The English Patient comprises two interwoven narratives set in the years 1930-1945. The earlier narrative concerns the love of the English patient (Count Ladislaus de Almásy, a Hungarian explorer of the Libyan deserts) and Katharine Clifton, the wife of another explorer. The later narrative concerns Hana, a twenty-year old Canadian who is nursing the English patient as he lies dying of burns received in a plane crash and grieving for her father and her lover (and father of her aborted child), both of whom have died in the war. Hana has a self-confessed father-complex about the English patient, but as the novel develops she comes to love Kirpal Singh, a British Army sapper. The novel is set in April 1945 in the Villa San Girolamo, 20 miles north of Florence, a half-destroyed Italian monastery (also described as a nunnery) where Hana is nursing Almásy and where the sapper comes to stay as he clears the region of German bombs and mines. The narrative of the dying Almásy's lost love for Katharine Clifton is woven through Hana's love for him and her developing love for Kirpal.
Almásy is known at first as 'the English patient' because his identity documents were lost in a plane crash in the North African desert. Badly burned, he was rescued by the Bedouin and cared for by them because he could distinguish guns and ammunition by touch, telling them which should be married with which. The English patient apparently cannot remember his own identity but has been treated as an British officer because he speaks English and is clearly of the right social class. (Rather against historical and geographical probability, the novel has him being treated in a hospital north of Florence when one would have expected him to be shipped from North Africa back to hospital in England.) The enigma of the English patient's identity will be a major focus of the novel.
The two stories are presented through Ondaatje's characteristic method of discontinuous sections, generally of a page or two in length, but sometimes merely a paragraph. Typically these paragraphs open with a sentence in the form 'He / She + verb' and use the present tense or the simple past. The effect of this mode of narration is to foreground what is immediate to the characters' subjectivity and to attenuate the reader's understanding of the plot and the historical context. At times, especially in the Almásy-Katharine love relation, the presentation is highly subjective and it is hard to discriminate what might be fantasy from what might be fact.
The first section, 'The Villa', introduces Hana and the English patient and weaves fragments of the English patient's recollection of his plane crash and rescue by the Bedouin into an account of their life in the villa .
The second section, 'In Near Ruins', introduces David Caravaggio, a charming thief of Italian-Canadian extraction and a friend from Toronto of Hana's father Patrick. (Caravaggio, Patrick and Hana feature in Ondaatje's previous novel, In the Skin of a Lion). Caravaggio has had his thumbs cut off by the Italians as punishment for his activities as British thief and spy. In one noteable scene which has echoes with the later tale of Candaules, he climbs into a bedroom in the German high command by night and steals back a camera in which there is a photograph of himself, silently observed by a woman who is having sexual intercourse with a German officer.
Caravaggio hears of Hana's whereabouts, travels to join her and the two circle each other in the villa, a kind of love between them, he a quasi-uncle of 45, but Hana is in love with the English patient. The section ends with Hana playing the piano and Kirpal Singh arriving during a thunderstorm and watching Hana through a rift in the wall.
The third section, 'Sometime a Fire' introduces Kirpal Singh, the Sikh sapper who has been given the nickname 'Kip' by the British (in a covert racial sneer associating his skin-colour with the oily nature of kippers). This section's discontinuous episodes broaden the canvas in disparate ways. They inaugurate a concern with visual representation, offering almost in passing a moment made much of in the film version where the sapper hoists Hana up into the painted roof vault of a church – only in the novel Kip does this in Arezzo for an unnamed mediaeval scholar from Oxford. In another parallel scene, Kip admires the painting of Isaiah on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel through a sniper scope as it is lit by a military flare. Kip is usually associated with guns which he holds with a nonchalant male confidence, and with bombs which he defuses with a calm and dangerous skill. He is at first felt by Hana to be an intruder into her space and it is clear that she is physically drawn to him. Kip and the English patient share a sophisticated understanding of weapons, the intricacy of fuses and bombs, and an association between Kip and Rudyard Kipling's Kim begins to appear through Hana reading Kim to the English patient and the patient's praise of Kipling's prose style. The theme of books is further emphasised through the volume of Herodotus's The Histories which the English patient carries with him, a volume twice its original size because the English patient has inserted additional pages with commonplace entries. It is as Hana reads a diary entry from May 1936 pasted into this book that we first hear of Katharine Clifton.
