Customer Reviews (4)

The life of the artist, laid bare.
In his longest novel, written in 1970, Nobel Prize-winning author White examines the question of an artist's creativity, where it comes from, whether it can be controlled, and what obligations, if any, accompany it. As he traces the life of Hurtle Duffield from the age of four until his death as an elderly (and successful) avant-garde artist, we see Duffield always as somehow different from his peers.

The son of a laundress and a bottle collector, Hurtle is from birth inspired, painting large images on walls as a toddler, but he recognizes at an early age that "people look down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful.'" To provide him with opportunities which will allow his genius to flourish, his parents sell him, when he is four years old, to the wealthy family for which his mother works.

As a member of the Courtney family, Hurtle travels and becomes educated, though he continues to see rather than think. For him, the usual emotional traumas of adolescence are accompanied by unique questions of his identity, both because of his two families and also because of his view of the world. Not religious, he sees God as the Great Vivisector, and men treating each other as animals, slaughtering each other in war.

When he himself goes off to war and returns to find that the family has gone in separate directions, he devotes himself, once again, to his art, using women who love him as vehicles for his own self-expression and behaving as a vivisector himself. About his painting of one model, White says "[Hurtle] disemboweled her while she was still alive." As time passes, Hurtle continues to search for love, inspiration, self-expression, and some sort of balance in his life between his immense need to paint, his desire for personal connection, and his simultaneous need to be alone.

White's prose style is direct and concise, elegantly simple, and easy to understand. He uses colloquial speech-words like "smoodge," "sook," "slommacky," and "mumped," which must be understood from context-and reveals character and action through dialogue. The novel is old-fashioned, using a straight chronological narrative with no complex flashbacks, and it is quite romantic in its plot elements, despite its serious theme development. The biggest problem for the reader is that the main character is not very likable, nor does he inspire a great deal of empathy--a difficult character to live with for approximately six hundred pages--and I'm not sure how typical he is of the artists he is supposed to represent. Mary Whipple

all is unfair in love and art
"The Vivisector" is a document of the life of an artist, Hurtle Duffield, a painter who can only ever communicate through his art-the problem being his art is cruel and painfully honest. The book portrays the artist as the "vivisector", and is often brilliant in doing so-chapters one and five are pure, crystalline beauty, and it is here that the artist and White are closest in what they communicate-one often wonders just how much of Hurtle is based on White himself. If you are reading White for the fist time, I would recommend starting with "Voss", arguably his definitive work. In comparsison to other works by Patrick White "The Vivisector" is certainly not going to dissapoint, though I do not think it to be in the same rank as some of his other works, such as "Voss", "Riders in the Chariot" or "Eye of the Storm", all highly recommended. Start with those three and see if you develop a taste for his writing.

articulate, original and awesome
The Vivisector is a novel which commands some effort on the part of the reader because it is not fast paced. White portrays the essence of the artist with brilliance. It is compelling and revealing if you have the concentration to continue past the opening few chapters. While not giving us the fairytale ending, White provides such insight into the workings of a complex individual through his relationships with others and art that a resolution is secondary to the resonance that this novel evokes.

genius
Patrick White is a genius. The Vivesector is, garunteed, one of the most original pieces of fiction ever written, not to mention one of the most subtley disturbing. It is beautiful, brutal, and above all, very very sad.We should all be so lucky as to have the imagination and sheer power ofinvention that Peter White possessed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Full Power of Patrick White
This is one of the greatest novels ever written. Whites style is always powerful;each word, each paragraph builds vividly in your mind, and within a simple story framework he explores how human ambitions, hopes and dreams are eroded by nature and the eras we live in.
All that occurs is that Stan Parker builds his farm,takes a wife,has two children,lives through flood and drought and sees the area in which he lives expand,grow and change. No one but a supreme master craftsman can illuminate such a plot with such powerful and biblical imagry (man in Eden,the brief hopes,the failings and disallussions of human existence,the reuniting with God)
So powerful was the writing that, when White refered to a sewing machine on a hill late in the book,the image created in my mind some 400 pages earlier of that scene during the great flood instantly came back. White has that unique capability.
And the story rings true for all of us. Stan had his dreams of how things would grow,yet it is things outside our control that thwart these ambitions. Was it his fault Thelma grew up ashamed of her parents and as a prissy shrew? Or that Ray turned out to be a petty hoodlum and ended up being murdered? Something in human nature makes us blame ourselves for other peoples free will.
An extraordinary book.Not for those who like something quick and easy,but definately for anyone who loves literature and wants to be wholly absorbed for the duration of a classic book.

