Ambiguity about Ondaatje

Sigh. I just finished Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Spent Saturday recovering from the flu while reading in bed. Didn’t want the dream to end. Beautiful, beautiful, but sad, sad. There’s a part of me that thinks I shouldn’t like this book after the movie, also beautiful, but bitter, left a bad taste in my mouth. In the movie, WWII nurse Hana runs off with Indian bomb defuser Kip on a motorcycle after shooting the burn victim, the apparently English patient, a man whom she loved, full of morphine, so that he’ll die. The book ends differently – should I tell? – after the dropping of the atomic bomb destroys Kip’s belief in what he is doing and breaks up the coterie in the abandoned villa.

Aside from the act of euthanasia at the end of the movie, I wouldn’t recommend the movie because it’s nearly soft-core porn. Yet here I am unable to take my nose out of this book with naked people kissing on the cover because it is so beautifully written. I felt like I had to hide it from my preteens. Can I excuse my love of this book by citing the difference between reading something and seeing it? A visual image imprints itself differently on the brain - it stays with you longer than one you read and affects your emotions more strongly. Based on this, I let my kids read The Lord of the Rings before letting them see it. Similarly, I felt more moved after seeing the devastation here after Katrina – or in Haiti- than after reading about it. So I read about the intimacies described in this book without feeling as voyeuristic as when watching the movie, but the circumspect, poetic way Ondaatje writes also differentiates the book from the openness of the camera.


Is there something redemptive in the meeting of the four damaged persons at the Villa San Girolamo that comes across in the book but not in the film? I like to think the redemption has to do with Mr. Cairns comments in the comments section below about recovering the body. But it seems what these victims of the war are suffering is the opposite of Gnosticism. They have to recover a sense of the body’s connection to the soul, not because the soul is more perfect, but because they’ve lost their souls. Whether they are seeking the identity of the patient, their own identities after being dismembered, or an ability to reconnect with human beings after turning themselves into statues to survive the devastation of the war, it appears they need to connect physically, not just with their minds, but with their hands and bodies, in order to heal: “Here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defense but to look for the truth in others.”

Could you say that, even though the story weaves around tales of love and death, adultery and betrayal, the characters treat each other with a certain chastity – Caravaggio never fully reaches out to Hana, Hana barely touches the patient, Kip never really gives himself to Hana, but preserves a distance, never really looking into her eyes? I can’t make up my mind whether the book has a resolution or not. And the beauty of the place stands in such stark contrast to the horrors of the war and the doomed love affairs.

Yesterday we went to New Orleans and visited the World War II museum, and again came face to face with the horrors of war. How did the men who survived Normandy, or the War in the Pacific, come home and rebuild their lives after such devastation? It was a hard museum to visit, especially when you knew that downstairs was an old man, a volunteer helping fill out membership applications, who had lived these stories and now watched people meandering through the exhibits, looking at photos without knowing that dead soldier in the picture.