Twenty-seven years since it won the Booker Prize in 1992 (maybe check my maths as usual) twenty-two years since I read The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje in 1997, a lot happened that year, more or less in this order from January...
I started six years of an OU degree in English Literature...
My mum died...
I had a full-time health visiting caseload of about 400 children...
I was sub-poenaed to give evidence in court in a child protection case concerning a family the multi-agency services had been working to bring back together for two years. It wasn't going to happen. It was awful...
Our own children were sixteen, fourteen and twelve...
We had moved house three years previously and it was a renovation work-in-progress...
I've checked my reading journal. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy won the Booker prize and though I didn't read it, I did read sixteen others in that year.
Just sixteen books, how different my life was then to now.
Amongst the books I read that year were The Crow Road by Iain Banks, Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, The Magus by John Fowles, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood and of course The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.
Truth be told I really didn't quite follow or understand The English Patient in 1997, though seeing the film helped, and looking back I think this is hardly surprising because, having just read it for a second time, I can see it is a book that demands peace and quiet and above all thinking space. It's a book to put down and carry on sitting and pondering, not grabbing a chapter in my car in my lunch break whilst out on my visits and then rushing back for a baby clinic.
Four war-damaged people holed up in a villa, once a nunnery, near Florence towards the end of the war. The German retreat has been considered and brutal. The countryside is laced with landmines and booby traps at every turn and whilst Sikh sapper Kip ('the warrior saint') sets about defusing more of them each day back in the villa Hana cares for 'the English Patient'. The anonymous man so badly burned that he is unrecognisable and clearly dying. Into the mix comes David Caravaggio (thief, drug addict and now thumbless after Nazi torture) a character along with Hana who both first appeared in Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion.
What I may have missed first time around I gleaned by the shovel-full this time.
Hana, the young nurse traumatised by what she has witnessed and grieving for the loss of her father epitomises so much else that has been lost through war...trust, faith, love, home, safety, security and more.
Slowly the story of the English patient emerges, and here I really don't want to spoil the book in case you haven't read it, but whilst I missed the nuances and maybe even the plot last time, this time I was right on it. And thinking too about how cultish elements of this book became...
Wasn't it fashionable to clutch a copy of Herodotus and stick ephemera in amongst its pages...
Maybe Michael Ondaatje, along with Bruce Chatwin and his Moleskine notebooks, were partly responsible for a resurgence in popularity of the commonplace book, the journal...
'And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus's Histories are other fragments - maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name.'
This time around The English Patient has stunned me, been welded to my hands for two days. It's a truly timeless classic. Michael Ondaatje creates a living and visible tableau in a place once given to devotion, silence and prayer, and something of its essence hangs in the air. For all its slow revelation of traumas there is a quietness to the book that soaks them up, absorbing the pain.
There were moments of deep peace too. Moments that surprised me...
When the gramophone is brought into the room, the music plays and the four have an impromptu party. I played some of the tracks...Solitude by Duke Ellington and Honeysuckle Rose by Django Reinhardt and Stefan Grappelli, doubling down into the atmosphere of the book and the moment like no other.
And thinking too how the internet has made all this possible. How much enjoyment it can add to a book to be able to play the music, or track down a poetic account of the stars and discover that it is from Paradise Lost...
These then, though unbeheld in deep of night
Shine not in vain, nor think, though men were none
That Heav'n would want spectators, God want praise
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.
Fewer people might have known that when the book was published.
And then the war must end with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Kip, the disposer of bombs, is undone and with it came a sudden and profound awareness of that August day.
So there you have it. The English Patient a book that has read differently as the cadence of my life has changed, and finally I understand what the rest of the world has been going on about all this time.
I'd love to know your memories, experiences and thoughts about reading this book...
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