Ondaatje. Twayne’s English Authors, 835. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

Ganapathy-Dore, Geetha. “The Novel of the Nowhere Man: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Commonwealth 16, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 96–100.

Michael Ondaatje Issue. Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994): 1–262.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: Michael Ondaatje biography, Michael Ondaatje Canadian author, Michael Ondaatje criticism, Michael Ondaatje works, The English Patient academic article, The English Patient analysis, The English Patient character study, The English Patient emotional suffering, The English Patient historical context, The English Patient identity, The English Patient literary analysis, The English Patient love and loss, The English Patient narrative structure, The English Patient novel study, The English Patient plot, The English Patient setting, The English Patient summary, The English Patient symbolism, The English Patient themes, The English Patient trauma, The English Patient war literature, World War II novel