The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

When I was living in San Francisco in the mid 1990s, my housemate Julie owened this book.  I'd seen the film, and I liked it.  She said she hated the film, and that the book was much better.  If I'd read the book first, I might have agreed.  But since I did see the film, and let's face it Ralph Finnes is excellent, I can't honestly say I like the book better.  I like them both, but feel they are two different things.

In the novel, you get to know more about the the other characters inhabiting the Italian Villa at the end of WWII.  We learn about Hana, the nurse taking care of the English Patient, who is a 20-year old Canadian nurse.  Hana is dealing with the loss of her father, who burned to death earlier in the war, as well as the loss of a former lover, also a soldier, and her living with her decision to terminate her pregnancy upon hearing of her lover's death.  We learn more about David Caravaggio, who knew Hana and her father before the war, and who is a professional thief recriuted into Allied intelligence.  We also learn more about Kip, the Sikh who works as a sapper, defusing bombs for the British/Italian forces.  He is a very interesting character, and it think it is a pity more of his story was not made of in the film.  In fact, if memory serves, Kip only seems to hook up with Hana at the end of the film, which is not the case in the book. 

Hana has some interesting daddy issues, as you would imagine, as she is tying herself to a man who is dying in the way she believes her father did.  Caravaggio has been tortured by the Germans, has had his thumbs cut off, and has become a morphine attitic in during his recovery.  He also knows how to make an interesting morphine cocktale that eventually gets the English Patient to talk.

The writing is superb, although it takes a few pages into the book to get into it.  The narrative is not straight forward or chronological, and is often narrated from different points of view.  The "English" Patient's character is morally ambigious. He sleeps with his friend's wife.  He works for the Nazi's. But even when he is burned to a crisp and high on morphine, he is charming as the devil and the author makes him very sympathetic. I think the filmmakers just found it easy to focus on his story, because aerial footage of the desert is a cinematographer's wet dream. The passionate love story which takes center stage in the movie, makes up a third of the novel, but as I said, there are a whole lot of other interesting things going on.

The four characters are living in their own world at the end for the war.  They've made their own little community and have their own mechanisms for keeping the destruction outside away from themselves for several months.  It think its interesting that most of the novel takes place in North Africa or Europe, but what jolts them back to reality are the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't recall any of this being mentioned in the film.  Colonial/post colonial history and politics affected people in a very personal way.  This novel is more than a simple love story.  It's about personal survial, nationality vs making your own identity, and memories that transcend time and space.