The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje (1992)

I really did not like this book. At all. I honestly didn’t know anything of the story before I started reading, but I was pretty disappointed to discover that it is, basically, a melodramatic romance. Ostensibly the story of four people holed up in a crumbling villa at the end of the Second World War, for all its writerly affectations (more on that later) the book is basically two love stories, one told as a reminiscence and one playing out in the villa before our eyes. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a love story, but neither love story in The English Patient is very compelling, and neither yields any original insights into the human condition that one might expect from a lauded work.

Please excuse a little superficial psychoanalytic criticism on my part, but it’s also a strangely masculine book, with extended descriptions of men “penetrating” the Libyan desert and interminable sections detailing macho bomb-defusal practices. I usually enjoy digressive sections on technical matters (as in Farrell’s excursus on Victorian medicine in The Siege of Krishnapur) but in The English Patient they are insufferable, technical fetishism at its most boring. More telling, however, is that the main characters in the book are the men. While Hana has more of a voice in the narrative than Katherine, neither of them are fully fledged characters in their own right. What we know of Katherine begins and ends with what the male English patient tells us about her, and Hana only seems to exist in relation to the men in villa, responding to their actions.

However, my main problem with the book is the prose. It is gratingly one-note, and that note is writerly, which I mean in the perjorative sense. It is so self-consciously literary and affected that it dominates all the characters’ voices, rendering them identical. That might not be so bad if Ondaatje wrote beautifully, but in my opinion he does not. He seems never to have met a metaphor he didn’t like. Wires in bomb fuses are likened to tributaries, a piece of cloth is likened to a placenta, with no sense of there being any actual meaning behind the relation. Every character speaks with the same awful, awkward, affected cadence, every character likens objects to other objects so dissimilar as to be ridiculous. I found it to be tiresomely overwritten.

There are a few other problems too, like the wild coincidences and improbabilities that drive the plot, the unbalanced narrative that focuses on certain characters to the exclusion of others, and the general superficiality of it all. If you like Ondaatje’s prose, then I’m sure you’ll find this a pretty enough book, but still, it doesn’t actually say anything interesting or original. And if you don’t like his prose, well, this could prove a painful read.