In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.
Michael OndaatjeHe will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.
Michael Ondaatje...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.
Michael OndaatjeShe had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she had demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed. Not that she did not have enough animals. She had collected several wild and broken animals that, in a way, had become exotic by their breaking. Their roof would have collapsed from the number of birds who might have lived there if the desert hadn't killed three- quarters of those that tried to cross it. Still every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome-the tame, the half born, the wild, the wounded.
Michael Ondaatje