The English Patient – The love for things

The English Patient

Michael Oondaatje

23/03/2024

The librarian from Sherlock and Pages in Frome recommended this book. He said it has one of the most beautiful descriptions of deserts, almost to hear its texture and song. I was intrigued. I had seen the film, years ago, with Ralph Fiennes, Kirsten Scott-Thomas and Juliette Binoche, but frankly I don’t remember it, and in anycase, on rare occasions the film is as good as the book. 

The story goes around an abandoned Villa in an Italian place at the end of the Second World War, where the chaos of surrounded troops is slowly and messily taken by the allies. There are four characters that are not what they seemed: first, the English patient, a soldier or a spy, a man who does not remember his identity, but can recall in detail every nook and crevice of the Gilf Kebir and the surrounding desert. There is a nurse, a young woman called Hannah who is devoted to her patient to the point of obsession. A man without hands arrives at the Villa, his name is Caravaggio, a thief. He had met Hana before the war and once he learns about her existence in that desolated place he moves in.  Finally, there is the young sapper: Kirpal Singh – Kip, an Indian expert in disarming mines and other booby traps.  

Throughout the story, each of the characters find their own ways to survive, mostly, by focusing on their preferred form of beauty. For example, the English patient is enamoured of his own mind and his knowledge of the desert. Going through descriptions of places, archaeological adventures and the almost mystical quality of the sandy landscapes, make his already extinguished experience bearable. His body is totally burnt, kept alive by tribes of tuaregs and other travellers for his knowledge, only his blue eyes shine when he is not doped by the opium. Caravaggio, the thief without hands, is obsessed with the beauty of objects and their stories. He goes around abandoned houses, collecting whatever he can find, from food to booze, as well as stealing the little dispensary of opium kept by Hannah.  The young sapper is enamoured of machines. As a Sikh, he has an affinity with mechanical objects, the possibility of understanding their mechanism, the flow and focus required to save lives, including his own through manipulating cables and connections.  This cool passion for the machine is installed in his training in Westbury, by his mentor Lord Suffolk, who says: 

“You must consider the character of your enemy. This is true of bomb disposal. It is a two handed bridge. You have one enemy. You have no partner. People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.” (p. 205) 

And Hana?  Although she is the pivot around those characters’ orbit, she is rather lost in the story. We know she has lost her father, her youth, her own nationality. She is totally displaced and dis-identified. This is also stressed with her love of the garden, although again we don’t see her from within but through the eyes of others: “He noticed her civilization in the small wildflowers, the small gifts to herself. Even in the overgrown garden he would come across a square foot of grass seed down with her nurse’s scissors. If he had been a younger man he would have fallen in love with this.”

Later, Hana starts a relationship with Kip, but it is more a necessity than a love story, it is desperation rather than lust that connects them. In dire times we need to find love, hope and beauty even when we don’t feel ourselves loved, or hopeful or pretty.  

Likewise, the other female character: Katharine, the love interest of the mysterious English patient, is not very well defined. We know she is the wife of the young pilot and adventurer who flies the English patient and other archaeologists to the sites across the desert. We know that is a woman who grows to love the desert as much as the English patient, but her own journey is fragmented. Their love emerge from nothing:

“He wants only 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. 

And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?” 

 (P. 165)

What I loved about this book?  I think that although World War II has been endlessly documented, told and reccounted, there are many mysteries. For example, that liminal space between the German forces retreating and the allies advancing, and the chaos and confusion of this shift in powers. I also loved the descriptions of the desert, the different types of wind, the varieties of sand, the life in the expansive silence of this landscape. This was a total hit for me. 

What do I learn from this reading, as a writer?

Firstly, the importance of doing your research. In the acknowledgements, the author talks about the extensive research and collaboration with the Royal Geographical Society. It seems to me that the real love affair here was one of the author’s with the imagined and visited landscape:

“The desert could not be claimed or owned -it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treated quilted Europe and the East. Its caravan, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember…. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into the landscapes. Fire and sand.”

p. 148

There are some beautiful writing and the descriptions are sublime:

“The noise of the trees, the breaking of the moon into silver fish bouncing off the leaves of aster outside.” (p. 33) 

And of course, this is a celebration of words:

“I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Chartered things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth.” (p.245) 

“Words, Caravaggio. They have power.” (p. 249)