Chapters 4 - 7

Welcome back, readers! In the past week, I’ve gotten through four new chapters of The English Patient and it seems that this length of the book has been almost completely backstory. I’m excited to share with you what has been revealed about the mysterious English patient, if I can even call him English…

“South Cairo 1930-1938”

This chapter takes us through almost a decade of the English patient’s life as he narrates it to Hana from his little garden room in the villa. At first, this chapter seemed to be much more plot-heavy than those that preceded it. It takes us year by year through the English patient’s journey to find Zerzura, a city rumored to exist somewhere in the deserts of Northeast Africa. But as the English patient describes his eight-year exploration, his personality begins to show through. His description of a sand storm really stood out to me:

“The sand leaps in spurts and swirls. Inch by inch the disturbance rises as the wind increases its force. It seems as though the whole surface of the desert was rising in obedience to some upthrusting force beneath (137).”

Despite these sandstorms being a great obstacle for the group of explorers, the English patient describes it as if it was a powerful symphony, admiring the beauty of nature through personification and imagery. The English patient’s voice contrasts with the other characters’ in its great attention to detail and passion for what has happened in the past. In his dying state, he chooses to escape through his memories rather than sit in the presence of the peaceful villa.

Identity

In the early years of his Journey, the English Patient and his team have lost their sense of having a country to call home:

“There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I’ve met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African- all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations (138).”

This begins to explain why the English patient was unable to identify himself after the plane crash. After years of going from place to place with a diverse group of people, he has become focused on the individual, the “beautiful humans” rather than established groups. While other explorers pride themselves on naming their discoveries after themselves or their wives, he wishes to be nameless, expressing his desire for freedom.

“Katharine”

So who is Katharine? Well, she’s many things. She’s the wife of the English patient’s friend Clifton, an abusive lover, and the catalyst for the very plane crash that landed The English patient in the villa. The previous chapter ended with the English patient’s infatuation with Katharine reading poetry under the stars: “That night I fell in love with a voice. Only a voice. I wanted to hear nothing more (144).” The love for a voice later turns into the love for the whole person, as Katharine and the English patient have an affair. It gets ugly quick.

From the very beginning, these two have a mutual disdain for each other, while at the same time constantly needed the affection of the other person. Katharine hates his extreme politeness and long, wordy speeches: “...she hated him, her eyes remaining polite, her mind wanting to slap him. She always had the desire to slap him, and she realized even that was sexual (150).” The desire to hurt him turns into action, and Katharine becomes violent:

“The various colours of the bruise- bright russet leading to brown. The plate she walked across the room with, flinging its contents aside, and broke across his head, the blood rising up into the straw hair. The fork that entered the back of his shoulder, leaving his bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox (153).”

This confused me at first. I liked the English patient. He was intelligent and observative. Why was he letting her do this to him? It only grows worse, as she becomes his only desire in life. He is distracted from the passions he developed over the past eight years. “He has been disassembled by her (155).” I soon realized that his unbridled passion for people and discovery was also a flaw in his character. His ability to easily obsess over things caused him to become dependent on her, and no amount of pain could make it not worth the trouble. 

“A Buried Plane”

Suspicion

In between flashbacks to the deserts of Africa, we see Caravaggio and Hana discussing the English patient. Caravaggio, who has become addicted to morphine during the time that
Hana has been using it for the English patient’s pain, theorizes that the patient isn’t actually English. He thinks that he is a Hungarian man named Almasy who worked with the Germans during the war. Although Almasy’s past lines up well with the patient’s, Hana wants to let it go as the war is over and her beloved patient is nearing his last days. But like always, Caravaggio is not satisfied with simple solutions and decides to whip up a “Brompton cocktail” (morphine and alcohol) that can get the patient in a vulnerable state. Hana, being loyal to the patient, warns him of this, and his reaction tells all:

“She watched his stillness as she spoke; it appeared that he was not listening carefully to what she was saying. Just his distant thinking. The way Duke Ellington looked and thought when he played ‘Solitude’ (169).”
When you are close to the end, you haven’t got much to lose, so why waste your time trying to defend yourself against true accusations?

What Lead to the Plane Crash?

