The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 34: The English Patient, on screen and in print

Welcome back to the second of our Booker at the Oscars mini-series where we explore Booker Prize novels whose silver screen adaptations went on to experience Academy Award success. This time we’re revisiting The English Patient, the joint Booker Prize 1992 winner by Michael Ondaatje (the other winner was Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger) and its silver screen counterpart, directed by Anthony Minghella.

• Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
• The Histories by Herodotus
• In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Video:

You’re in love with him, aren’t you? You poor patient. You think he’s a saint because of the way he looks? I don’t think he is.

I’m not in love with him. I’m in love with ghosts. So easy, he’s in love with ghosts.

What if I told you he did this to me?

How could he have? When?

I’m one of his ghosts and you wouldn’t even know it.

I don’t know what that means.

Ask your saint who he is. Ask him who he’s killed.

Jo Hamya:

Welcome to The Booker Prize Podcast with me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

And me, James Walton. And today we’ve got the second in our three part series, the Booker at the Oscars, which is running between this year’s nomination and this year’s award ceremony. Last time we did Schindler’s List, the first Booker winner to become a film that won the best picture Oscar, and today we’re doing the second, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, which won the Booker in 1992. The film written and directed by Anthony Minghella, which was released in 1996, nominated for 12 Oscars in all and won nine, including best picture, best director, and best supporting actress for Juliette Binoche. Jack Seale’s win for cinematography may be worth a mention.

But in part one, let’s concentrate on the book, which did after all come first. This was the 1992 Booker winner jointly with Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth. Other books shortlisted that year include Black Dogs by Ian McEwan and Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe, which anybody with long Booker Prize podcast memories might know was the book I brought along when Jo and I first met on the very first podcast as one of my favourite Booker books ever. Also, I should mention that the English Patient won the Golden Man Booker in 2018, which was basically there was one book chosen for every decade with that obviously for the ’90s and then the public vote as to what was the best of all, and The English Patient was voted. So Jo, what can tell us about Michael Ondaatje?

Jo Hamya:

Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943. I think after a certain point in his childhood, his parents divorced and his mom went to England. He joined her around the age of eight, I believe.

James Walton:

Maybe a little bit older, but his mother and his brother Christopher, who’s now knighted and an eminent Canadian moved to England first after his dad left home. His dad an alcoholic by all accounts.

Jo Hamya:

So after childhood in England, he immigrated to Toronto as an undergraduate. He began teaching around 1971 there. I think although we think of Ondaatje as a novelist primarily, he’s also quite an accomplished poet, I believe he’s also a-

James Walton:

Was for quite a long time, yeah,

Jo Hamya:

… yeah, I believe he’s also a documentary maker. As well as winning the Booker Prize for The English patient. He was also long listed in 2018 for a novel called Warlight. Interestingly, also a Second World War book, although I think much more directly about the Blitz as opposed to the kind of gauzy, dreamlike, it almost seems post-war The English patient, even though it’s not. But it occurs in an emotionally post-war space, I suppose you could say. But yeah, I believe he’s still in Toronto.

James Walton:

Yeah, although he’s very recognised in Sri Lanka, including in 2016 when a newly discovered species of Sri Lankan spider was named after him.

Jo Hamya:

Wow.

James Walton:

Brignolia ondaatjei. That’s how famous he is. The one thing I’d just like to throw on in a personal note, I read his first book after The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost, which is set in Sri Lanka when I was on honeymoon in Sri Lanka. Doing that sometimes mocked but actually fantastic thing of reading books where they’re set, anyway … and obviously nothing more romantic than reading a novel about the Sri Lanka Civil War on your honeymoon. So the plot of The English Patient, which took Ondaatje six years, solid years apparently, doing nothing else. Four the story to get worked out, to arrange and rearrange and edit.

So it opens in a villa in Italy in 1945, with the war in Europe recently ended. And we see a nurse who daily bathes and anoints badly burnt patient and we gradually find out who they are. The nurse is Hana, who’s 20 from Canada, who’s suffering from a kind of shell shock, which is why she’s decided to stay in the villa with this guy rather than follow all her colleagues when the villa ceased to become a military hospital, and everybody else headed north.

We then learned about who the burnt man is, he was … He fell from a plane over the desert, burning saved by the Bedouin, delivered to the allies, and now he’s here in this military hospital that she has refused to leave. He’s a man who seems to know about everything, big fan of Herodotus, and the film actually led to a massive spike in sales of Herodotus.

