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Incurable Wounds of war: The English Patient The English Patient won Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian novelist and poet, the 1993 Booker Prize. It is a very rich novel, very stylistically written. May be having read the very first pages somebody will say that this story is boring, others might not understand how one could make a film out of it or even win such a prestigious prize as Booker Prize. But this story draws our attention to the very important issue: war and wounds it can cause. He does not speak only about physical wounds, when one looses his arm or leg but he underlines the horrors of war toward the human side of a human being.
The novel reveals the very truth about any war. It is such a short word, only three letters, but the wounds these short word causes might never be cured and may even destroy everything human left inside of our bodies. Ondaatje tells about four individuals whose lives have been damaged by the war. War is never led for good sake, or love, or peace.
War itself is evil in its essence. War causes death and it must not be particularly a physical death of body, but it is always death of soul and heart. All the best human feelings are dashed by war and you never know when these will be recovered and even whether these will ever be recovered. No one in this foursome is whole, emotionally or physically or both, and each seeks renewal from the others. The story of the English patient narrates about four people, a woman and three men, who all meet during the later stages of World War II in a damaged villa north of Florence. They are usual people, who do not differ from any others, who also suffered from the World War II like our great-grandfathers and grandfathers.
Each of them has his own story, his own past and hopefully will have his own future. But the war took away their present and left nothing instead, except a deep wound which seems never to heel. It took away their identity and thus they all feel lost and try to find their place in this world. First there is the nurse, Hana, a young woman with a generous heart.
Hana is only 20 years old but already fatigued and dispassionate. She has lost her father in the war, and later on her lover too. Although it is not right to say: SHE has lost, but rather: the war took away her father and her love. This young woman is already so immune to death that she fears she has lost the capacity to feel.
She walks around the villa like an empty shell tending to the mysterious patient. Hana is unable to accept the death of her father, neither she will be able to accept the death of her lover. Hana suffers from her own emotional shell shock. She blames herself: I must be a curse. Anybody I love or get close to is killed. She is scared that her heart wont be able to feel all the good feelings it used to feel.
But no war can take away everything. Hana finds strength in herself and decides to setup a small hospital in an old monastery to take care of a dieing patient who does not have any chance to live. Anyway Hana is ready to stay in a lost and forgotten place but just to help this man at least to die in peace. She constantly tries to keep up life in him, although she herself is exhausted by war. Finally Hana finds inspiration in a young man, an Indian sapper. Her relationship with him can not be called a real, true love, it was more their mutual desperate hunger for at least some kind of feeling which could give them both strength to go on.
But at that time, when there was only war, hate and destruction around them, they took this feeling as a chance for them both finally to understand their roles a meaning each one of them had for another one. And they took this chance but the war would never let them cure the wounds the war itself has caused. Kip, a Sikh sapper, has lost himself fighting the war in the uniform of his imperial masters. He is also haunted by the loss of his mentor and teacher, Lord Suffolk.
Through his interactions and affairs with others staying in the villa, he comes to see who he is. But he never finds himself and their romance with Hana never has its happy continuation. Another character who also can not thank war for anything is Carvaggio, the former spy / thief who was caught by the enemy and physically maimed. He has lost his thumbs during the war and cannot steal anymore. The only thing he can do is come to the villa to find Hana, his friend's daughter whom he knew back in Canada before the war, and try to re imagine himself. Carvaggio is also lost in the world.
This man seems to have lost all his feelings. He is presented as a cold and cruel person who just comes from nowhere and destroys the peaceful atmosphere. But this is the only place he finds for himself where he can re imagine himself. And finally the English patient, a nameless man who is severely burned in the war and attempting to reconstruct his mysterious past. Everyone assumes he is an Englishman because of his speech and mannerisms. We know nothing about this man, except that he suffers both: physically and spiritually.
As the novel progresses we find out that this man went through a terrible tortures. He seems has lost everything including his lover, his friends, and his body. After this loss, loss of his woman, he never needed himself, and this patient has lost himself. He lost his face, body, his identity. The war took everything that could be a reason for him to live. Step by step just as the identity of the English patient is slowly revealed as the novel progresses, so too are the inner selves and spiritual identities of the other characters in the novels.
The truth, however, is never be fully known in this novel. Surrounding these flashes of lightning is a heavy and dreary darkness in which the characters navigate, trying to find themselves and others. It is almost as if the novel is an exploration of the way we understand things and discover the truth. People are always meeting in the dark, and the only way we can know them is through casual, occasional bumps in that darkness and through brief flashes of light. The reason why this technique might have been used is that the war makes us all equal. It turns us just into the simplest creatures and takes all the humanity, individuality away, just as it took them from all the main characters of this novel.
The war erases the individuality and in the darkness we all are just a number of all people, some creatures who do not have heart, soul, but just think how they can survive. The war causes not only physical wounds which can be cured and healed by doctors. The scariest thing is that war injures our hearts and souls and we loose the ability to feel, not like simple creature of the earth but like humans. There is no doctor of souls or hearts. These four individuals tried to struggle; whenever they had a chance to get back their humanity they used it. But the awful truth is that there is no place for humanity when there is war.
It is a pity that the mankind does not learn anything from every single war that took place on our planet. Each war leaves to us less and less from the humanity. It is getting more difficult to sew up new wounds. Ondaatje has written a masterpiece. And it is not only the style of his writing that is worth of attention and prizes but the theme itself. Such novels as these one need to be read not just one time only as novels which won a famous Book Prize but several times and as works relating to the whole mankind and discussing issues which can not leave a usual person indifferent.
Bibliography: Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient (October 1, 1992). Alfred A. Knopf; 1 st edition. Ha, Kelvin. Brief flashes of lightning.
Inkpot book reviews: the English patient. Retrieved from the Web June 09, 2004. web
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