Where to Start with Michael Ondaatje: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Michael Ondaatje — whether to begin with The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion. A complete reading guide to his essential fiction.
Michael Ondaatje (born 1943) is the Sri Lanka-born, Canadian-raised novelist and poet whose The English Patient (1992) won the Booker Prize and the Golden Booker (the best of all Booker Prize winners) in 2018. He is primarily a poet — he published several collections before turning to the novel — and his prose style reflects this origin: precise, image-driven, resistant to conventional narrative linearity, and capable of extraordinary compression and beauty. He grew up in Sri Lanka and England before settling in Canada; his fiction spans colonial Toronto (In the Skin of a Lion), wartime Italy (The English Patient), Sri Lanka’s civil war (Anil’s Ghost), and New Orleans (Coming Through Slaughter, about the jazz musician Buddy Bolden). He is one of the most distinctive prose stylists in contemporary literature.
Where to Start: The English Patient (1992)
The essential Ondaatje — and one of the most celebrated novels of the 1990s. In a bombed Italian villa in the last months of the Second World War, four people shelter: Hana, a young Canadian nurse who has refused to leave her patient; Caravaggio, a Canadian thief who is Hana’s family friend; Kip, a Sikh sapper who defuses unexploded bombs in the Italian countryside; and the badly burned man who is Hana’s only patient — a man who has survived a plane crash in the Libyan desert and cannot remember, or will not reveal, who he is.
The novel moves between these four in the present and the English patient’s past: his years as a cartographer in the Libyan desert with the International Sand Club, his love affair with Katherine Clifton, and the sequence of events that ended in the fire that destroyed him. Ondaatje’s prose is at its most concentrated and most beautiful here; the love story between the English patient and Katherine is among the most precisely rendered in contemporary fiction. Won the Booker Prize in 1992.
In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
Ondaatje’s most politically engaged novel — and the one that establishes the world that The English Patient exists within (Hana and Caravaggio are mentioned in the earlier novel). Set in Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s, it follows Patrick Lewis, a young man from the logging community of Depot Creek, who comes to the city and becomes involved in the immigrant communities building its infrastructure: the Bloor Street Viaduct, the water filtration plant, the tunnels under Lake Ontario.
The novel insists on the visibility of the invisible: the Macedonian, Greek, and Italian immigrants who did the dangerous work of building the city are not in the history books, and Ondaatje’s novel is an act of recovery. The prose is characteristically lyrical; the set-pieces (a nun falling from the Viaduct, a theatrical fire, tunnelling under the lake) are extraordinary. The best place to start for readers interested in Ondaatje’s political concerns.
Reading Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje’s fiction is built on the conviction that poetry is the native language of the most intense human experience — that love, war, loss, and beauty require a prose style that is as exact and as suggestive as verse. His narratives are not linear; they circle their subjects through image and association, arriving at their truths obliquely. Begin with The English Patient for the most celebrated and the most emotionally immediate demonstration of his gifts; read In the Skin of a Lion to understand where that world came from, and what his political concerns look like at their most direct.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Michael Ondaatje?
The English Patient (1992) is the best starting point — the Booker Prize-winning novel set in a bombed Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, where four people shelter: a badly burned man who cannot remember who he is, a Canadian nurse, a Sikh bomb-disposal expert, and a thief. Ondaatje moves between the villa's present and the mysterious English patient's past in the Libyan desert, building a meditation on love, identity, and the ways in which war unmakes people. It is his most celebrated work and the most immediate demonstration of his prose gifts. In the Skin of a Lion is the best alternative for readers who want Ondaatje's most specifically Canadian novel.
What is The English Patient about?
The English Patient (1992) is set in 1945, in the Villa San Girolamo near Florence. Hana, a young Canadian nurse, has refused to leave an Italian country house still full of mines, choosing to stay and care for her only patient: a badly burned man who has survived a plane crash in the Libyan desert and who has lost his identity (hence 'the English patient'). She is joined by Caravaggio, a Canadian thief, and Kip, a Sikh sapper who defuses bombs. The novel moves between these four characters in the present and the English patient's past in the Libyan desert — his mapping expeditions, his love affair with Katherine Clifton, the flight that destroyed him. It is a novel about the dissolution of identity and the possibility of love across national and cultural borders.
What is In the Skin of a Lion about?
In the Skin of a Lion (1987) is set in Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s — among the immigrant workers who built the city's bridges, waterworks, and tunnels, whose labour is invisible in the official history. Patrick Lewis, a young man from rural Ontario, comes to Toronto, falls in love with Clara and then with her partner Alice, and becomes involved in the workers' community. The novel is about invisibility: the immigrants (Greeks, Macedonians, Italians) who built Toronto's infrastructure are not in the history books; Ondaatje insists on their presence. His prose is lyrical and precise; the novel is structured around a series of extraordinary set-pieces, including a theatrical fire and the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct.
Is Michael Ondaatje's fiction difficult to read?
Ondaatje's fiction is demanding but beautifully accessible — he is, first and last, a poet (he has published many poetry collections alongside his novels), and his prose style reflects this: precise, image-driven, and capable of sudden compression and beauty. His narratives are not linear; they move between times and places through association rather than chronology, which can require trust from the reader. The English Patient is the most immediately engaging; In the Skin of a Lion the most politically engaged. Readers who respond to highly wrought, poetic prose will find both novels extraordinary; those who need conventional narrative propulsion may find the associative structure challenging.