Jo Hamya:

Really? Of the histories?

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Wow.

James Walton:

In the way that Four Weddings And A Funeral did for Auden. Anyway, he seems to know about plants, guns, flowers, Kipling, winds, pretty much everything else that comes up. Then in the next section, a man with badly injured hands hears about it, and he arrives and he is David Caravaggio. And his backstory is that he knew Hana’s father very well in Canada and Hana in fact, and David Caravaggio were both major characters in Ondaatje’s previous book In The Skin Of The Lion.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I didn’t know this.

James Walton:

Yeah, so that was their story in Canada and that’s why they are very close here. Less so, in the film as we’ll discover. And he suspects he knows who the English patient is, this mysteriously badly burnt person who says he doesn’t know who he is except that he’s English and he isn’t English. His name is Almasy. He was a Hungarian and David thinks that he worked for the Germans as a spy, or at least helped the Germans in some way in the war in North Africa. And as the book goes on, he feeds him morphine and together he and Hana learn that he’s indeed Almasy. He was a desert explorer in an international party in the 1930s and fell in love with Katherine Clifton, the wife of Jeffrey Clifton. And then the central quartet in the villa is completed by the arrival of Kirpal Singh, nicknamed Kip, which was also Ondaatje’s nickname to Dulwich College when he went to English public school. And Kip is an Indian Sikh and a sapper. So he is there to diffuse the unbelievably large amount of mines that the Germans have left behind in the villa and everywhere around it. And we also get his backstory and then the four of them sort of put themselves together. Tentatively, I think Ondaatje calls it tentatively, start to heal after the war. So what did you think of it, Jo?

Jo Hamya:

I really loved it. I loved it so much.

James Walton:

Why so?

Jo Hamya:

Okay, I think there are very few books where the author can set up a sense of tragedy about three pages in. So just to give people who haven’t read this book an idea-

James Walton:

It can’t be a spoiler alert if it’s the third page.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, it’s fourth page, to be fair.

James Walton:

Still, no spoiler.

Jo Hamya:

So the book opens with Hana caring for the English patient who is not English. It’s the great con book and an indictment of nationalism and imperialism generally Ondaatje’s part. But that aside, the book opens with Hana caring for the deeply disfigured English patient, and there’s this beautiful scene where she’s unskinning plums with her teeth and passing the flesh of the fruit into his mouth. There’s this gorgeous line where it goes, “He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.” So, that sets up the form of the novel, which operates on these points at which something will trigger each of the characters into a memory. But then you have this heartbreaking passage all of a sudden that goes, “There are stories the man recites quietly into the room, which slip from level to level like hawk. He wakes in the painted arbour that surrounds him with its spilling flowers, arms of great trees. He remembers picnics, a woman who kissed parts of his body that are now burnt into the colour of aubergine. ‘I have spent weeks in the desert forgetting to look at the moon,’ he says, ‘… as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission, but signs of preoccupation.’ “

I’ve spent this morning before the recording of this podcast arguing with a lot of our team that The English Patient is like a brilliant masterful book and film. But to me, those two paragraphs contain an entire novel in and of themselves. I just find-

James Walton:

[inaudible 00:08:35].

Jo Hamya:

… it so tragic, so beautiful, and Ondaatje’s prose is pretty much just like that for the entirety of the book, it’s just … it’s descriptive without ever being florid. It works the way memory does, in the way that certain details wash over you quite suddenly and then withdraw, kind of like a wave. I think the thing that I love most about this book is that there’s a method he uses where he doesn’t signal to you who is speaking or whose perspective you’re reading from. He just launches you into it and you should feel quite destabilised by this, but actually, I don’t know about you, James. I felt it worked with this idea of a novel that seeks to overcome ideas of tribalism or nationalism.

It felt quite natural that he should give us these unlabeled instances of consciousness and then you just gradually realise whose voice belongs to who. There’s just so much to love in this book for me, I adore it.

James Walton:

I really, really like it.

Jo Hamya:

That’s not love, James.

James Walton:

No, no, it’s not adoration, but it’s becoming so as you’re making the case. It is terrific book. Yeah, he says that because he was a poet, he was a poet for a long time before he turned to novel writing and he was asked, what’s your poetic background bring to The English Patient? And he said, “Sort of quietness, there’s a whispering.” It’s not a declaiming book. People know the film, they will think it’s the big love story, but actually it’s not. The big love story in the film is a constituent part of the book, but not colossal.