Caravaggio successfully gets the patient to finally tell the full story: The patient and Katharine eventually ended their affair, but that didn’t keep Clifton from finding out. He attempts to crash his plane, with Katharine in it, into the patient as a murder-suicide. He fails, however, and ends up dying in the ruined plane while the patient is unscathed. The patient recovers Katharine from the crash. She is badly injured, and even then they are fighting:

“You were terrible to me. That’s when my husband suspected you. I still hate that about you- disappearing into deserts or bars. You left me in Groppi Park.
Because you didn’t want me as anything else.
Because you said your husband was going mad. Well, he went mad (173).”

He then leaves her body, only to retrieve it three years later, and bring it back to the plane that was buried in the sand. As he and the late Katharine begin flying, Ondaatje takes us in and out of the past and present, from Caravaggio listening to the story to the plane catching fire before the patient’s very eyes. The passage ends when the patient realizes that he is on fire.

“In Situ”

Focus has shifted, and we are now in the mind of Kirpal Singh (a.k.a. Kip) as he reflects on his training to be a sapper during the war. The chapter begins with a description of Kip: “Now, he was a black figure, the background radicalizing the darkness of his skin and his khaki uniform (181).” This sentence echoes a struggle that Kip has dealt with for years; being known as the sapper, the Indian, the Sikh. His peers tend to focus on his race rather than his personality, his abilities. However, not all the people he meets are like that. He finds comfort in his mentor, Lord Suffolk, who shows him kindness and respect:

“‘I trust you, Mr. Singh, you know that don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Singh adored him. As far as he was concerned, Lord Suffolk was the first real gentleman he had met in England’ (186).”

Suffolk not only mentors Kip as a sapper, but he also teaches him about the English culture, making him feel more at home in England. This makes it all the more devastating when he learns that Mr. Suffolk and his wife are killed by a bomb. Still, Kip’s new knowledge, nurtured by his mentor, aids him in neutralizing bombs planted by the Germans; bombs that cannot be disassembled in the traditional way. This makes Kip one of the most valuable people sappers England.

Thank you so much for reading! In my next post I will be discussing the end of the book, so stay tuned!

Chapter 3

Welcome back readers! I have just finished reading the chapters “Sometime a Fire” and “South Cairo 1930-1938”. In this post, I will be focusing on “Sometime a Fire” as it is very dense and character-heavy while “South Cairo” is a complete tonal shift that is very brief and would be better placed in my next post. I can’t wait to share my thoughts with you!


“Sometime a Fire”


Well, it appears this blog is living up to its name, as yet another character has entered our little Italian villa. In this chapter, we meet Kip: an Indian soldier who specializes in defusing bombs, also known as a sapper. He’s introduced to us when he hears Hana playing piano, and remembers that Germans would often hide bombs inside them. Luckily no such thing is found in Hana’s piano, and Kip makes himself at home in a tent just outside of the villa.


Kip


At first he appears to be a concrete character, with his job as a sapper being a major part of his identity. Even at the kitchen table “he peeled onions with the same knife he used to strip rubber from a fuse wire (86).” He always has a rifle on his back, is constantly washing his hands, and can be heard whistling almost constantly whenever he roams the villa. His actions are repetitious, something that would be expected of a soldier with such an intense job that requires control. But as Kip forms relationships with the other residents, his layers unravel. In a flashback to Kip’s life before the villa, when he acted as protection for an Italian village celebrating the Virgin Mary. He develops a fondness for the statue that represents her, saying that she had “a face which in the darkness looked more like someone he knew. A sister. Someday a daughter. If he could have parted with it, the sapper would have left something there as his gesture. But he had his own faith after all (80).” Despite being Sikh, Kip shows empathy for the Italian people and their own religious views, even connecting with a religious figure that he doesn’t follow. Even in the midst of war, he can express vulnerability.


One of my favorite moments in this book so far is when Kip and the English patient first meet. After being sure that the two wouldn’t get along, Hana walks in on them geeking out over weapons. “We’re getting along famously! (88)” says the Englishman; and thus the bromance begins.


