The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is too Mature for Me

“She was told it would be like desertion. This is not desertion. I will stay here. She was warned of the uncleared mines, lack of water and food. She came upstairs to the burned man, the English patient, and told him she would stay as well” (41-42)

One of my writing teachers used to warn the class that some books are only good when the reader is a certain age. I didn’t believe her until I read Michael Ondaatje’s 1993 novel The English Patient.

I didn’t fail to connect with this book because of the NSFW content, which is fairly mild for a book set in Italy between V-E and V-J Day, but because I’m just not at an age where I find people who are too sad to have sex compelling. Or for that matter, people who fall into torrid affairs for no reason.

The four main characters of this novel have been specifically engineered to inspire the next generation of tepid literary fiction: there’s Hana, a troubled nurse moved by grief and obsession to care for the titular English patient, a burned explorer who is neither English nor composed enough to avoid an affair with his colleague’s wife. This codependent duo are complemented by Carravagio, a lonely morphine addict with no thumbs, and Kip, a Sikh sapper who falls in love both with Hana and with the half-destroyed Renaissance masterpieces he encounters on campaign. The villa they share is studded with unexploded bombs, which are insipid metaphors for the protagonists(?)' fraught interpersonal landscape.

“The last mediaeval war was fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944. Fortress towns on great promontories which had been battled over since the eighth century had the armies of new kings flung carelessly against them. Around the outcrops of rocks were the traffics of stretchers, butchered vineyards, where, if you dug deep beneath the tank ruts, you found bloodaxe and spear.” (69)

The smartest thing about The English Patient is how Ondaatje portrays postwar Italy. To the main characters—none of whom were actually born in Italy—the Italian countryside is a Romantic Orient™, brutal and desperately poor but rich in beauty. Kip in particular is intoxicated by the foreign (pagan?) beauty of Renaissance art, which he frames in the same way that Rudyard Kipling describes Kip’s native India. I’ve never seen this technique turned back on a European country before, and I’m surprised it isn’t done more often. It’s smart and subtle, and it dovetails neatly with the book’s other anti-imperialist themes.

But the characters. Are so. Mopey.

“He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died” (2)

Hana is dull. Caravaggio is useless. The English patient is obnoxious. Kip is alright, until he begins sleeping with Hana. I’m not sure why The English Patient is marketed as a love story. Do allosexuals find extramarital angst attractive? Do the characters even enjoy one another’s company? The point of this novel seems to be that all they have is one another and they can’t hope for anything better.

I don’t understand that sentiment, and I think that’s because I’m young and dumb. I can imagine an older version of my self—35, disillusioned, worrying that I peaked in grad school—picking this book up and appreciating its beautiful prose and complex interpersonal relationships. But right now I’m 16, and I should probably stick to more age-appropriate books.

You know, like The Remains of the Day. Or Wolf Hall.