The English Patient

The English Patient (1992) is a historical romance novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. The novel explores the relationships between four dissimilar people living in an abandoned Italian monastery at the end of World War II. The eponymous English patient—actually a Hungarian count burned beyond recognition—tells Canadian nurse Hana the story of his forbidden romance with British amateur cartographer Katharine Clifton as their small team attempted, several years earlier, to map North African deserts. Using a nonlinear chronology, it explores themes such as National Identity and Personal Identity; Desire, Sensuality, and Orientalism; and Storytelling as a Form of Healing against the backdrop of violent conflict. The novel was awarded the Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and in 1996, its film adaptation won nine Academy Awards.

This guide uses the First Vintage International Edition (Random House, 1993).

Content Warning: This guide refers to scenes that depict or discuss drug use/addiction, fire injury, war violence, suicide, abortion, and pedophilia.

Plot Summary

A young Canadian nurse named Hana gardens in an Italian villa. The year is 1945 and World War II has just ended in Europe. Hana spent the war stationed at the villa, a former monastery, with a handful of doctors, nurses, and patients. After the fighting ended, Hana stayed behind to care for a badly burned patient who could not be moved. He does not know his name or nationality and Hana assumes he is English.

The patient tells her stories about his life, sometimes using a copy of Herodotus’s The Histories, which he has filled with his own notes and clippings from other texts, as guidance. In 1944, he had been found in the wreckage of a plane in the Egyptian desert and cared for by a group of Bedouins, who eventually brought him to a British military camp. He clearly knows a great deal about the desert and feels very fond of it. When she is not caring for the English patient, Hana spends her time gardening, reading, and playing hopscotch.

One day, a man with bandaged hands arrives at the villa. His name is Caravaggio, and he was friends with Hana’s father, Patrick, who was killed in the war. While recovering in a nearby hospital, Caravaggio heard Hana was still at the villa. Before the war, Caravaggio had been a thief, and the Allied forces legitimized his skills by using him to collect intelligence. After the Germans caught him stealing a camera from a woman’s room, they handed him over to the Italians, who tortured him and cut off his thumbs. He is now addicted to morphine. At the villa, he and Hana reminisce about Patrick.

One night, as Hana plays the piano, two soldiers walk into the villa. They are sappers, or soldiers who defused bombs, in the British army. One is Kirpal Singh, better known as Kip, an Indian Sikh, and the other is his second-in-command, an Englishman named Hardy. They have come to the countryside to defuse the many bombs the Germans left behind when they retreated, which have made the landscape dangerous for civilians and animals. Hardy is ultimately stationed elsewhere, but Kip stays at the villa, setting up his tent in the garden. He spends his days wandering through fields and forest looking for abandoned ordinance. He and the English patient get along well, but Caravaggio is suspicious of him. Hana is attracted to Kip, largely because of his dark skin, and they soon become lovers.

Prompted during various conversations with Kip, Caravaggio, and Hana, the English patient reveals more about his past: He spends the 1930s mapping North African deserts with the Royal Geographical Society, becoming intimately familiar with the landscapes and the customs of local communities. In 1936, a young man named Geoffrey Clifton joins the expeditioners with his new wife, Katharine. One night, the English patient listens to Katharine read a passage from his copy of The Histories and realizes he is in love with her. Back in Cairo, where the group is based, he and Katharine begin an affair. Katharine ends the relationship in 1938, afraid of what will happen if Geoffrey finds out. However, they still see each other on expeditions, and the English patient becomes increasingly cruel to her in public. After witnessing this behavior, Geoffrey realizes what happened between them.

When the war begins in 1939, the English patient is responsible for breaking down the group’s base camp in the desert. He arranges for Geoffrey to pick him up in his plane, but when Geoffrey arrives, he flies the plane directly toward the English patient. The crash kills Geoffrey and wounds Katharine, who was in the passenger seat. The English patient moves her to the nearby Cave of Swimmers, a cave filled with prehistorical wall paintings, and leaves his copy of The Histories with her. He walks for four days through the desert until reaching El Taj, where British soldiers detain him, suspecting that he is a spy. When he is finally released, he knows it is too late to save Katharine, so he begins working for the Germans as a desert guide. On one mission, in 1942, he returns to the Cave of Swimmers and retrieves Katharine’s body. He puts her in a plane his friend Madox left in the desert several years earlier and attempts to fly them out, but the plane falls apart in the air. While the English patient is able to parachute out, his body, covered in oil, catches fire in the process.

The English patient tells this story after being given morphine and alcohol by Caravaggio, whose suspicions that the man is not really English are confirmed. Caravaggio identifies the English patient as a Hungarian count named Almásy. He tells Almásy that Geoffrey Clifton had been secretly working for British intelligence, and the government knew about Almásy and Katharine’s affair the entire time. They had planned to kill Almásy before he disappeared into the desert.

Interspersed with Caravaggio and Almásy’s conversation is Kip’s story. Kip volunteered for the British Army, and with his strong mathematical and engineering skills, became part of an experimental bomb defusing unit overseen by Lord Suffolk, a kind English gentleman. Suffolk became a father figure to Kip as they traveled across England, disarming bombs. In 1941, Suffolk and two other members of the unit were killed defusing a bomb. A devastated Kip rejoined the army as an enlisted man and was soon sent to Italy.

In the summer of 1945, the residents of the villa celebrate Hana’s 21st birthday, but on August 6, they learn about the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kip becomes enraged and threatens to shoot the English patient, who has come to embody the privilege of the white, Western world. However, he leaves the villa instead, riding a motorcycle down the Italian coast. Kip ultimately returns to India, becomes a doctor, and marries and has children. He thinks about Hana often. Hana returns to Canada, and while she is still alone in her mid-thirties, she is content.