The battle lines of the Italian campaign in World War II have moved northward from the outskirts of Florence. In a villa once owned by the Medici and then the Jesuits, lately used as a hospital by the Allies, two people remain. One is a nurse, a young Canadian woman who has been tending soldiers as the armies worked their way up the Italian peninsula. Bucking order, she has stayed in the villa to tend the English patient, a man who has been burned nearly beyond recognition, and who she says is too fragile to be moved any further.
At the beginning of the book, Ondaatje establishes how she cares for her patient, washing him every four days, bringing him food and water, injecting him with morphine, reading to him at night in the empty villa. “She reads to him from whatever book she is able to find in the library downstairs. The candle flickers over the page and over the young nurse’s talking face, barely revealing at this hour the trees and vista that decorate the walls. He listens to her, swallowing her words like water.” (p. 5) She also tends a garden, and ventures occasionally to other nearby settlements to barter for necessities, but otherwise there is only the English patient and the nurse, whose name is Hana. She is tending her own, inner, wounds as she keeps her last patient alive.
Though Ondaatje writes that Hana has tended the Englishman for months, it is apparently only when they are alone in the villa that he begins to recount his story, telling how he came to be so badly burned, how he came to be among the British army moving through Italy. The novel is divided into ten chapters, and it moves back and forth through time roving from the present when the war has left the characters behind back to the 1930s, as the nurse, the patient, and eventually two other men reveal varying amounts about their pasts.
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire