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On Foreign Ground |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / FEATURED BOOK: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient |
| Author: Tom Clark |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1993 |
| Size: 2,733 Words, 16,323 Characters |
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A book, a map of knots... a room of four people in an abandoned villa lit only by candlelight and now and then the possible light from an explosion." So Michael Ondaatje signals the basic situation of his story to us at one point in The English Patient, a novel that indeed composes a shimmering cartography of "knots," riddling, arresting moments of image and feeling that are continually slipping out of our hands.
The themes of identity, loyalty, betrayal, and healing that Ondaatje treats are not at all unconventional for a novelist. What is unusual about Ondaatje is the way he treats them, a way much more common to poetry than to fiction. In The English Patient he exercises the powers of a poet in passages of startling prose that illuminate his story and give it the resonance and depth that are the real interest here. For speaking of Ondaatje as a novelist of ideas is possible only if one qualifies his alleged "messages" by the spin of his inventive method. The bursts and ripples of image that confuse, complicate, and ultimately clarify his new novel are more appealing than the landscape of thought they light up for us.
The English Patient is set in the summer of 1945, amid the ruins of Europe. Ondaatje's beautiful, wrecked, candlelit Italian villa--located in the picturesque hills of Tuscany, a former nunnery successively commandeered by Nazi and Allied occupying forces--is a haven from the war's storms for four displaced persons: a Canadian nurse, an Italian born Allied spy, a Sikh demolitions expert, and the hero of the title, an apparently amnesiac burn victim. Cut off from the security of f...
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...hing about the book lives up to that claim (or, shall I say, deserves that rap), it is the denouement, which does indeed teeter on the brink of overt political statement. The judgment weighed in against Western civilization as a racist, imperialist behemoth seems, in terms of the larger structure of this ambitious, challenging, and poetic novel, at once gratuitous, facile, and oddly jarring.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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