The wandering and disparate nature of Herodotus, complemented and echoed by the various interstitial writings of the English patient, seems more and more to figure the authority of a history which comprises the personal with the public in a discontinuous writing in differing modes. The English patient's treasured book, like The English Patient, disputes the monological and apparently seamless representation which has now become characteristic of history-writing.
The fourth section, 'South Cairo 1930-1938', begins in the voice of an omniscient author – a relatively unusual voice for this book – then moves into Almásy's voice talking, it would seem, to Hana. The section gives the historical and biographical context for Almásy's life as a desert explorer and introduces his critique of nations and of the fixed identities given to persons by words. National imperatives, the need to own other people and make maps and name places after explorers, seem to Almásy inauthentic – immodest egotistical and imperial assertions that refuse the inevitability of death and human irrelevance. The Bedouin, moving through the desert along millenial paths, seem to epitomise to him a more authentic understanding of mankind's being in the world. As he later says, “The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles” (231).
The nine pages which comprise the fifth section, 'Katharine', sketch the quality of the love-affair between Katharine and Almásy, told in fragments from separate points of view. No social or conscious reasons are given for their love; it is a romantic desire which rises from the unconscious:
He only wants her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.He has been disassembled by her. (155)
Their relationship is marked by frustration at the barriers between them, psychic and social, by physical violence, and Almásy's tendency to territorialize her body, in contradiction of his dislike of owning and naming. The text expresses this bundle of themes most powerfully in th Section Nine:
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.” (261)
In the sixth section, 'A Buried Plane', Caravaggio tells Hana about the Hungarian desert explorer called Almásy who had found the lost oasis of Zerzura in the mid-1930s. Almásy was educated in England and explored the desert with a party of English friends but in 1942 Almásy had guided the German spy Eppler through the desert into British-held Cairo, then turned back into the desert alone and disappeared. Caravaggio quizzes the English patient under morphine and in broken and backward manner the full story comes out: in 1939 on the eve of war, Almásy had gone to pack up their expedition base-camp at Uweinat. Clifton, having got wind of the now-dead affair between Almásy and Katharine, had flown to Uweinat ostensibly to pick up Almásy but had taken Katharine along in the passenger seat then deliberately crashed the plane, attempting to kill himself and Katharine and leave Almásy to starve in the desert. Clifton was killed, Katharine badly injured. Almásy went to get help, leaving Katharine in the 'Cave of Swimmers' above the oasis and promising to return. He walked for three nights across the desert guided only by the stars but did not return until 1942, when after helping Eppler to penetrate British lines, he made his way back to Zerzura. He took Katharine's body from the cave, dug an old plane belonging to his co-explorer Madox out of the sand and flew away. The wind tore the fabric from the wings and the plane crashed in flames. One of the most complex patterns in the book occurs in this section when Almásy appears to be indicating (171) that when Katharine is injured and lying in the cave there is a possibly sexually intimacy between them, an implication that is picked up again later (240) when he describes having marked her naked and injured body with colours taken from the cave's wall paintings.
The seventh section, 'In Situ', relates the induction of Kirpal Singh by Lord Suffolk into an elite bomb-disposal squad. The style of writing in this section seems almost to come from another novel: it is a controlled genre-piece representing Suffolk as the typical eccentric British aristocrat with his small but dedicated team of pioneers who are developing the deadly art of defusing bombs. (There is a country house with a three-mile drive, Miss Morden, his seemingly stern but in fact kindly secretary, Mr Fred Harts, the chauffeur, Miss Swift, the aviatrix and lover, the unnamed compliant wife -- a set of components almost borrowed from Agatha Christie. This group welcome Kirpal like a son and he experiences the ambiguous pleasure of being treated with respect and affection by members of a ruling-class which he is more used to see as imperial snobs. Sadly Suffolk, Harts and Morden are all blown up when the German's invent a new kind of fuse. It then falls to Kirpal to defuse a second bomb, knowing his chances are slim. He succeeds, realising that the first fuse conceals another, a success which confirms him as the rightful inheritor of Suffolks mantle. But this is a role he refuses:
He was accustomed to invisibility. In England he was ignored in the various barracks, and he came to prefer that. The self-sufficiency and privacy Hana saw in him later were caused not just by his being a sapper in the Italian campaign. It was as much a result of being the anonymous member of another race, a part of the invisible world. (196).
