Ondaatje and Mingella: The English Patient

• Outline of structure of the Novel
  
• Contrasts and Parallels between the Novel and Film
  

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1993 Vintage edition)

• Present Time, 1944/45:

  Opening: World War Two, Italy, with some flashbacks showing Almasy's plane brought down and how he was brought to Pisa and then, with Hana, to Villa San Girolamo, pp. 1- 131.

  In the novel this is framestory. In the movie it is simply juxtaposed with earlier story.

• 1942, jumps back to 1936, and forward again:

  We are told the story of how Almasy and his group of fellow male explorers (including Madox) met with Geoffrey and Katharine Clifton and how Almasy and Katharine gradually became lovers, pp. 133-58.

  In the novel this story is one of two inset into the framework of 1944/45. The other is Kip's. In the film this second material begins and ends the film and is therefore the frame.

• Back to 1944/5 and Villa, interspersed with climactic moments of inset love story:

  We delve into Caravaggio, and meet Kip. We learn more about Hana, pp. 162-77.

  We do have still moment of return to dead woman and plane shot down in desert. In both novel and film, this climactic moment remains unexplained (fully) until the end.

• 1940, Kip's Story:

  How Kip was chosen and trained by Lord Suffolk, Miss Morden and Mr Harts, pp. 182-203.

  This gives Ondaatje ample room to depict minefield bombs, the horror and barbarism, the spite of it. Opens with Kip's life in India; ends with sense of green and pleasant England where local people who are different from a "norm" tolerate one another.

• Kip's Experience of War: 1940s to 1945:

  This moves back and forth with Kip at center (or sometimes at margins) defusing bombs. The love affair with Hana comes out strongly here, pp. 207-226.

• Mostly Almasy and Katharine's inset story, 1936-1940:

  This begins with Almasy as storyteller but story is also retold again with another perspective, pp. 229-261, with climax at cave again at center (see pp. 169-175 especially).

• Back to Present Time, 1944/45: ending bringing together threads of time:

  Anticlimactic, violates much that has literally gone before in the personal stories; includes straight history (as do earlier sequences), pp. 265-302.

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1993 Vintage edition) and Anthony Mingella's 1996 Miramax film, The English Patient

A Few Parallels and Contrasts

• The novel is reasonably accurate historical fiction. You can research many elements in it and discover they have analogies in real people's lives, real names, and real events in the period and places covered. The film is an emotion picture (romance melodrama) combined with action picture (male adventure). Nonetheless (despite the occasional action-sequences), the film reminded me of other films made from high-status novels (say the type one sees on Public Television), and the type characters, their fates, and many of the hinge-points and scenes of the film recall these lavish emotion pictures. Our hero is no longer swash-buckling; he is someone who is dying and his desert daring-do and spying career are presented as the result of his enthrallment to a femme fatale, intellectual and adventurous herself, but finally a dutiful docile wife.
• The novel emphasizes Hana, the English Patient, and Carvaggio in villa, to which comes Kip (setting). The film begins and ends with Almasy and Kathine's love affair and weaves back and forth between two parallel love affairs (the other is Kip and Hana).
• The novel emphasizes relationship of Kip to Almasy. In the film William Dafoe as Caravaggio becomes central and opposing figure to Ralph Fiennes as Almasy. In the novel Hardy dies early; his death not climactic and not responsible for Kip's concluding act; Kip returns to India out of despair over dropping of nuclear weapons on colored peoples by white people. In the film Hardy's death makes Kip despair, but Kip does not return to India: we are left to feel Kip and Hana may get together again.
• In the novel Almasy dies naturally and Maddox kills himself in a church when a preacher preaches hatred and war. In the film Hana helps Almasy commit suicide actively; Almasy despairs when told by Caravaggio that Maddox killed himself when Maddox heard Almasy a Nazi spy.
• In the novel despair at man's barbarism comes from use of landmines and nuclear weapon; the film does not project ultimately grim or quiet despair in the same way. The novel suggests love between people of different nationalities cannot work as permanent; it has a paean to death and barbaric goddesses in Almasy's final scene in the desert next to Katharine's corpse (this is not the last scene of the novel). The novel ends with the characters dispersed or dead; the only ecstacy we experience at length occurred in the desert between Almasy and Katharine's corpse. The film provides a semi-uplifting ending when Hana goes off on the bus clutching her Herodotus and smiling at a child; she may meet Kip again; we then return to intense romance of Almasy and Katharine as beautiful as they fly through the sky (though they will be shot down had the film continued). The strongest pessimistic scene of the film is the torture of Caravaggio by a nurse in white uniform, but we see that his talk with Almasy at least on one morning has taken the poison from his system and he is last seen making contact with a woman we are to assume he will love and perhaps marry. The film ends with an affirmation of love (and by extension) marriage, with war as simply a terrible interruption of these patterns which are presented as ongoing, fundamental and the dominating norm. The film's story is an aberration which (mysteriously or a result of human nature) people have to endure stoically.
• Both the novel and film use Cave of Swimmers climactically; both the novel and the film use desert metaphorically and imagistically. But as befits the larger role of Hana in the novel, there Almasy tells Hana about winds; in the film which continually moves between Cairo and the desert and Italy just as the war is ending, he tells Katharine while they are buried under sand.
• The novel and film use theme of reading, but the novel is richer and fuller and more detailed. Ondaatje's English Patient combines the adventure type of The Scarlet Pimpernel with female romance of Rebecca. In the novel Katharine Clifton a Rebecca femme fatale type and both novels are alluded to more than once -- as well as Kipling's Kim, Herodotus, James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. There is a skein of archetypal Biblical and Jungian imagery as well (studied by a few critics as wasteland and European medieval romance imagery). Reading is not brought out much more fleetingly in the film, though there is a use made of Herodutus mostly as a memory book for Almasy; the film does keep the dialogue bewteen Kip and Almasy where Almasy admires Kipling's style and tells Kip he must luxuriate in the words and Kip answers with intelligent witticisms which concisely convey the retort that the content is all about European domination over Indian people.
• Small things: in the novel Kip sleeps near a statue; in the film we see Hardy blown up by one. In the novel writing and art are positive; in the film writing and photography allow people to capture and torture you: art is a seductive allurement; it can have religious and historical tradition and beauty, but in the action of the film it's important as something which may endanger someone.