The English Patient has given me doubts about my whole approach to reading. How can a novel so widely, almost universally praised, leave me so cold? What am I missing? Am I reading just for the sake of meeting some arbitrary blog-related target (bad) or for pleasure (good). Do I need to rethink how I read these novels? Sometimes it is interesting to spend time working out precisely why the novel in question missed the mark, but it would be nice from time to time to be able to write about what it did well. Perhaps I am just on a bad streak, missing the Terry Pratchett novels which were such a release from ‘literature’.

The novel is set in Italy at the end of the Second World War. The text has a complex narrative structure in which events are told out of sequence. A severely burned “English” patient in the bomb-damaged Villa San Girolamo an Italian monastery, is being cared for by Hana, a Canadian nurse. He is the only patient left after the rest of the hospital has been evacuated at the end of the war in Europe. His only possession is a battered copy of Herodotus’s The Histories. Also in the villa/hospital is an Italian/Canadian/British thief and spy, Caravaggio. Of all the novel’s characters Caravaggio is the least well realised. The descriptions of him burgling various properties in the nude were bizarre and when he has his thumbs cut off as a punishment for his thieving it seems a fairly light sentence in the circumstances. Eventually these disparate and troubled characters are joined by Kip, an Indian bomb disposal engineer working with the British Army in the area. 

The English patient is horrendously burnt and will almost certainly die, but is lucid and able to recall some of his experiences leading up to his accident. His memory comes back to him intermittently, although he can never remember his name nor confirm his nationality. (We eventually discover he is not English at all – one of the many instances in the novel where things are not what they seem). He seems to have been slowly dying for several years, although the little I know about severe burns cases suggests that would be highly unlikely if not impossible. Previously he was part of a group of explorers mapping the North African desert. His adventures and those of the other inhabitants of the villa are the focus of the novel – little happens in the villa itself until the very end of the war.

In The English Patient Ondaatje has constructed a complex, elusive novel. It has some finely drawn characters, plenty of incident, and a mystery which is slowly revealed. It was quickly translated into an award winning film. The director made some striking choices about the way the narrative is presented, which highlighted some of the weaknesses in the novel’s construction. Incidents which are central to the film and prove heart rending and dramatic are almost thrown away in the novel. The most obvious example of this is the scene which forms the climax of the movie. The English patient is involved in a plane crash in the middle of the desert. His lover is seriously injured and her husband who was piloting the plane, dies. It is suggested that the crash may have been a deliberate attempt by the husband to kill his wife, and possibly her lover, in revenge for her infidelity. The patient rescues the wife and carries her into a nearby cave. She is seriously wounded but might survive, although the nearest town is three day’s journey away, and without the plane the patient has no way of getting help any faster. He walks to the town where he is immediately taken into custody on suspicion of being a spy. No-one will listen to his pleas, that he has left an Englishwoman out in the desert without food or drink, and she will surely die if he doesn’t go back to her.

In the novel, instead of this scene providing a heart-breaking climax to the patient and his lover’s affair, it is simply one of many fragmented recollections that surfaces during the morphine injections used to control his pain. It is not given any particular emphasis within the narrative structure. Of course I appreciate this was a deliberate choice by the author – war is full of tragedy – but the different choice made by the film director was clearly more impactful. The film also evens the novel’s timeline out, making the structure more straightforward while retaining the multiple flashbacks that are at its core.

Just to be clear, I appreciate that Ondaatje’s decisions to structure the novel in the way he did, to foreground some events and leave others in shadow, were obviously carefully thought through. They all add to the elusive nature of the novel in which the reader has to invest thoroughly in the narrative in order to construct the whole. Hence my feelings of guilt that I didn’t come to the novel prepared to do this work, put this effort in, and as a result didn’t benefit from the reward that would have brought. Putting it simply, I didn’t pay sufficient attention. And that’s entirely down to me.

Having offered that mea culpa, the novel is weakened from the uneasy combination of different narratives. As well as the present day events in the villa, described in the present tense, there are the patient’s memories of time spent exploring the desert, Caraveggio and Hana’s personal reminiscences, and Kip’s training as an unexploded bomb disposal engineer in England. These last scenes in particular, full of technical bomb-making detail, for which Ondaatje obviously did a lot of research, seemed lifted from an entirely different novel and grafted onto this narrative. 

And finally there is the prose. Much praised for its lushness, its vibrancy, its – well, pick the adjective of choice. But I found much of it just pretentious. I know it is unfair to quote the novel and make fun of the empty sentences, having emptied them myself of context and meaning, but how else can I demonstrate the point? You will either enjoy this style of writing or not – and I found it vacuous and empty. Worse at times it descends into meaninglessness.

“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.”

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”

“There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.”

“Her hand touched me at the wrist. “If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?”

In most cases these are the author’s characters speaking rather than the narrator, so it is the characters who are being over the top, pompous, or plain ridiculous. But when everyone speaks like this, more or less (Kip is the primary exception) then I can be forgiven for finding it wearying. It certainly didn’t leave me wanting to read more of this author.