Later he contrasts himself with his elder brother, imprisoned for refusing to be drafted into the British army which he sees as an army of occupation in India. His brother is confident that he has “the trick of survival of being able to hide in the silent places” (201). Kirpal leaves the pioneer bomb disposal group and enlists as a common sapper, spending the rest of his war removing mines and building bridges in Italy. Kirpal and Almásy evidently share an antipathy towards public identity.
The eighth section 'The Holy Forest', tells of Kirpal's defusing a 2000-pound Esau bomb in a pit of icy water and mud in 1942 (a cliff-hanging episode which the film version will relocate to Italy and 1945). We then move to a game of hide-and-seek played in the Villa san Girolamo by Hana, Caravaggio and Kirpal, then to reminiscence about Kirpal's relationship with his ayah.
The ninth section, 'The Cave of Swimmers', takes us back to Almásy's romance with Katharine Clifton and fills in many of the gaps left in Section Six. Again it appears that this narration is prompted by doses of alcohol and morphine administered by Caravaggio. Clifton is described as obsessively asking the other desert explorers to affirm his wife's beauty, then, as if in ironic comment on this habit, his wife reads aloud from Herodotus's Histories the tale of Candaules, king of Lydia, who so wished to impress his spearman Gyges with his wife's beauty that he ordered him to spy on his wife as she undressed for bed. Candaules's wife sees Gyges spying but says nothing until the next day when she gives Gyges the choice of killing her husband and marrying her, or of being executed for seeing what he should not have seen. Gyges kills Candaules and becomes king. Reading this story aloud “revealed a path in real life” to Katharine and Almásy. There is more on the quality of their affair, and especially on Almásy's drunken misbehaviour after Katharine has ended the affair.
We now learn that Almásy was prevented from returning to save Katharine in 1939 because, being Hungarian, he was picked up by British troops in El Taj and interned on suspicion of being a German spy. We also learn from Caravaggio that Clifton had been a British spy, tasked with keeping an eye on the group of desert explorers and taking aerial photographs which would be of use in the coming war. His death left the suspicion that Almásy might have known this and murdered him. More significantly, Almásy was already viewed as an enemy because of his affair with Katharine, an affair monitored by the British authorities in Cairo at the time, even if unknown to Clifton. As this section retells in more detail the story of Clifton's plane crash, Almásy's leaving Katharine in the 'Cave of Swimmers' and his eventual return to her, there is again the implication that on both occasions Almásy is sexually intimate with Katharine. Perhaps this can be read as a morphine-induced fantasy.
Section Ten, 'August', moves the novel towards its close, sketching in more of the relations between Kip and Hana, and between Hana and Caravaggio, and going back to describe Kip's work defusing mines in Naples during October 1943. It then comes to a climax when Kip hears of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio. He reacts intensely, accusing the Whites of only being able to drop such a bomb on an Asian people and blaming the British as the origin of all the bombing of brown-skinned peoples. He jumps onto his motorcycle and drives for two days towards the Italian coast, finally skidding off a bridge in the rain but surviving the accident. A coda has him fourteen years later, living as a doctor with a wife and two children in India, thinking nostalgically about Hana in 1945 and somehow telepathically in touch with her in contemporary Canada.
The novel carries final acknowledgements that some of the work is based on reading archives of Libyan desert exploration in the Royal Geographical Society, London, Almásy's own monograph, Récentes explorations dans le désert lybique, histories of bomb disposal and of the Canadians in Italy.
[Page references to the Picador Paperback edition of 1993.]
2686 words
Citation: Clark, Robert. "The English Patient". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=977, accessed 16 October 2024.]
