The English Patient

This book is a tough one to read, for a few reasons.

First, the dialog and descriptions are…lyrical? Pretentious? Long-winded? I don’t know how to describe it, but the author would never say something in one word if he could use 37 words instead.

It’s like he knew he was writing a Very Important Book and was determined to make the most out of it. At multiple times, I would literally shake my head and say, people don’t actually talk like that!

If a social media influencer ever became a novel, it would be this book. It goes out of its way to be very…perfect. Every scene is just wildly overblown and staged. Writing this was the literary equivalent of airbrushing something.

Second, the narrative is chopped up. A lot of the book involves “the past,” so the author jumps back and forth. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where you are, or who is doing the recollecting. The perspective shifts and sometimes you don’t realize it right away.

A lot of this felt gratuitous. There were times when making it confusing helped no one, and I felt like the author just did it in an attempt to be clever.

Third, the author is very subtle. He never just says what happens. He…hints at it. Did those two characters just have sex? I don’t know, I re-read the damn passage four times and still can’t figure it out. (At one point, I apparently missed that someone had sex with a dead person. You’d think that would stick out.)

The plot – the plot of the main timeline, anyway – involves four people living at a bombed-out monastery in Italy during the waning days of World War 2.

• A man, horribly burned in a mysterious plane crash in the desert. He was being cared for in the hospital which used to be in the monastery, but when it was evacuated, he couldn’t be moved. He can communicate, but claims to not remember his name. He speaks with an English accent, so they dubbed him The English Patient.

• Hana, a Canadian nurse. She has decided to stay with The English Patient and care for him, for reasons that are not straightforward.

• Caravaggio, a thief, or maybe a spy. He knew Hana’s parents and found out she was here alone, so he came to stay. He recently had his thumbs cut off when he was caught stealing (so he says).

• Kip, an Indian bomb expert. He is working in Italy, defusing all the bombs that the Germans left behind.

The story resolves around the interactions of these four people, and the slow revelation of the events leading up to The English Patient becoming injured. This is the part told in sporadic flashbacks which are non-linear.

This is a slow build of a story, and there’s not much of a payoff, honestly. At the end, I was like…that’s it?

The novel was written in 1992, and the acclaimed movie came out in 1996 (it would win nine Oscars the next year). You get the feeling that the author knew it was going to be a movie and was determined to make it epic.

I posted a note to a spy fiction group I’m a part of (there is a spy/espionage angle to the flashback plot). The first comment was:

Extremely rare case of where I prefer the film to the book.

After I was done, I went and read the Wikipedia summary of both the book and the movie. I missed some plot points, but not many. It’s just not an aggressive narrative. It’s a subtle story, so you need to make sure you’re in the mood for something that like.

I just…wasn’t.