Love and war

An old saying says that all is fair in love and war. While I have totally detested the idea of war and its toll humanity has taken in its throes, and while I believe that while it can ravage civilization, the worse of situations can bring out the best in the human spirit. And yes, war also happens tests love and its endurance.

In The English Patient, four lives are intertwined in a post WWII era in a far-flung Italian monastery/villa. There is Hana, the young and captivating nurse; Caravaggio, the thief who twice as old as Hana fell in love with her; Kip, the Indian bomb expert, and the mysterious English patient, whose identity remained anonymous almost throughout the novel.

While covered in copious bandages, the English patient retells the story of war and his adventures in the desert. But the subject of most of the stories he narrates to Hana as she painstakingly takes care of him is one of his affair with Katherine Clifton, wife to Geoffrey Clifton (the Cliftons are supposedly real members of the Geographical Society. Their disappearance in the African desert is one of the non-fictional accounts made mention in the novel.) The patient loved Katherine even until her death, when their plane crashed; he hid her in a cave.

Kip meanwhile, is a bomb expert trained by British intelligence. He worked during the war and had recounted many of his experiences during their gatherings at night in the villa. Caravaggio also had his share or war stories to tell being maimed during the atrocities. Just as she took care of the English patient, Hana also took care of the other two, but she was so enamored of the mysterious man that she felt taking care of him is her lifelong vocation.

In The English Patient, author Michael Ondaatje transports us to several places, sometimes unknowingly and abruptly. This style is important in driving one of the themes which is about identity – that it is not defined by one’s nationality. This was made apparent in the retelling of the patient’s history – his nationality remains mysterious and unknown until the last two chapters, and even with Kip – as one of the many Indians who found their identity in Britain.

There is no one narrator who dominates. We get to see each of the character’s perspective indicating the shared notion of love, pain and memory the war has brought to them.