Ondaatje’s The English Patient voted best Man Booker Prize winner in 50 years She is half crazed from so much death - the soldiers, a lover, her baby, her father. (Just 20 now, Hana first appeared, briefly, as a little girl in Ondaatje’s previous novel, In the Skin of a Lion.) When the hospital staff to which she is attached moves on, Hana prefers to stay with the bed-ridden Englishman, living like a scavenger, sleeping in a hammock in the corners of rain-swept, cavernous rooms, reading at random from books in the library. Who is he? Discovered by Bedouins in the Libyan desert after a plane crash, he has miraculously survived long enough to reach northern Italy and the care of a young Canadian nurse, Hana. Each of them has been terribly wounded by the war - and the war isn’t over yet.įirst, there is the badly burned, slowly dying English patient. To escape, at least partially, this random violence, four people find themselves inhabiting an abandoned, half-ruined nunnery outside Florence. In that spring of 1945, a young woman might sit down one evening at a piano, strike a high C and be blown to pieces, along with the room around her. To slow the Allied advance through Italy, the Germans dynamite bridges, mine roads, booby-trap buildings. The Second World War is drawing to a close. After all, Ondaatje possesses awesome narrative gifts: Prose as beautiful and clear as rainwater, a composer’s artistry in the canny unfolding of his stories’ themes and variations, a flair for suspense and, not least, characters whose destinies shake us like a death in the family. That Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, The English Patient, has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize is hardly surprising.
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