Jo Hamya:

No, it’s actually quite small, relatively speaking.

James Walton:

So Juliette Binoche plays Hana, the nurse who was up for best supporting actress and won in fact, and Kristin Scott Thomas who was up for best actress plays Katherine, but if it’d been faithful to the book, it would’ve been the other way around because Hana would be the main actress, wouldn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

And very much supporting actress, Katherine. What do we make of Hana?

Jo Hamya:

Of Hana as a character?

James Walton:

Yeah. It’s quite interesting the idea of that nurses get shellshocked. She just suffered enough. She also learn of the death of her father.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, who also has died in a fire. I say also, but the English patient represents to Hana, I suppose, an opportunity to be by the side of her father.

James Walton:

That’s right, to tend to her father in a way that she couldn’t.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Caravaggio at certain point very early on when he arrives at the villa, is concerned that Hana might in some way be in love with the English patient and in fact, what she’s done is elevated him into a kind of saintly …

James Walton:

Yes, she has really, hasn’t she? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. But this is so interesting to me because actually the thing is, you’re asking me what do I think about Hana? But the fact is I don’t think with any of the central four characters in this book, you could say what you thought about one person without drawing upon another.

James Walton:

No, true.

Jo Hamya:

The way that they all work is in relation to each other. It’s one of the amazing accomplishments of this novel. Of course, you can think of them as distinct characters. You could think Hana is a nurse, Hana is Canadian. Hana has cut herself off from her emotions and calls people buddy in order to overcome the grief that she feels at being shellshocked from war.

But that wouldn’t really tell you what Hana was like. What would tell you what Hana was like is the fact that she reads to the English patient and anoints him with oils. That she has this relationship with Caravaggio, where she understands that he’s a humane thief. That she falls in love with Kirpal, Kip Singh, and in the end represents to him the kind of opportunity that he never quite manages to reach to, I suppose create an alliance within himself, with the West, so-called.

And I keep saying that I love this book, but it’s one of the reasons that I love this book, is that the same is true of say, Caravaggio. You could not talk about Caravaggio without talking about his relationship to the English patient, which is a lot more pronounced in the film than it is in the book. But this idea that he harbours suspicions that the English patient may not be English, and the reason he does this is because he has been mutilated in war and is, in the film, more so seeking revenge. I think in the book more so seeking explanations as to why he wants to find the centre, the root of the evil that has been done to him and is forced to let that all go because the man he finds, who he expects will resolve this question to him is … has no memory, has no body, has no use. And so he’s set free by the English patient.

And yeah, it’s an extremely … I’m making this book sound so complex, but it’s not. It’s sort of, I feel like, explaining how your friends work upon you and your life or your family works upon you in your life.

James Walton:

It is very delicately done, isn’t it? The tentative way in which they put themselves back together and help to put each other back together. Now, you mentioned a couple of times the theme of nationalism and imperialism and they don’t sound too forbidding because they are pretty much central to the book. But anyways, as you say, one thing we learned about the English patient is that in the desert, he came to hate nations. He wants to erase his name and where he comes from, which he kind of does actually, because he ends up as the English patient. And there’s a colleague of his who commits suicide when he hears a pro-war sermon in Somerset. It’s different in the film, but here we’re told that he dies quote, “Because of nations.” But is there a sort of, I suppose on the fool’s paradise, devil’s advocate side of things-

Jo Hamya:

Sure.

James Walton:

… to mix my metaphors, that it’s about … it’s touching and nice, but also as naive as, “Imagine there’s no countries,” by John Lennon.

Jo Hamya:

So I think Ondaatje is operating at a higher level than the characters. So I think Kirpal or Kip is a really good … and his relationship with Hana, following this idea that you can’t talk about one character without talking about the other. His relationship with Hana is a really good example of this sort of naivete being gradually put to bed, but only once it has been usefully exhausted because what these characters are all doing in this Italian villa is overcoming, overcoming a war, overcoming huge amounts of trauma. And in order to do that, they need to put the past behind them and believe in a better future.

