The English Patient

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

The English Patient is one of the finest Canadian novels I have read for
some time. Michael Ondaatje is primarily a poet, and there are eight
collections of verse to prove it. In this novel, set in Italy in the
last days of World War II, Ondaatje successfully weds his feeling for
language to a complex narrative and four intriguing characters.

Events move slowly—the suggestion on the dust jacket that the novel
has the resonance of a dream is an accurate one. The action takes place
in a ruined Tuscan villa in the hills north of Florence, where a young
Canadian nurse and her helpless patient have been left behind as the war
moves north. The young woman, who has suffered several traumas that are
gradually revealed, is obsessed with the badly burned patient, “her
despairing saint. “ His experience of being shot down in North Africa
unfolds in flashbacks.

The nurse and her patient are joined by two men: an older
Italian-Canadian and a young Sikh sapper from the British army, a
bomb-disposal expert who is drawn to some of the masterpieces of Italian
art encountered during the war.

Several love stories develop, but the major love affair is
Ondaatje’s, with words. Even technology is grist for the poet’s
mill, as an uncovered bomb becomes “a city of threads.” “Words are
tricky things, a friend of his has told him, they’re much more tricky
than violins.”

The novel contains an apt self-description: “A book, a map of knots,
a fuze board, a room of four people in an abandoned villa lit only by
candlelight and now and then light from a storm . . . from an
explosion.” The English Patient is the map, the board, and an
explosion of words.