The English Patient: A review, of sorts.

I killed it. My first book of 2009. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. It was one I’d owned for years, purchased back when the movie had been so popular, and then neglected because, well, because I couldn’t get past the first few pages. I tried again, one night when nothing else sounded good, and lo and behold! It was readable! And better than that – I liked the language, the phrasing, the characters, the context.

Hold on, let me clarify that. This was never a book that bit me; I was never hooked. I was always curious about what happened next. I wondered when the really good part kicked in, the one that made audiences across the country declare it the saddest movie since Titanic. Never happened. But I liked the vignettes. I liked how Caravaggio’s character unfolded. I liked how everyone was in love with Hana and, to a lesser extent, she with them. I resented, at first, the sapper’s intrusion, and then came to love him best of all. The English patient – he and his colorless desert and his stupid forbidden woman – he drained all the fun out of the story for me. No, for me it was Kip and his colorful in-situ backstory that held all the glam. Here are small selections from my favorite vignette:

“He wanted to do this alone….They were the last two left of the unit, and it would have been foolish to risk both. If Lord Suffolk had failed, it meant there was something new.”

“Every six months or so the enemy altered something. You learned the trick, the whim, the little descant, and taught it to the rest of the units. They were at the new stage now.”

I love the give and take, the repetition with a difference as we used to say in class. A few paragraphs later, Kip likens it to bridge, rather than chess:

“Lord Suffolk had said you can have a brilliant chess player at seventeen, even thirteen, who might beat a grand master. But you can never have a brilliant bridge player at that age. Bridge depends on character. Your character and the character of your opponents. You must consider the character of your enemy. You have no partner….People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.”

And to me, that is what makes Kip’s beautiful relation of bomb disposal so much more like the flirtation dancing between two potential lovers. An intimate conversation between two bodies, trying to anticipate the other’s unchoreographed move to stay in the game, so to speak, to have a chance. You can’t ask what the game is, you can’t ask what their move will be. You have to guess, to anticipate, to be ready to match their every move and neutralize any danger if you want to make it to the next level. Here, in this story and the language, it’s about character. About heart. About daring.

“The problem was now simply the problem. The fuze. The new “joke” in the bomb”

“He wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong except for the weight. And he would never have thought about the weight if he wasn’t looking for the joke. All they did, usually, was listen or look.”

“Quickly he wrote down a few notes and handed the solution for the new bomb to an officer. He didn’t fully understand it, of course, but they would have this information.”

And finally,

“This new device would change the whole direction of Allied bomb disposal. From now on, every delayed-action bomb would carry the threat of a second gaine. It would no longer be possible for sappers to deactivate a bomb by simply removing the fuze.”

“He worked flat-out, crazily, after Suffolk’s death. Bombs were altering fast, with new techniques and devices. He was barracked in Regent’s Park with Lieutenant Blackler and three other specialists, working on solutions, blueprinting each new bomb as it came in.”

I might not have been drawn in by the romance of the characters, but the intimacy shared by two opposing bomb disbursement and seeding units mesmerized me. I’m sure Ondaatje would be disappointed by the former, but the fact that for 20 or so pages I longed to be part of a bomb research unit – that has to count for something.

The ending didn’t improve. Once Caravaggio, Kip and Hana figured out who the burnt dude was, I was lost. And I never came back to the story. The sobbing sadness I expected around every corner never arrived. I had a moment of “Awww, that sucks,” when I saw Kip had moved on and married, but really? My eyes never even teared. And for a woman who hates to cry, I have to admit I’m a sucker for sad stories. I’ll bawl like a baby over one of my books. So I really can’t recommend it if that’s what you’re looking for.

So that’s that. One book down. 24 to go.

Tags: English Patient, literature, resolutions