And so, part of that is Kip and Hana’s relationship. Kip in the book is this character who, for the first time in his life felt a kind of kinship or community he’s always longed for in the division that he signs up for, diffusing mines or bombs. He’s overseen by a man called Lord Suffolk, who is by all accounts very generous, very kind to him.

James Walton:

Well, he loves England at this point and loves Lord Suffolk.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. All the while playing in the back of his mind is the idea that his older brother is the man who is supposed to have gone to war. Kip, in the family order of things, should have gone off to become a doctor. His brother should have gone to war, but his brother doesn’t believe in fighting wars on behalf of the West, and so he’s always told Kip that he’s a fool to love the English. When Kip finally finds this kind of community in England, it’s only by the grace of Lord Suffolk’s kindness. He’s thoroughly discriminated against by other members of the British army. And Lord Suffolk rather tragically, he’s a real life figure actually, dies diffusing a mine.

At which point, Kip continues on in command of his squad, takes over from Lord Suffolk. But his belief in this idea of community falls apart and is only restored by his relationship with Hana, gradually. To be clear, Kip and Hana have a fairly mutually assured passion for each other. There’s no question about that, but the way their relationship is described, even in the middle of the book, you know that it’s doomed to fail because for example, “He will sit up and flip his hair forward and begin to rub the length of it with a towel. She …” as in Hana, “… she imagines all of Asia through the gestures of this one man, the way he lazily moves his quiet civilization. He speaks of warrior saints and she now feels he is one, stern and visionary, pausing only in these rare times of sunlight to be godless and formal, his head back on the table so the sun can dry his spread hair like grain in a fan-shaped straw basket.

“Although he’s a man from Asia who has in these last years of war assumed English fathers following their codes like a dutiful son. ‘Ah, but my brother thinks me a fool for trusting the English.’ He turns to her sunlight in his eyes. ‘One day,’ he says, ‘I will open my eyes. Asia is still not a free continent. And he’s appalled at how we throw ourselves into English wars. It is a battle of opinion we have always had.’ ‘One day you’ll open your eyes,’ my brother keeps saying. The sapper says this, his eyes closed tight mocking the metaphor. ‘Japan is a part of Asia.’ I say, ‘And the Sikhs have been brutalised by the Japanese in Malaya,’ but my brother ignores that. He says the English are now hanging Sikhs who are fighting for independence.”

And Hana’s only response to this very good point is to go. “She turns away from him, her arms folded, the feuds of the world, the feuds of the world. She walks into the daylight darkness of the villa and goes in to sit with the Englishman.” I mean, Hana’s got a point as well. She’s right, the fuse of the world, the fuse of the world.”

James Walton:

No, it is massively nuanced. There’s so many ways of reading that. It’s a very undogmatic book, I think.

Jo Hamya:

On the other hand, the fact that she does this is sort of the reason why after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kip has no choice but to return to India and marry, I suppose, a nice Indian wife and to follow his brother’s words, really, follow this … even though he will always think of Hana as someone who gave him this momentary ability to be side by side with the West.

James Walton:

Just before we better move on and … the film in a second. But one thing that’s just not in the film and that you’ve mentioned, and I don’t think it needs a spoiler alert really, because the bombs got dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in the book, this is a very sudden realisation now for Kip, that actually … So he says, “When you start bombing the brown races of world, you are an Englishman.” And then this is a phrase often attributed to him, but actually it’s Caravaggio who thinks they would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation and he just goes away on his motorbike but then falls off a bridge.

And I have read some critics suggesting that this is Ondaatje disapproving of his hasty departure because I must say, it does seem a bit hasty to me. He’s been very fond of English, admittedly with the provisos that you have eloquently described to. But suddenly attacking the Japanese who, after all, have been attacking the rest of Asia, haven’t been particularly good guys. And dashes off in a sort of rage. And then as I say, crashes. The crash is Ondaatje’s rebuke to his over-hastiness. I’m not sure about that really.

Jo Hamya:

I’m not either, because I think it really deviates from this idea that set up with the so-called English, actually Hungarian, patient himself who switches sides in the war, going from being on the side of the allies to leading the Germans across the army and Rommel’s territory. I don’t think Ondaatje judges the English patient any more than he judges Kip, really. I read that scene of him falling into water as … I don’t know, maybe this is a really … maybe read too much into this, but I definitely remember this scene of Hana telling Kip that she would like to take him to Canada to visit a river that’s very dear to her and all he can think of when he thinks of rivers are being shot at or diffusing mines. And this moment of falling into a river which he left, was confirmation of this fact that his memory will just ultimately always go back to that, not necessarily to that place of war, but to that separation between the two of them.

