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Exorcizing the Family Demons
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10406 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,804 Words |
| Author
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Cyril Dabydeen
Cyril Dabydeen taught for many years at Algonquin College and
now teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa. His
work has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies in
Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, the Caribbean, India,
Malaysia, and New Zealand. He was named the poet laureate of
Ottawa from 1984 to 1987. His books include several novels,
six collections of poetry, and two volumes of short stories.
His most recent book is Jogging in Havana (Mosaic Press). |
Cast in a luminous halo of words, Michael Ondaatje's recently published novel, The English Patient, is a stunningly conceived work whose tapestry of interweaving voices, spliced scenes and situations, and desert lore makes it at times a poetic tour de force. The recent cowinner (with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger) of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, this novel has established for Ondaatje a solid place in the world of contemporary letters. Novelist Rohinton Mistry describes its style as "lapidary."
Because this is the first time a Canadian author has won the coveted Booker Prize, Ondaatje's book may succeed, as one member of the Commonwealth Institute in London recently said, in making this country north of the border less of a "boring place." Other Canadian writers such as Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies have been nominated for this award; and last year, Mistry, an Indian-born Canadian, himself came close to winning it for Such a Long Journey.
What all this suggests perhaps is that Canadian letters have come of age, and Canadian writers now come from a varied stock; they are not all Anglo Celtic scribblers mapping an imagined landscape inspired by the Great White North, a land off awesome beauty and over whelming solitude. Writers like Ondaatje are bringing interesting new frameworks and horizons to Canadian literature by introducing the extraordinary or exotic, bringing into play a cosmopolitan worldview and, often, a meta-phorical depth and style not previously seen.
Interestingly, upon learning that he had won the Booker Prize, Ondaatje immediately complained about Canada's taxes on books, one of his few public political statements. The English Patient could be seen as a major political statement, however; the book's title alludes to the slow death of the British Empire. Ondaatje should know: He was born in Sri Lanka, a former British colony.
The novel is set in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, in a hill town north of Florence, Italy; most of the action takes place in the Villa San Girolamo, a nunnery that became a stronghold for the German army before liberation by the Allies. The English Patient is about four characters. Hana is a twenty-year-old Canadian nurse, traumatized by her experiences in field hospitals, who remains with an English patient "burned into the colour of aubergine." The latter presumably is an Allied pilot who crash landed in the desert and was rescued by Bedouins.
Now Hana takes care of
...
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