![]() ![]() ![]() Finally, there is Kip, a Sikh bomb disposal expert who becomes Hana's lover and the patient's admirer and friend. Almasy is also tended by a young nurse, Hana, who is herself a victim of war, shell-shocked and grieving for her father's death under arms. This story is extracted by a former thief and spy, Caravaggio, who uses his knowledge of morphine addiction (developed after Axis torturers removed his thumbs) to make the patient garrulous. He spends the book on what he knows to be his deathbed, recounting the story of his doomed love affair with a married woman, Katharine Clifton. He's a Hungarian desert explorer called Laslo Almasy ( very loosely based on a real man) who was burned black after a plane crash on the Libya-Egypt border. The titular patient isn't, in fact, English. ![]() In case you're one of the few people who've neither read the book nor seen the film, The English Patient centres around an Italian villa towards the end of the second world war, where four variously damaged characters try to come to terms with the past. Even so, viewed through the reverse telescope of history it seems surprising that Ondaatje's novel had to share the prize. ![]()
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