The Glorious Disorder of Michael Ondaatje’s Early Work

In an interview with the Times, earlier this year, Clint Bentley, the Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter of the film “Train Dreams,” was asked to name his “favorite book that no one else has heard of.” Bentley’s answer? Michael Ondaatje’s “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” from 1970. Bentley described the book, which combines prose, poetry, and photographs, as “hard to categorize.” He added that, despite its obscurity, he had eventually come across someone else who had read it.

I must be in the minority, because all my friends (each one of them, for good or ill, writers or visual artists) have read that book. We routinely talk about its boldness and inventiveness. But Ondaatje’s best-known work, the first of his that I read, the one that made him an international star, was the novel “The English Patient,” published in 1992. It won the Booker Prize that year, and the marvellous screen adaptation, by Anthony Minghella, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1997.

I got my first job as an assistant professor around the time that “The English Patient” came out—in those years, for people of the “tinted persuasion” (the phrase is Salman Rushdie’s), it was easy to find an entry into English departments in the U.S. if you wanted to teach post-colonial literature. “The English Patient” was a gift to my curriculum. The novel allowed me to foreground the politics of otherness artfully. My students and I discussed its critique of narrow nationalism—the conviction, expressed by the explorer Almásy, that “we are deformed by nation-states.”

What makes this idea more powerful, and even poignant, is the appearance, in the book, of Kirpal Singh, an Indian combat engineer, or sapper, who goes by Kip. He is defusing bombs that the Germans have left behind in the Italian countryside, the immediate setting for the novel. In this drama of war between the imperial powers, Kip acts as a moral agent. He is devastated by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When reminded that the English patient isn’t really English, Kip replies, “American, French, I don’t care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman.” In other words, there is difference, and then there is difference.

There was another way that “The English Patient” was of help to me. I was still young when I read it, and falling in love. “The heart,” the novel taught me, “is an organ of fire.” Ondaatje’s language was piercingly lyrical; I was keenly attentive to its precision regarding what, in academic seminars, got called “the representation of desire.” Theory, much of it unintelligible, was enjoying its moment of dominance in literature classrooms; “The English Patient,” in contrast, was about bodies, at war and in love; it dealt with emotional conflict and striking sensual details. I carried in my head bits of the novel, such as the question that the English patient asks his fellow-explorer: “Madox, what is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of an impress of your thumb?” (Late in the novel, the answer that I had been curious about arrived: the hollow was, in the world of the book, called the vascular sizood.) Kip and a Canadian nurse, Hana, fall in love in an abandoned Italian villa; they are “discovering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them.” I was a new immigrant in love, and, reading such words, I imagined sexual love as a new country.