This
was a slow read. I had a hard time following the jumbled timelines and trying
to connect with the main characters. I know many of my Goodreads friends loved
the poetic writing. But it didn’t work for me. I picked this up expecting to
read a war novel with an engaging plot and well developed and relatable
characters, and found myself reading an epic, meandering and prolix narrative
poem instead.
Four
people of different nationalities are thrown together by chance at a Tuscan
villa towards the end of World War II. The Englishman is badly burned from a
plane crash and is dying. The Canadian nurse Hana, who could have gone with
other hospital nurses to the safer north, decides to stay to nurse him. A Sikh
sapper Kip does his life-threatening job of defusing mined bombs around the
villa. An Italian-Canadian thief and spy Caravaggio, who is a buddy of Hana’s
father’s, comes to persuade Hana to leave the dangerous place. Kip falls in
love with Hana despite his suspicion of white Europeans. Caravaggio identifies
the English patient as the pro-German Hungarian desert explorer.
Each
character has a poignant backstory which, when revealed, sheds light on his/her
present state of mind. The English patient once had a steamy love affair with a
British intelligence agent’s wife, which resulted in the husband’s
suicide-murder attempt that killed the wife; Hana had an aborted child and was
devastated by her father’s death from serious burns; Kip lost a dear British
friend and coach who was killed while defusing a bomb; Caravaggio had his
thumbs severed as punishment for stealing photo shots of German officers.
The
plot was not a bad one, but the way it was executed, the suspense was much
diluted, and the characters, with the exception of the Sikh (Kip), failed to
strike a chord.
Interspersed
throughout the novel is technical information about cartography and desert
oases and bomb defusing, which I didn’t find interesting.
I’m
giving this novel 3 stars.
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