Rethinking Service
The Cresset, Easter 2013 (Vol LXXVI, No. 4, pp 6-14 http://thecresset.org/2013/Easter/Wells_E2013.html) Samuel Wells The 1992 novel and 1996 film The English Patient is set in Egypt during the Second World War (Ondaatje 1992; Minghella 1996). A married Englishwoman, Katherine, finds herself often alone as her husband pursues a cartographical expedition. She falls in love with an impossibly exotic Hungarian nobleman, Laszlo. Count Laszlo, another cartographer, discovers a wondrous cave, decorated with prehistoric paintings, deep in the Sahara Desert. Laszlo and Katherine fall into a passionate affair. Katherine’s husband, sensing the affair, plans a murderous revenge. He puts Katherine in the backseat of his biplane and flies toward Count Laszlo’s excavation camp near the famous cave. He tries to land the plane right on Laszlo himself, but the plan catastrophically backfires. It turns out that it is Katherine’s husband who dies in the crash. Laszlo, the inte...