The scene is set: a woman is working in the garden, looking into the distance, when the weather changes. It is to begin raining. But she has sensed the weather change before the fact. When the rain eventually falls on her arms, she enters the house behind her garden. Once inside, she finds herself in another garden. A man lies here.

This is the information available to us on the very first page of Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel The English Patient. In theater, this is the description that determines the trajectory of the rest of the work. If this is the scene that is set — the physical setting, that is — then we know the woman will move from the house and to her garden and back again. Other characters may come in from outside the physical setting or from within the house. The set may change, but that does not happen too often. The woman cannot sense the weather change in the theater — or we cannot tell that she can sense it. Perhaps she will raise her eyebrows and perk her nostrils at the smell of an incoming rain before a few drops of water fall on the stage. But it is on the viewer to determine if she is sensing the rain or if she is responding to an allergy. Unlike the page, the stage cannot explicitly tell us things except in dialogue or monologue and, I would argue, through certain kinds of symbolism. But again, symbols are far from explicit. In that sense the theater is like our own lives, familiar in part because things are absent. Novels, in contrast to plays, are full of scenes that transform without any regard to the physical barriers that are present on a stage. The short scene from Ondaatje’s novel described above is followed by the description of an event that is not only physically elsewhere but is also situated in a different time: “Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet.” The novel also gives us information about the characters that would be unavailable on a stage. In Ondaatje’s novel, I know what the woman is thinking: “Hipbones of Christ, she thinks.” I know that behind the scenes of what I am reading, there is another universe. Reading the novel is the simultaneous experience of reading, watching and retrospectively thinking about the play, with the stage and its descriptions present as well. The act of reading is slow, deliberative and, in part, active. There is no performance to facilitate our reading of the novel. Unlike a play, a novel demands that the reader find her own proximity to the action: the action is not brought to them, or presented in front of them. The burden of creating and staging the play lies on the reader. Following the writer of the novel, the reader is the scriptwriter, the director and, in some sense, the actor — of the act of reading.

This burden is what I think every reader should bear. Despite our familiarity with the form of the novel, I have always felt strangely incapacitated to read a novel. I have felt estranged from the form, unfamiliar with its sometimes-omnipresent narrator, stalling my suspension of disbelief to the point in which it becomes counterproductive to my reading practices. But that is in part because the novel is a form that is markedly different from our regular lives. While theater mostly, although not always, attempts to simulate some kind of real life, the novel by definition opposes that project. No one person narrates our lives — I say this in spite of some of our theistic beliefs. If a god were to narrate our regular lives — and if we were to be aware of this — it would be very strange.

One way in which I have learned to read the novel is by thinking about reading as a theatrical activity. The novel then becomes fodder for the plays we can stage in our minds. Every scene in the novel becomes a distinct play — complete with a beginning, middle and end. It is enough to take one simple bit, a single sentence, for us to create the play. Without the particular context of the novel, we have our own contexts in which we can stage this sentence. One example, from The English Patient, demonstrates the ease by which an image can be staged in our mind, “At night he is never tired enough to sleep.” The picture of a man, or a woman — ourselves — struggling to sleep, not just not tired, but not tired enough. The end comes when we sleep, or when morning arrives.

In most cases we fall asleep and wake up having slept for only two hours at most, groggy and waiting for our morning coffee. But it isn’t implausible to stage a play in which the man never falls asleep. He wakes up every morning without having slept. Perhaps the normal man would pace around his room until he became a little more tired. Ondaatje’s man cannot walk. The woman reads to him under a flickering candlelight instead. To stage the play in context, the reader must modify the picture of the stage as she reads further into the novel. If the plot of the novel twists and turns and jumps from one place to another and one timeline to the next, the reader has no option but to construct new stages every time.

What I am proposing should be different from the simpler suggestion that the novel has the capacity to evoke certain images in our minds. I am proposing a conscious activity. Reading should be accompanied — even founded on — our capacity to create such images. This capacity is ours and not the novel’s. To me, the novel is markedly different than any other thing I encounter in my regular life, literary or otherwise. Staging every bit of it as I would stage a play has helped me gain footing inside the fictional and formal universes of the novel. It also allows me to create a proximity to the novel that I do not think is normally present — not only for me but for anyone. Eventually, I hope, this activity becomes less burdensome. But until then, my mind’s stage is a way to make the novel familiar.