Kip and Hana


Another highlight of the chapter is the emotional exchange between Hana and Kip when Kip finds a bomb in the garden, and needs another set of hands to find which wire to cut. They get it done, but not without Hana promptly spilling her feelings out to Kip in a lengthy, incoherent monologue of pure honesty. It’s not the first time she admires his physical appearance, but it's the first time she says it aloud. She comments on her fondness of his skin tone, saying:


“I’ve always liked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone. I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree and climb into it and sleep (103).”


He then lets her sleep under the tree with him, contemplating her seemingly innocent remarks. Ondaatje writes:


“But he was a professional. And he remained the foreigner, the Sikh. His only human and personal contact was this enemy who had made the bomb and departed brushing his tracks with a branch behind him (105).”


This is when I realized that even I, the reader, was guilty of seeing him as “the professional” and “the Sikh”. Ondaatje did this on purpose. Kip was simply referred to as “the sapper” when he was introduced as if that was all there was to him. As long as Hana sees him for his skin color and his war title, he won’t really be seen.


Hana


Where do I even begin with Hana? She may just be one of the most complex characters I’ve ever come across. Her past is the most detailed and influential. In this chapter we learn that she almost had a child while working as a nurse, but had an abortion after the father was killed. She shares this with Caravaggio:


“I had continued conversations with the child. I worked very hard in the hospitals and retreated from everybody around me. Except the child, who I shared everything with. In my head. I was talking to him while I bathed and nursed patients. I was a little crazy (82).”

Not a lot of people would admit that they are crazy, but Hana is an open book at this point in her life. Just like with Kip in the gardens, she is quick to trust the men in the villa with very personal things. I believe this to be therapeutic for her. She spent so many years being strong for the patients who were in pain that she did not care for herself, thus causing her to bottle up a sea of inner turmoil. This was really emphasized when Hana told Caravaggio about how quickly she would lose patients, saying “soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying.” She recalls a time when a dying man’s last words were calling her a bitch: “Who would want to die like that? To die with that kind of anger? You bitch! (83).” As I continue to read into Hana’s past, her aloofness and constant need for human connection makes more and more sense. She, like Kip, is driven by empathy due to her rich understanding of other peoples’ pain. It’s the reason she is so attached to the English patient. He is in need of constant care but has also lived enough for her to form a relationship with him. This makes the fact that the English patient’s death is inevitable all the more troubling.


“South Cairo 1930-1938”

This chapter shifts us into the English patient’s past, revealing that he was part of a group of European explorers who mapped out deserts in different parts of the world. I will be focusing on this chapter in the next post, as I believe the upcoming chapters will allow me to focus on the English patient’s character in depth.


Thank you so much for coming back and catching up on my thoughts about The English Patient. I’ll see you next week!

Chapters 1 and 2

Welcome readers! I have just started reading The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and boy is it rich. I’m already really glad that I chose this book to write a blog on because there's so much to unpack. In this post I will be focusing primarily on the stylistic choices of this novel. So without further ado, let’s jump on in.


“The Villa”

This story takes place at the end of World War II. We are immediately introduced to two of the main characters. Firstly there is a severely burned English man who was injured in a plane crash, but doesn’t have much recollection of who he is. By his side is his only nurse, Hana. We learn that the two of them live alone in an Italian Villa that has been deserted due to several bombings and devestations. Although the Villa was once a hospital and the former patients and caregivers have moved somewhere safer, our two main characters choose to stay.


I’ve often heard that a good book will tell the full story in it’s first few pages. I think it’s safe to say that in a lot of ways, this book does that. Ondaatje is remarkably thorough in his attention to detail and imagery, allowing for an immersive experience. From the very beginning he allows us to find familiarity in their little world and the intimate bond between the two. We are given a description of the wide open outdoors outside the villa where Hana gardens, which is then contrasted with the room where the English patient must stay. It is as abundant with nature as a room can get, even if the trees and sky are painted on the walls. The two are dependent on each other, as Hana is his one companion and caregiver, and in Hana’s eyes, “he is her despairing saint,” (3). And then, in the second page of text, it is disclosed to us that The English patient will die in mere months. When I read this, I immediately thought of its parallels to Romeo and Juliet. The first sonnet in the play let’s us know that the star crossed lovers will die, which makes it a devastating journey as we read through their epic love story, with the knowledge of their demise lingering in the back of our minds. I’m not sure if Ondaatje has read Romeo and Juliet or not, but I think he knew what he was doing with this.