The ability she has to see a river and think, “I would like to bring Kip here,” and Kip’s inability to think of it as a nice place, is only … the only way his mind can go is, “I was part of a war as a brown man.”

James Walton:

So thanks, Jo. Beautiful close reading you’ve done there and the book you completely adored and I greatly admired and sort of loved it, and it is great. So the question is, how on earth do you turn a book like that into a big Oscar-winning film? So we find out after the break.

Video:

Mrs. Clifton, I’d like to present. Count Almasy.

Hello, Jeffrey gave me your monograph and I was reading up from the desert. Very impressive.

Thank you.

I wanted to meet the man who could write such a long paper with so few adjectives.

A thing is still a thing, no matter what you place in front of it. Big car, slow car. Chauffeur-driven car. Broken car, still a car. Not much use though.

Love, romantic love, platonic love, filial love. Quite different things, surely?

Uxoriousness. That’s my favourite kind of love. Obsessive love of one’s wife.

There you have me.

Jo Hamya:

We’re back for part two. James, can you tell us about The English Patient, the film?

James Walton:

It’s a similar sort of setup to the book that we’ve described. There’s still four people in the villa, with Ralph Fiennes as the not-so English patient in spectacular burns makeup. Juliet ache as nurse Hana. Willem Defoe as Caravaggio and Naveen Andrews as Kip.

One difference is that Caravaggio is just someone who sort of knows Hana from Canada or has heard of her from Canada, rather than someone she grew up with and was a close friend of her father’s.

Jo Hamya:

His motive for seeking out the villa is really to exactly revenge upon the English patient.

James Walton:

Yeah, so there’s a much closer relationship, a much more direct relationship between Almasy in his spying work and Caravaggio who’s sort of after revenge, you’re right. Kip actually becomes distinctly minor character here.

The biggest difference between the book and the film is that the film essentially turns the whole thing into the big love affair between Almasy and Katherine back in the desert. A grand passion set against great historical events and they experienced that passion by having sex in the bathroom, up against walls, with a lot of the old putting of the thumbs in the mouth and all of that. Her husband incidentally is played by a somewhat baby-faced Colin Firth.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I know. There’s a scene of him in a Santa costume at one point, which is just so pleasing. It was very Love Actually before Love Actually, isn’t it?

James Walton:

Yeah, it is. And if it’d been more faithful to the book, as I said before, I think Juliette Binoche would’ve been up for best actors, Kristen Scott Thomas for best supporting actor. But as I say, this completely foregrounds Katherine and Almasy’s grand, grand passion.

Came out to largely rave reviews. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, for example, called it, “An intimate epic, vast landscapes mingle with the minute details of desire and the combination is transfixing.” As I say, sales of Herodotus went through the roof. But since then there’s been a bit of a backlash and the film became slightly more fashionable to mock, I think. And possibly led by an episode of Seinfeld in 1997 called The English Patient, where Elaine’s hatred for the movie when everybody else loves it so much and she loses their friends, is dumped by her boyfriend, and is sacked by the boss. And since then it’s often been reviled, the film, for being overblown and generally taking itself too seriously.

Jo Hamya:

Nope.

James Walton:

Which the writer of the episode of Seinfeld had actually said he quite liked the movie, just wanted to pick one that everybody felt that they had to admire. On the one hand, unbelievably well acclaimed. On the other hand, then became slightly fashionable to mock. Which side are you on Jo?

Jo Hamya:

I love this film. I love this film so much, James. I’m obsessed with this film. I have to sound a bit less frantic saying this because otherwise everyone’s not going to take me seriously. But yeah, I am hyper-fixating on it. I’ve watched it three times now and I’ll watch it again.

James Walton:

Why?

Jo Hamya:

Just like there’s nothing wrong with it. I can give you a list. So first off-

James Walton:

Okay, I can give you a list of what might be wrong with it just for devil’s advocate purposes.

Jo Hamya:

Okay, well don’t. I’m going to give you my list first. I think first off, it’s just so incredible to me that this … The film maintains an anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist stance that I think is more portrayed through Caravaggio as a character than through Kip, and also perhaps more through the English patient’s story arc, which is a bit more fleshed out in the film than it is in the book, really.

