They are joined by a thumbless thief-cum-spy and fellow Canadian, Caravaggio, and, later, a Sikh sapper by the name of Kip, tasked with clearing the surrounding area. He is cared for by a young Canadian nurse, barely twenty, who has effectively deserted her unit as they carry on north through Italy – she could not bear to see him moved, and the two of them are waiting for him to die. His presumed nationality is down to him speaking English at a triage station. He was rescued by Bedouins, smoothed with a salve of the ash from peacock bones, and carried through the desert on a makeshift palanquin. He fell from a plane in flames into the Sahara.
The patient of the title is a man whose organs are shutting down one by one after suffering full-body burns which have left him purple and featureless.
It lifted the lid off my understanding of the world, and showed me what else a novel, and indeed a person, could be, and the metrics by which they might exist. The English Patient helped me to reject the premise implicit in the question. It was a narrow box I could not fit my family into. I had been in England, a semi-foreign country, for a few months, and when I was asked where I was from, I had no easy answer, and found the question daunting. The English Patient is so famous, it barely requires a summary here: its settings are among the finest in the literature of the past fifty years – the Sahara, the bombed-out villa hiding in the Tuscan hills, and some of its vignettes (faithfully recreated in the film) are iconic: who can forget the penis sleeping ‘like a seahorse’ on the very first page, or the young nurse feeding her patient a plum she has chewed for him? Or the lonely game of hopscotch late at night, or the piano being played on its side in the rain-damaged library, or the Cave of Swimmers, found under a rock shaped like a woman’s back? I first read it when I was fourteen.
Published in 1992, the novel co-won the Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is a famous novel, one turned into a famous film.
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