Magic Carpet Ride

By Pico Iyer

TITLE: THE ENGLISH PATIENT

AUTHOR: MICHAEL ONDAATJE

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 307 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: A hauntingly beautiful tale weaves myths and metaphors around the end of Empire.

FOUR FIGURES MOVE LIKE SHADows through an abandoned villa. All four of them have converged on this Tuscan space, without lives or real identities, in the limbo at the end of war. All four pass in and out of consciousness, half- daydreaming in a crumbling palace "lit only by candlelight and now and then light from a storm, now and then the possible light from an explosion." One of them is an "English patient," tarred black by burns and lost now in his memories of map-making explorations in the deserts of North Africa. One is a morphine thief named Caravaggio. The third is an Indian Sikh, called Kip, working for the English as a bomb defuser. And the sun around which all these "planetary strangers" turn is a 20-year-old female nurse from Canada.

Out of these ghostly materials Michael Ondaatje has fashioned a magic carpet of a novel that soars across worlds and times. Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan poet who lives in Toronto, has gained considerable acclaim before, most notably for his one-of-a-kind memoir of colonial Ceylon, Running in the Family. He has also established himself as one of the most inspired chroniclers, and exemplars, of the new cross-cultural mix taking shape all around us, able to light up Salman Rushdie-land with a visual daring that must have moviemakers salivating. Two weeks ago, The English Patient won England's prestigious Booker Prize, sharing the award for best novel of the year with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.

The heart of the book is the slow unraveling of the faceless patient's life, educed by morphine and haunted by scenes from Cairo nights when it was necessary "to proceed into the plot of the evening, while the human constellations whirled and skidded around you." That is very much how Ondaatje proceeds. One by one he introduces his characters, and slowly he unlocks their secrets, leading us through their lives as through the darkened corridors of a huge and secret house. Loves flicker, footsteps echo, lines of poetry recur. All four feel their way through darkness, by hand and memory, and with all the phantom sensuousness that darkness brings. The effect is a little like Borges on a love-potion.

What makes it shine is that Ondaatje alchemizes these abstract spaces with a poet's fluent radiance. Scene after scene shimmers with the jeweled brilliance of Arab poetry. The Indian alone, in the course of his wanderings, walks through cities where corpses are strung from trees and sleeps beside angels in deserted churches. He sees the Virgin Mary emerging from the sea (until her batteries give out), and he finds himself one of 12 defusers alone in a city without lights. Woven through such flights are colorful threads of historical arcana: richly researched evocations of the "desert Englishmen" of the '30s, lilting allusions to Herodotus and Kipling, catalogs of the winds that blow across the sands. The result is a realism that could not be more magical: "I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds."

In time, it begins to become clear that the bandaged European, on his sickbed in 1945, stands for many things that are lost and wounded. And in the dying light of Empire, Ondaatje shows us the end of one world and the birth of another -- deracinated, post-national -- where people must be mapmakers in a different kind of desert. Kipling has been eclipsed by Kip. Occasionally, the author's design becomes almost too insistent, finding in Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only the explosion of the whole world of nation-states, but also the final cruelty of the West upon the East. By then, however, he has thoroughly enveloped the reader in as rare and spellbinding a net of dreams as any that has emerged in recent years.