James Walton:

Much more fleshed out, as it becomes the focus, doesn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. The fact is when you watch this film, it looks by all accounts like an English period drama, it almost kind of looks like a Merchant Ivory film, really. Parts of it actually look like a Rubens or a Caravaggio. The scene where Kip is sitting alone in the outhouse and Hana’s trying to break down the door to find him, there’s this scene that’s kind of like the camera’s clearly on the floor, handheld. And the light is falling across him at an angle and it’s night so it’s dark. That just looks like a Caravaggio painting, that’s incredible. But yeah, to have created an anti-nationalist film out of a period drama is just wonderful to me. It’s the two things I love most in the world put together very pleasingly, with this sandwich. In a sandwich that’s filled with these incredible actors, as you say-

James Walton:

Incredible actors.

Jo Hamya:

Well-

James Walton:

Ralph Fiennes, really?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I do think Ralph Fiennes-

James Walton:

Not way too clipped? I mean, people often compare it to Lawrence of Arabia obviously, because there’s lots of great sweeping desert scenes, but it also reminds me a little bit of another David Lean film, which is brief encounter with very clipped English people.

Jo Hamya:

But he’s meant be clipped.

James Walton:

I know, but is he meant to that clipped?

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

Maybe let’s listeners judge for themselves.

Video:

Why were you holding his collar?

What?

What? That boy, that little boy. You were holding his collar. You were gripping his collar. What for? Is he next? You going to drag him into your little room? Where is it? Is this it?

Don’t do this.

I’ve watched you. I’ve watched you at garden parties. On verandas, at the races. How can you stand there? How can you ever smile as if your life hadn’t capsized?

You know why?

Dance with me.

No.

Dance with me. I want to touch you. I want the things which are mine, which belong to me. Do you think you’re the only one who feels anything? Is that what you think?

Jo Hamya:

But it’s essential that he’s clipped because both the film and … both in the film and in the book … I think in the book there’s this line that goes, “I’m a man who starves himself until he finds what he wants.” I’m paraphrasing this slightly, but it’s something to that effect and I feel like the only pointer, there’s another passage in which he says that when he reads novels, he identifies more with the jaded villains than with the optimistic heroes and heroines. He is supposed to be an extremely clipped man. This is part of the tragedy of his relationship with Katherine in the film and I suppose, something that makes him more of a useful cypher in the book, but it’s not something I noticed or that I picked up on.

James Walton:

Okay, two thoughts about it. My most generous was that because he’s not English, he was trying too hard to be English, Almasy, and therefore would’ve been over the top. But the other one is I did wonder if it was the kind of Brits designed to appeal to Americans as well.

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know because to be honest with you, I think there is a scene, I won’t spoil the film, but there is a scene towards the end of the film where Katherine Clifton and Almasy are in a cave and he’s going to leave her in the cave. You know what I’m referring to?

James Walton:

I very much do, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

And he makes this speech to her and that is a moment which could be so over the top, which could be so overblown. You already know how going to end because the first shot of the film is him crashing a plane in the desert and falling out of it in flames. So, you kind of know where this is going.

It’s a scene in which Ralph Fiennes as an actor could … he could really ham it out. He’s making a lot of very romantic declarations to Katherine at this point. It’s a point at which they’re forced to admit to each other the extent to which they’ve loved each other, but he’s so quiet with it. He almost whispers it and I think the magnitude of it is … could only be conveyed with the kind of subtlety. I think Ondaatje in an interview with Charlie Ros and Anthony Minghella, who directed the film, talks about it as one of the most generous pieces of acting that he’s ever witnessed.

James Walton:

I read a good article on the BBC website. I think part of the reaction against it, I think, is because it is in a way dated but unashamedly so, in a way. But this article was suggesting was the last hurrah almost of a genre that’s more or less disappeared now. The great, epic, sweeping love story against the backdrop of big historical events in the tradition of Gone With The Wind, or Dr. Zhivago, which perhaps doesn’t suit our more sceptical age.

And the consensus among people who are sceptical about this, that Fargo should have won the best picture Oscar that year because that pointed the way to the future, and this belongs in a way to the past. But having played my devil’s advocate for a bit, I’ve really loved the great, unashamed, sweeping, old fashioned, big old movie feel to it all.

