The English Patient
- Awards And Honors:
- Booker Prize
- Governor General’s Literary Awards
The English Patient, acclaimed novel by Sri-Lankan-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. Published in 1992, it won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and a Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 1996 film, which won the Academy Award for best picture.
The novel is set in a bombed-out villa in Italy that had been most recently used as a hospital. Taking place during the closing days of World War II, the novel moves between the war-ravaged Italy of the present and the memories of the characters. In this villa a young nurse, Hana, cares for the badly burned man she calls “the English patient,” who fell from a burning plane in North Africa and was rescued by Bedouin nomads. One day Caravaggio, a charming Italian-Canadian thief, comes to the villa. He had known Hana when she was a child in Canada. A war hero who stole things for the Allies, Caravaggio had been tortured, and his thumbs were cut off by the Germans. Kip, a Sikh soldier who is tasked with clearing unexploded bombs and mines, also arrives and stays.
The English patient’s tale slowly emerges. He is in fact a Hungarian count, László de Almásy, who spent the 1930s exploring and mapping the deserts of North Africa. When an English couple, Geoffrey and Katharine, arrive, Almásy begins a doomed affair with Katharine. Geoffrey somehow learns of the affair and attempts to use his plane to kill all three of them, but only he is killed. Almásy carries the injured Katharine to a cave and leaves to find help, but when he reaches a British-controlled base, he is imprisoned as a spy, and Katharine dies in the cave. This story, with its tragic end, weaves around the lives of Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip. The horror of war is distant, but central, as Hana and Kip begin a tentative love affair. The characters are warm, human, likable, yet morally flawed, damaged, and overwhelmingly ambiguous.
The English Patient was a joint winner, with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, of the Booker Prize in 1992.
In one of the finest scenes in the novel, the uneasy peace of the villa is shattered when Kip hears the news of the bombing of Hiroshima and, shocked and outraged, abandons the villa. It presents the damage and the terrible strain on each character in a way that is both a microcosm of the novel as a whole and its perfect conclusion. The boundaries between division and unity, ally and enemy, connection and separateness become confused and indistinguishable, as the experience of war destroys and remakes each character’s humanity.