The English Patient: What the Movie Leaves Out

by Jenny Wortman

(Editor's note: Michael Ondaatje will be at Lighthouse for a Writer's Studio visit March 19 and 20, and Jenny Wortman is teaching an online Reading as a Writer class on his work to help you get ready. Class starts February 15; click here to learn more and register.)

The movie The English Patient left me a sobbing mess. The tragic love affair at the film’s center reminded me of my own tragic love affair, an on-and-off relationship that swirled through my teens and 20s and, despite glaring differences from the movie’s spectacular war-time romance, had its share of passion and pain.

Later, I’d realize that my relationship had been less tragic than simply dysfunctional and immature. It failed to achieve the grand dimension I’d determined to impose on it, again and again, and though that itself was a kind of tragedy, it wasn’t the stuff of Shakespeare or Oscar-winning films.

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For years, then, hoping to escape the histrionics of my youth, I avoided reading Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Imagine my surprise when, after finally gathering the courage to crack it open, I discovered Ondaatje’s novel bears little resemblance to a Hollywood melodrama. It has all the ingredients, which the movie seizes upon. The book, for example, contains these oft-quoted lines from the English patient’s journal:

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

Unsurprisingly, the movie puts these romantic lines to use, but adapts them thus:

Betrayals in war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace. New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For the heart is an organ of fire.

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The movie version foregrounds high drama: betrayals, lovers smashing things, hearts on fire. Gone are the homey “habits of the other” and the “new light” of revelation. And in the movie, lovers, not sentences, are nervous and tender. The lovers stand front and center; the book’s larger meditations--on Other, knowledge, language—are brushed aside.

Here’s a different portrait the book paints of lovers, in this tranquil scene between nurse Hana and sapper Kip:

Kip walks out of the field where he has been digging, his left hand raised in front of him as if he has sprained it.

He passes the scarecrow for Hana’s garden, the crucifix with its hanging sardine cans, and moves uphill towards the villa. He cups the hand held in front of him with the other as if protecting the flame of a candle. Hana meets him on the terrace, and he takes her hand and holds it against his. The ladybird circling the nail on his small finger quickly crosses over onto her wrist.

The quiet poetry of this passage characterizes the novel at least as much as the heart-on-fire ardor. Nothing is smashed here, or even said: the drama comes through the play of imagery and language, sans fireworks. And, unlike in the movie, the English patient’s doomed love affair is but one of many significant relationships, romantic and platonic, that the book portrays. No one person or relationship or story is the center of the universe. Try telling that to my 20-something self.

Or try telling that to my 40-something self. I like to think I’ve matured since the movie The English Patient reduced me to a puddle of tears. I have a husband, kids, work, a home: a life both ordinary and extraordinary, full of routine irritations and simple joys. Still, at times, my world seems stingy and small.  Then I read The English Patient, and my small self dissolves into a vast and varied realm. Ondaatje puts it best:

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

Ondaatje’s The English Patient doesn’t set my heart on fire. Better yet, it leaves me full and satisfied, drugged on sentences and moments, the spell of other lives.


Jenny Wortman is a fiction instructor at Lighthouse and an associate fiction editor for the Colorado Review. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including the North American Review, Confrontation, the Massachusetts Review, the Southeast Review, and PANK. Her four-week online Reading as a Writer class on Michael Ondaatje starts February 15.