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know, I have to say I don’t see it as a great big, sweeping movie. I think it’s deceptive in that way because it’s set in a desert and that’s an incredibly … there are sandstorms and crashing planes, to be sure, but I actually think a lot of what makes this movie so brilliant is things that you would actually miss on the first … Well, you would only subconsciously realise on the first watch, but become clear to you when you watch it the second or third time around.

So earlier in part one, I was talking about the beauty and tragedy of Hana feeding the English patient plums and him going back into his memory. The way that translates in the film is so minute, it’s actually sound. It’s that you don’t realise it. You register it, but you don’t realise it on first watch. When she pushes the plum through his teeth and the camera lingers on this moment, you start hearing a bell in the distance and you also start hearing plant life and animal life. You hear birds tweeting and the reason this is so significant is that up until that point in the film, the only sounds you’ve been hearing are machine made, the sounds of a train on its tracks rumbling through. The sounds of guns and the war. The sounds of cars, the sounds of bombs off. Then all of a sudden with this gesture of Hana feeding Almasy the plum, the soundscape of the film changes and you’re drawn back into memory, in this very organic, subtle way.

And it’s just one of the instances in this film where I felt like I didn’t love it because it was big and sweeping and I still maintained that it’s not big in sweeping. I loved it because it was almost Proustian where, okay, say a big scene where Clifton and the English patient are trapped in the car in the sandstorm and the sandstorm was raging around them. Actually what’s pivotal about that scene, is the fact that she’s lying on his arm and she looks to it and he looks at it and there’s this protracted moment in which you realise as the viewer, she’s not going to push it away. And there’s this silence, apart from the wind outside. Again, a very organic, natural sound, and that’s where these really beautiful moments lie.

James Walton:

This is linked to that, but slightly tangential. It made me think that books can be a lot more supple than films. So, how they get together in the book, their love affair can be done in little patches and scenes here and there, can’t it? Whereas in the film, certain amounts of business have got to be done. They’ve got to be trapped in the desert, they’ve got to lose that. This has got to happen and it made me think that films have to be a bit clunkier, as books can … One thing that was quite interesting that I heard Michael Ondaatje say was that he was told by Minghella, you can only have one flash … only one character can have a flashback in a film, which is why they simplified it the way they did. So again, the suppleness of books that they can do as many as they want, with all sorts of backstories flying to and fro.

Having read the book quite carefully, obviously as you do for these podcasts, then watching the film quite carefully as you do for these podcasts, if anybody wants to know about how to adapt the screenplay, this would be a good exercise to do, I think. You can see the decisions, why all the decisions were made. And in some of them I think there’s certain improvements over the book. I think getting rid of that Hiroshima apocalyptic ending business is better. Oh, I think beefing up Hardy actually, who’s Kip’s assistant. I think the spy plot is a lot clearer and better.

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know-

James Walton:

I mean, obviously what you lose out on is the unbelievable breadth and nuance and interest. How to streamline a book into a movie. We didn’t major on that last time with Schindler’s List but could have done. But in this, I don’t think I’d ever done that before, where I’d read a book just before I’d watched a movie and just seen all the decisions that this screenwriter made and why they made them and how understandable they all were. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of them, but how thoughtfully and beautifully the streamlining was done on the whole in this, and as I say completely with improvements to the book,

Jo Hamya:

I think Ondaatje and Minghella, I agree with you, with taking out Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end because I think it was something to do … I can’t remember where I read this, but it was something to do with the fact that the film had focused so carefully on four other people, that to suddenly introduce, even abstractly, the concept of loads of other characters, or people, or strangers, would blow apart the end of the film, no pun intended, by losing the intimacy that you’ve gained of watching these four characters’ lives intersect.

James Walton:

There is that. But also because Kip is, as we say, massively downplayed, he does get one great moment towards the end where he shows … a lovely scene where he shows Hana high up, with a rope, high up on the church, the mosaics. Now, in the book … It’s a very famous scene. In the book, he does that to a mediaeval historian who happens to be in town and let’s be honest, it’s better.

Jo Hamya:

It’s better in the film.

James Walton:

It’s better that it’s Hana and it also gives Kip a big moment, which it’s a shame he’s downplayed in the film in a way.

