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On Foreign Ground
| Article
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10405 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,733 Words |
| Author
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Tom Clark
Tom Clark, professor of literature at New College of
California, is the author of thirty books of poetry, including
Fractured Karma and Sleepwalker's Fate (Black Sparrow Press).
His other books include The World of Damon Runyon (1978), Jack
Kerouac (1984), The Exile of Celine (1987), and Charles Olson:
The Allegory of a Poet's Life (1991). |
A book, a map of knots... a room of four people in an abandoned villa lit only by candlelight and now and then the possible light from an explosion." So Michael Ondaatje signals the basic situation of his story to us at one point in The English Patient, a novel that indeed composes a shimmering cartography of "knots," riddling, arresting moments of image and feeling that are continually slipping out of our hands.
The themes of identity, loyalty, betrayal, and healing that Ondaatje treats are not at all unconventional for a novelist. What is unusual about Ondaatje is the way he treats them, a way much more common to poetry than to fiction. In The English Patient he exercises the powers of a poet in passages of startling prose that illuminate his story and give it the resonance and depth that are the real interest here. For speaking of Ondaatje as a novelist of ideas is possible only if one qualifies his alleged "messages" by the spin of his inventive method. The bursts and ripples of image that confuse, complicate, and ultimately clarify his new novel are more appealing than the landscape of thought they light up for us.
The English Patient is set in the summer of 1945, amid the ruins of Europe. Ondaatje's beautiful, wrecked, candlelit Italian villa--located in the picturesque hills of Tuscany, a former nunnery successively commandeered by Nazi and Allied occupying forces--is a haven from the war's storms for four displaced persons: a Canadian nurse, an Italian born Allied spy, a Sikh demolitions expert, and the hero of the title, an apparently amnesiac burn victim. Cut off from the security of familiar surroundings and experiencing various degrees and kinds of emotional shock as they sift through the remnants of a lost world, these characters gradually piece together, out of their fragile links with each other and out of the art of Europe's shattered civilization, some sense of common motive: the regaining of a semblance of sanity, of belonging in a human community.
Like the poet John Keats, who found truth in beauty, Ondaatje seeks an aesthetic solution to the problem of human suffering--a healing through the beauty of the imagination, as embodied in its beautiful creations of the past serve Ondaatje's characters as a refuge from war's destructive furies, just as clearly--and not all that much is ever clear with this explorer of the enigmatic, the ambiguous, the uncertain--the ideological and moral trusts of the past no longer obtain. Whatever frail commonality Ondaatje's four shipwrecked-by-history survivors arrive at is of a much lonelier, starker sort than that once promised by the old loyalties, with their
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