I don’t even want to look to see when I started this because I know it’s been months and frankly, I’m only a little under a third through it. Not completely the book’s fault, since I spent three or four months doing nothing but writing hyperfiction so at least I have a decent excuse for not being up on my reading.
That said, it’s still a problem of pace for me with this book. What stands out for me here is that while I know this was made into a movie, I did not see the movie but seem to be reading it as if it were a movie I’m watching rather than a book that I’m reading. Even the music seems to com through, you know, that melancholy string sound that holds all the tension, emotion, and mostly despair of the setting of the narrative. The characters seem to have been well-beaten into submission by the events of war long before we come upon them in this bombed-out and abandoned villa in the Tuscany hills. As a matter of fact, I find the drifting in and out of morphined sleep of the English patient not much different than the wanderings of Hana, or Caravaggio.
Finally, the character of Kip, a young sikh soldier who has the job of finding land mines left behind by the retreating enemy armies, enters the small social circle at the villa. This may bring some life into the story which I still feel is following a sweet violinistic mood. Even revelations of who the characters are and how they got to this meeting point have been harrowing war stories, yet presented in a sort of smoky bubble that keep apart from each other.
Perhaps it is this, the fact that we get the characters after they’ve been twisted and ravaged by war, that keeps the tone (for me) in an anticlimactic somberness.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology