Circles on a Pond : THE ENGLISH PATIENT, <i> By Michael Ondaatje (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 306 pp.)</i>

His face disfigured and his limbs burned black in an air crash, the English patient lies dying but lucid in a Tuscan villa. It is toward the end of World War II. The Allies, who used the villa as a hospital, have moved north, and the other patients have been evacuated. Only the burned man remains, in the care of a young Canadian nurse who has resigned from war and its attendant machineries and withdrawn her patient with her.

The Villa Girolamo, in Michael Ondaatje’s magically told novel, is a wayside haven, a place of silence where the cacophony of world conflagration is filtered down into individual voices. Four people, each damaged, find a refuge where the rupture between their stories and their lives can begin to mend. Besides Hana, the nurse, and her patient, there are two arrivals: Caravaggio, a professional burglar who works for Allied intelligence and has been horribly tortured by the Gestapo, and Kip, a young Sikh officer who faces death each day in his lethal job of disarming unexploded mines and bombs.

Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan who became a Canadian citizen, is a poet who has written some extraordinary fiction, including “In the Skin of a Lion” and a fantasy-memoir, “Running in the Family.” In these works, and in “The English Patient,” the motivating power comes in part from story and character, but even more from white flashes of phrase or image. It is a night journey; we move from one star-shell burst to the next, and the countryside shows suddenly familiar and strange.

In part, “The English Patient” consists of the stories of its four pilgrims, told by themselves or by the author. Two are developed: the ravishing story of Kip and his life-saving mission, and the many-layered secrets of the patient, who proves not to be English and whose discovery is the central thread. The stories of Hana and Caravaggio are told more cursorily.

None of the stories stand alone, however. Their counterpoint and the tensely shifting relationships of the characters provide the book’s texture. It is a complex and delicate web whose shimmer and sway is set off by the four lives that alight and are caught in it.

Hana, the youngest, is burned out from ministering to hundreds of dying soldiers and standing as their failing last comfort. Word of her father’s death had brought her to near breakdown; seclusion in the villa and the care of her single patient are a private peace. The patient is beyond hope or self-pity. Out of his blackened mouth comes a serene flow of images and stories; he has been, among other things, a scholar and a desert explorer. She finds in him something of an oracle, something of a father, and something of an old man whom she can warm by chastely sharing his bed at night.

The arrival of Caravaggio brings a bitter tension. He was caught stealing documents from the German high command, and his thumbs were sliced off during interrogation. Crippled in the exercise of his filching profession, he is jealous of the patient’s hold on Hana. He knew her family in Canada; as a girl, she had a crush on him, and his feelings for her are something more than protective. But there is another element in his hostility. His work in intelligence goads him into finding out who the patient really is; he administers morphine to question him.

We hear the patient’s story. He is a Hungarian named Almasy, a member of a British expedition that mapped the Libyan desert in the 1930s. He had a violent affair with the young wife of one of the parties. Later, the husband killed himself and mortally injured his wife by deliberately crashing a plane at Almasy’s desert campsite, apparently in an effort to kill him. Passion aside, there was a cloudy political manipulation at work. Almasy at some point had become a German agent. His own injuries came while flying an arms mission to the Bedouins.

To the embittered Caravaggio, Almasy is a quarry. To Hana, still open to life, he is a compound of learning, mystery and grace. Ondaatje gives his musings and memories an Apollo-like quality. Hana reads Kipling to him; he tells her that Kipling wrote with a pen, pausing to look out the window and think. She should use the same rhythms when she reads him aloud.

Hana is far more than a devoted attendant. In her silence, she waits for her own healing. After Almasy falls asleep each evening, she continues reading for herself. “His books had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by rain.” At the piano in the villa’s salon, she picks out a few chords. “She paused after each set of notes as if bringing her hands out of the water to see what she had caught.”

What she catches is Kip. He has been clearing the area of mines; hearing the piano, he breaks in. The retreating Germans, it seems, made a point of booby-trapping pianos, and metronomes as well.

Kip stays on, living in a tent in the garden, going out to mortal danger each day, spending evenings in the villa. He and Almasy discuss detonators and Virgil. He and Hana become lovers. For her it is finding life again; Ondaatje suggests it in one of the associative images he uses so startlingly and naturally. Hana prepares to bathe in one of the villa’s outdoor fountains. There is water only a few minutes each day; she crouches in the dry fountain waiting for it to gush out. As for Kip, his love is as absolute but divided; he is perpetually honed to his peculiar mission.

Kip’s story is the book’s centerpiece. A science student in India and a tinkerer and inventor by instinct, he came to England at the start of the war and volunteered for the country’s pioneer bomb-disposal unit. Everything was experiment, and life expectancy was six weeks.

The leader, Lord Suffolk, is a peculiarly English type of gentleman genius. With his secretary, Miss Morden, he takes his small band of hero-tinkerers around England, feeding them cream teas, staying up late at night to theorize and speculate, treating them in the double fellowship of science and peril. In Kip, he inspires a pure devotion and unflagging sense of mission.

When Lord Suffolk, Miss Morden and four of the team are blown up by a new kind of bomb, Kip takes over. His agonizing effort to puzzle out the new bombs is brilliantly described: down in the craters with them, freezing them with liquid oxygen, reasoning desperately and playing blind hunches. But Ondaatje infuses the detail with a sense of knightly quest. Lord Suffolk had conveyed to Kip the image of Western learning at its daring and generous best. Kip made it his own. And so, when the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki comes over the radio--Western learning indifferently applied to exterminating his people of the East--he breaks down. He flees the villa in a wild motorcycle run.

Ondaatje puts no particular dramatic emphasis on the break-up of the sanctuary at the Villa Girolamo. We hear of Hana, years later, in Canada, and of Kip, years later, in India. Nothing much is said of Caravaggio. We assume that Almasy is dead. The author’s four stories are not a story that gathers momentum from start to finish. They are the widening and fading circles on a pond into which history has plunged like a cast stone.