I came to Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient with no prior knowledge; I hadn't read any of his books, nor had I seen the film version of this one, so by way of preconception I had only his reputation for fine writing.
What I found is that that renown is justified and due. Here is a wordsmith, here is a richly-furnished mind whose work is similarly well plenished, and in a narrative put together like a window of stained glass, every small scene or short passage is intensely coloured and deep with meaning. The lead that provides the episodic link is the crumbling Villa San Girolamo and the four people who inhabit it in the last days of the war. There is Hana, a nurse, who stayed behind when the hospital she was part of moved on, her sole charge now the English patient. This anonymous man was burned beyond recognition when his plane crashed in the desert. Who is he and what is the love affair of which he wrote in the palimpsest-like volume of Herodotus' Histories he keeps with him? Then enter Caravaggio, a thief, a spy, a family friend of Hana's. To complete the quartet, there is Kip a young Indian sapper or engineer, a bomb disposal expert, and in many ways the most complex and intriguing of the four.
The story spans the characters' wartime experiences and pre-war histories as well their communion in the Villa, but it is the English patient's past in desert exploration and his affair in Cairo which is at the heart of the book, along with the questions of identity and the turns of fate to which that gives rise.
Ondaatje's prose speaks of a muscular effort and a poet's sensitivity, so choose any passage and you'll find that tension producing writing of beauty and intelligence. Here is the English patient on economy of language:
"The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles."
In the spirit of that line, I'll close here as I've said quite enough!
