The English Patient and Geomorphology
Some 20 years after I was bowled over by this sweeping saga at the historic McDonald Theatre in my hometown, I stumbled across the novel in one of my favorite second-hand stores. We had read much of Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler in a college poetry workshop but for some inexcusable reason I had never sought out the novel that gave way to one of my favorite movies.
The movie garnered BAFTA and Oscar recognition for almost every tactile gift it offered its viewers – cinematography, art direction and set design in addition to adaptation, direction and production.
It was a thing of beauty to behold. WWII movies are by and large Hollywood-blind to the North African theater but Anthony Minghella takes us up and over and the desertscapes and into 1940s Cairo where you can feel the breeze blowing through the bedroom curtains.
Not surprisingly, the Hollywood adaption disproportionately focuses on the illicit affair between our protagonist and his married lover.
* Spoiler Alert *
Ondaatje primarily focuses on the relationship between a Canadian nurse and her mysterious patient, burned beyond recognition and recovering in an abandoned monastery in rural Italy as WWII finally draws to a close. They essentially form a de facto family with a young Indian sapper and a professional thief the nurse has known since childhood.
The film adaptation is as physically beautiful as the book. Mingella’s Oscar acceptance speech for best director gave him the opportunity to teach us the word ‘uxorious’ – an excessive or even submissive adoration for one’s wife. But it is Ondaatje who embodies this affection for storytelling. He is as loving as he is startling, his characters matter and what they have seen haunts us. A young Arab girl tied up and left to sleep in an old English man’s bed, the Germans who set the enemy’s horses on fire, the soldier who survived everything and shot himself in church after the war was over, an ancient dog petrified in white ash, the ghost procession of typhoid Italians finally shuffling back to the city after they’d been quarantined in a cave for months, cats sleeping in gun turrets, a Sikh diffusing a bomb in a well shaft, an entire plane you find buried in the sand while foraging for ostrich eggs at night while you follow the stars to civilization, a single-strand hemp rope bridge connecting two war-torn Italian villas. “The purest among us, the darkest bean, the greenest leaf.”
These unexpected moments stun us into silence with a halting peacefulness. It’s a strange cadence. The story, the setting, the details are impossibly sophisticated. But it all falls with a hush like the light falling across the frescoes in their villa. The mortared wall of the second-floor chapel, blown open and the rain dampening all the books. The broken piano that still sings.
I used to revere books like art you’re not supposed to touch, lest the oils from your fingers ruin the perfection. But it’s books like the English Patient that made me revere the stories more than the paper and the ink and the glue that bring them to me. This book is dog-eared, underlined, double dog-eared and asterisk-ed now. I used to think pristine equaled respect. But now I think a book’s scars tell the story of our relationship and what we experienced together.
So for those who love time traveling as much as traveling as escapism, Ondaatje offers you Cairo, White Horse Hill in Yorkshire, the Forty Days Road with the Bedouins, the Tuscan countryside destroyed and abandoned by WWII. I paraphrase Ondaatje as an invitation to read this book:
… walk under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller. Geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage and the book, be alone, your own invention. During these times you learn how the mirage works, the fata morgana, be within it.