PEARL
K. BELL
73
the
Germans. The fourth inhabitant of the villa is Kip, a Sikh from the
Punjab, trained as a sapper in the British Army, who is defusing the mines
left
behind in the region around the villa. Gentle and soft-voiced, Kip is
marvelously adept at dismantling the dangerous objects that may blow
him
to pieces at any moment.
The structure of the novel is episodic, moving, in floating discon–
nected sequences, toward each character's private revelations. But no
matter how often Ondaatje's focus shifts to the others, his attention -
and
theirs - is riveted on the dying man at the center of their immediate
lives. After a large dose of morphine, he recounts his astonishing story:
though he speaks like an Englishman and knows Britain intimately, we
soon discover that he is not English at all but a mysterious Hungarian
aristocrat, Count Ladislaus de Almasy, a legendary map-maker and ex–
plorer of the African deserts, a man of formidable cultivation "who
knew where every Giotto was in Europe, and most of the places where
a person could find convincing
trompe l'oeil."
Before the war, on an ex–
pedition in the Libyan desert, he fell in love with the high-born wife of
an
English colleague who tried to kill him. After war broke out, Almasy
worked for the Germans in the desert campaigns of North Africa, and
eventually, after a series of hair-raising escapades, his burning plane
crashed in the desert, where Bedouins found him and delivered him to a
British hospital.
With the extraordinary tale of heroic adventure, doomed love, and
disaster, apparently based on an actual historical figure, Ondaatje weaves
a meticulously researched account of desert exploration in the 1930s. As
Almasy says of himself at one point, "I have always had information like
a sea in me." This is true of the novelist as well, and it is all conveyed in
Ondaatje's poetically hypnotic, dreamy, trance-like prose. But then, with
startling abruptness, he punctures the sinuous, ruminative mood of his
story with a jarring leap toward the end of the novel into political
melodrama. Kip hears on his radio that an atom bomb has been dropped
on Japan, and he goes berserk. Though he knows the bomb was
dropped by Americans, to Kip this most ultimate and undefusable of
bombs means the triumph of British imperialism. He threatens to shoot
the "English" patient, screaming, "Americans, French, I don't care.
When you start bombing the brown races of the world you're an
Englishman." Against the grain of the story Ondaatje has been unfolding
with such imaginative power, he shifts the register of his voice to out–
rage, reminding us that although he was educated in England and
Canada, his deepest roots remain in the third world of colonial oppres–
sion.
One may understand why he introduced this dissonant political note
