Ralph Fiennes in the 1996 film adapation of The English Patient. Because what actually turned up, of course, was The English Patient: 300-plus pages about four people inhabiting the mined rooms of a remote Italian villa at the end of the second world war four very different people who meet in damaged solitude, who talk (there are a lot of night conversations), who love, whose histories, revealed in vivid flashes, become a taut, outraged meditation on the idea of war, of nationalism and of prejudice a meditation that slips between spies and explorers, Suffolk and the Egyptian desert the Punjab and Women’s College Hospital, Toronto, as easily as the sapper, Kip, slips into bomb craters to defuse bombs. I thought it might be a brief novella – all dialogue, European-style, big type.” “I did not know at first where it was taking place, or who the two characters were. “It began with a small night conversation between a burned patient and a nurse,” he said. He found a lectern and, white head bowed, reached into his pocket for a small piece of paper. O n Sunday night, Michael Ondaatje stepped on to the wide stage of the Royal Festival Hall in London.
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