Jo Hamya:

I feel like their relationship is contained within that one scene because it’s point at which he’s showing Hana and she’s showing him, how to find beauty in things again after a really terrible time but I did … Actually for this time round, I watched the film first and then I read the book, I mourned … and then I went back and watched the film again. I mourned Kip’s absence from the film. I think he’s such a genuinely beautiful character in the … I mean, he still is in the film, but I think the problem with having someone like Naveen Andrews play him in the film in a comparatively minor role, is that … this might just be me, but I did spend my first two viewings just being like, “He’s so hot, God, he’s really good looking.” You know?

James Walton:

For people don’t know, he was in Lost. He was Sayid in Lost and he also made his first mark in Buddha of Suburbia.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, more younger viewers might also remember him as Jonas from Sense8 on Netflix.

James Walton:

Younger even than me, Jo?

Jo Hamya:

Actually, that is a good point. I feel like this is something that always happens with English period dramas, which is that the cast is always so much hotter than the people, the actual characters in the book it’s adapted from. And pardon my French for the Booker podcast, but the thing about the English patient that’s way more apparent than the book, is that it’s such a horny little film. It’s so full of repressed desire and the sense that characters are always on the brink of having sex with each other. I sometimes kind of wonder whether that comes more out of the fact that people like a young Ralph Fiennes, a young Kristen Scott Thomas, a young Juliette Binoche are just so outrageously good looking that you want to see them have sex.

James Walton:

I mean, that’s part of the proper old school movie isn’t it? Just having extremely good looking people on the screen, which I do think does help a movie, let’s be honest. And it certainly helped this. One thing it didn’t win, which I was quite surprised having [inaudible 00:38:57]. You ever heard of a film called Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton? That’s what one best adapted screenplay that year over Minghella. I think he might’ve been robbed.

Jo Hamya:

Can’t say, having never seen Billy Bob Thornton’s joint, you know?

James Walton:

No, no. Yes, I suppose that … what a fair-minded woman you are.

Jo Hamya:

I am.

James Walton:

Yes, I haven’t actually seen it either. So maybe it’s the greatest adapted screenplay ever. But this, I think it does an astonishingly good job. Is there anything … Oh, do we have to come to that question I rather dread?

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

Okay, then Jo, what do you prefer off of The English patient, the book and the film?

Jo Hamya:

It was a really close call this time.

James Walton:

See, that’s what I was like with Schindler List. [inaudible 00:39:34].

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, but I’m not going to mince 200 words. James.

James Walton:

You’re allowed to say they’re both great. I think you are.

Jo Hamya:

No, I’m actually … I am going to go for film.

James Walton:

Are you?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

Wow.

Jo Hamya:

But it’s sort of like-

James Walton:

It’s a bit of a twist. I don’t think they’ve … listeners would’ve seen that one coming.

Jo Hamya:

No, I love, I love, love, love this book. But I think there is something about … Don’t get me wrong, Ondaatje invests a lot of exquisite craft and care, and I love Kip’s character so much in this book in a way that doesn’t come across in the film. But I think ultimately, it’s these small details in the film. The score by Gabriel Yared.

James Walton:

Also Oscar-winning, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

The post-sound design, the editing. Yeah, the editing and the sound design. And I don’t rate the film higher for the fact that it’s more of a love story between Clifton and Almasy. I rate it higher because I think it would’ve been so easy to mess up an adaptation of this book, and yet it works and I think it’s a spectacular achievement.

James Walton:

I was going to go for the book. I did love the film.

Jo Hamya:

I rambled this time.

James Walton:

Exactly. We take our turns rambling. But just to ramble very, very … actually so shortly that it can’t even be called rambling. I just think there’s more interesting stuff in it. I mean, the film’s good, but the book’s just got more in it and therefore, it gets my vote. So, that’s the Booker at the Oscars for this week. I think we’re back next week with … straight on with the Remains Of The Day, the big one that got away as far as the Oscars are concerned, nominated for loads and loads, lost them all to another Booker book, so we’re not too bitter about it, Schindler’s List that we’ve already discussed. So that’s it for this week.

Jo Hamya:

To find out more about The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, head to thebookerprizes.com.

James Walton:

And regular listeners can join in with this bit now because you can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Substack @TheBookerPrizes, as well as joining our book group on Facebook. Until next time, goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye. The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by me, Jo Hamya and by James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Muyolo and the executive producer is John Davenport. It is a Daddy’s Super Yacht production for the Booker Prizes.