ABSTRACT
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind; mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize, the pre-eminent British fiction award, in 1992, followed by paperback publication in 1993. It is written through the voice of an omniscient author, who has full access to the actions, thoughts and feelings of all the characters. A well-established means of considering the relationship between writing and cinema is through direct comparison of written texts and their filmed adaptations. For while academic criticism may wish to emphasise the specificity and separateness of individual filmic or literary texts, the way in which such narratives and stories circulate in our contemporary culture is often much less pure and is unaffected by concern for textual integrity.
