The English Patient
SynopsisPlot
The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to re-imagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions—and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
Story
About this book
In the final days of World War II, four people gather in a damaged Italian villa. Hana, a young Canadian nurse worn down by months of caring for dying soldiers, devotes herself to one last patient: a man burned beyond recognition in a plane crash, his identity uncertain. Caravaggio, a thief whose hands have been permanently injured during the war, arrives at the villa carrying his own losses. Kip, an Indian sapper serving in the British army, works nearby defusing unexploded bombs, moving through a landscape where every object could be lethal.
The novel shifts between the villa and earlier times and places. The burned patient's memories reach back to the Sahara and to years spent mapping the North African desert before the war. London during the Blitz, military hospitals in Italy, and the English countryside all surface through the characters' recollections. Ondaatje structures the story in fragments, layering episodes from different periods so that connections between the four lives emerge gradually rather than in sequence.
Michael Ondaatje, born in Sri Lanka and raised partly in England and Canada, published the novel in 1992. It won the Booker Prize. His earlier novel In the Skin of a Lion, set in Toronto, shares at least one character with this book.