The story continues, intermingling moments from the characters’ pasts with their present life in the villa. What I find most interesting about this style is how fragmented it is. The transitions from present day to a random moment in the past made it feel like I was reading a movie script. One moment it’s a thorough description of the soggy armchair in the library and the next it’s the English man’s journey through the desert where a Bedouin tribe rescued him from the plane crash. It’s effective in the way that it reflects how the characters are learning about each other, slowly revealing fragments that they recollect from the past few years.


One thing that I quickly picked up on is Ondaatje’s use of motifs, as they are a tool that creates consistency throughout the constant back and forth of the timelines. One motif that has stood out the most is the importance of books. Hana reads to the English man every night from various books in the villa’s library. However, she also continues these books on her own time, causing gaps in the story for the English patient.


“She was not concerned about the Englishman as far as the gaps in plot were concerned. She gave no summary of the missing chapters. She simply brought out the book and said ‘page ninety-six’ or ‘page one hundred and eleven’. That was the only indicator,” (8).


Moreover, one of the only things salvaged from the English man’s plane crash was a copy of The Histories which he wrote in. I have a feeling that might just be important later on, what with it being our only glimpse into who he was before the crash. For now, it’s an interesting detail.


Another motif that is carried into the next chapter is that of mirrors, as “The Villa” ends with a short paragraph that’s separate from the previous passage. Hana in the bathroom, where “she has removed all mirrors and stacked them away in an empty room,” (23). Hmm...


“In Near Ruins”


And we’re back in the villa but this time with a new character! David Caravaggio, a Canadian thief and war hero. He begins the chapter, being referred to as “the man with the bandaged hands”. He hears about Hana and her patient while in a hospital, recovering from an ordeal where he was caught by the Germans and lost both of his thumbs. He recognizes Hana’s name, as he knew her Father years prior, and decides to go to the villa.


There is a shift in the syntax of this chapter, which I believe to be brought upon by the introduction of Caravaggio. He is a more stubborn, grounded character who knows exactly what he wants. This is reflected in the shorter sentences that act as his internal and external dialogue. When someone tries to warn him of the dangers of the San Girolamo villa, he is unfazed. “A terrible place for a hospital. The smell of the dead is the worst. We need a good snowfall to clean up this country. We need ravens,” is responded to with a short and simple “thank you” (29). Caravaggio then continues on his way:


“He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into the open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato” (29).

Two thumbs up for gelato!


As Caravaggio is now staying in the villa, he begins to reconnect with Hana, and Ondaatje’s deeply detailed imagery comes back to the forefront. He immediately has an unadorned fondness for Hana, as “she sits across from him in front of the dark blood-red walls, whose colour he doesn’t like, and in her black hair and with that look, slim, tanned olive from all the light in this country, she reminds him of his wife” (39). This is one of the many examples of bonds between characters in this book that are so crucial in such horrific circumstances, and it’s one reason why this writing style works so well for the story. No matter where we are in the story, the driving force is detail in the characters.


Anyways, back to motifs. We learn more about Hana’s past as a nurse during the war and why she refuses to look in mirrors. At this point in time, her Father is dead, and the war is taking a major toll on her both physically and emotionally. After days without sleep and hundreds of wounded soldiers to care for, she “picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it away” (49). It is made alarmingly clear that her appearance was not something she was concerned about. However, the act also appeared to be a means of letting go of some of the pent up stress that she had building up inside. And in order to remain free of that stress, she swears off mirrors… at least for now.


One of the final passages of the chapter has its own page, so you know it’s gotta be important. Without much context, it simply explains that Hana writes about Caravaggio in her copy of The Last of the Mohicans. She writes:


“There is a man named Caravaggio, a friend of my father’s. I have always loved him. He is older than I am, about forty-five I think. He is in a time of darkness, has no confidence. For some reason I am cared for by this friend of my father” (61).


Writing about your life in a book? Sounds familiar.


The chapter finally leaves us on a cliffhanger, as Caravaggio finds Hana in the kitchen with two soldiers. And this is where I leave you. Thank you for reading, and make sure to come back next week as I continue reading The English Patient.