Anne's response to The English Patient

Yet another novel that made me want to throw it across the room at the end!! :-)  I wanted to know what happened to Hana and Caravaggio.  At least we got to know that Kip survived his flight into the river.  I would have like to see Kip and Hana make a go of it but I know now that their relationship would have never worked out - it's just the romantic in me wanting to have its way with everything!

As far as the actual structure of the novel goes, I have to say that it was confusing and frustrating at times.  As I got into the storyline, I sort of became used to the jumping around.  It kept me on my toes and I had to stay sharp while reading.  The same applies to the omission of some quotation marks when there was dialogue.  It made for an interesting aesthetic while looking at the page and it required your full attention.

The story itself was interesting.  Amnesia, love, lust, exotic settings, life, and death.  Not to mention drugs!  Morphine, again, is the vehicle used to get the story out into the open.  But is it the true story?  I would have to take the position that, even though he never says the words, the English patient is Count Almasy.  There  are enough veiled references and pieces of dialogue that convince me of the matter.  

The relationship between Almasy and Katharine Clifton was a violent, sexually-charged one.  They met in 1936 and she died in 1939.  These pre-war years that they had together were very tumultuous and foreshadowed the war years to come in Europe.  Similarily, Kip and Hana's relationship was not a simple, lovey-dovey one.  In contrast to Almasy and Katharine, I don't think Kip and Hana consumated their love, although there was sexual tension there.  Hana was initially very much taken with the colour of Kip's skin as seen on pages 123, 125, and 127.  I think it was a subconcious reaction to reading Kim with the English patient.  I don't believe that Hana saw Kip as a conquest, like a colonizer.  She really did love him but it was not meant to be . . . at that time . . . in that place . . . ever.

I really like that fact that Kip returns to India and becomes a doctor.  As a sapper, he was defusing bombs, saving lives in the process.  But he was working for the British, the white man.  After the bombs were dropped on Japan, Kip could no longer keep working for a government that represented what he was fighting against.  The British didn't drop the bombs -- "white humanity" dropped the bombs on "dark humanity" and at that moment, anyone who was white-skinned was the enemy, in Kip's eyes.  Interestingly, Hana, Caravaggio, and the English patient come into his mind at the end of the novel, particularly Hana.  I think that he came to realize that the three white people who shared the villa with him that summer were also victims and that he would only be feeding a tumour of anger if he continued to hold them responsible as well.  For him to heal and move forward, he needed to let his anger against them disappear. 

Overall, I enjoyed the novel - can't wait to see the movie!!!