Better Than White's Voss
I have read two of White's novels: the present work and Voss. The present novel, The Tree of Man, is more complex than Voss, and unlike Voss here the author manages to breath some life into the characters.

Patrick White gained fame as the Australian Nobel prize winner in literature, and as a person with a prickly or difficult personality. He was educated at Cambridge but settled and wrote in Australia after World War II. He wrote about a dozen novels and a biography.

This is a good novel and it deserves 5 stars. After a dozen pages or so it becomes clear to the reader why White is famous: he has an unusual style and he is a gifted writer. There is no question about his writing ability. We see great writing ability in Voss and that skill is present in The Tree of Man.

The story is set in rural farm country in Australia and it follows the life of a young couple through to their deaths at old age. The male protagonist is a bit like the Voss character. In any case, we follow their lives, and the births and lives of their two children, and the lives of a few of their neighbours. The story describes the day to day life of a typical farming couple, along with the problems and challenges of raising children on a small rural farm. The story of the two children are followed into the marriage of the daughter and we follow the troubles of the adult son with the law.

I liked the way White handled the four family members. The lives of the four are realistic and interesting; they are human and one can relate to their actions. The discouraging feature of some of White's writing is that the characters seem stiff or cardboard like. His Voss character was not a man to show much emotion or talk. There are any passages that simply describe Voss's activities in that slightly dry book. The present book is much more complicated and White does a much better job with his characters. They are human and give way to temptations. Each character shows a wide range of human emotions.

Overall, I thought it was a good book and an interesting read and an interesting book to read if you are interested in the works of Patrick White.

an important novel
This is a truly extraordinary novel.It demands a certain amount of quiet to be read well.I found myself reading it more like poetry.Because of White's compelling storytelling and writing style, it held my attention despite the fact that very litte happens.Perfect to take on trains, airplanes, or to the beach.

The sadness of time
In the tradition of DH Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Halldor Laxness, Patrick White has written a story that teases out the secrets of a family's existence and, in so doing, explores, without ever mentioning them expressly, the issues and mysteries universal to humanity.

The plot could barely be simpler. In the early days of Australia's nationhood a young man and his wife set off into the bush to begin their lives together. They find some land, build a house, have a family, grow old and finally die. Around them the dramas of life unfold: friendships, disasters, disappointments and infidelities. The book is less about them, though, than about the unremarkable moments in between. These times of quietness are White's triumphs. His unhurried prose admits us to the intimacies of the characters, their griefs, their dreams and their successes. We share in the man's unarticulated affinity with the land, the woman's chronic loneliness. We notice how many words are never spoken, how many uncertainties never resolved.

By the end, one sees that the characters' struggles are his struggles. Briefly, perhaps, one's view of life becomes wider than his self, and a larger landscape, if not a plan, crystallises in the world. You finish the last page, close the book and sit still and speechless for a second, as if someone real has died. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Voss: journeys of exploration
This novel opens in Sydney, 1845, with the German explorer Voss preparing to cross the Australian continent.This physical aspect of the novel is loosely based on the ill-fated expedition of Ludwig Leichhardt.

Prior to leaving Sydney, Voss meets Laura Trevelyan.Laura is the niece of one of Voss's patrons and is perhaps the only person apart from Voss himself who perceives that his journey is a challenge of will as much as a geographical journey of discovery.Voss and Laura, despite only meeting four times before he departs, form a spiritual bond which strengthens during the course of the novel.

The novel is about discovery, about triumph and about failure.The physical elements of the journey describe many of the challenges facing explorers within central Australia at the time and combines elements of human suffering and religious metaphor.

The intense relationship between Laura and Voss develops during the course of the journey, and is conducted both through letter and telepathy.

This novel can be read as a simple story of an ill-fated expedition.Alternatively, it can be read as one man's challenge to the physical world, and of the good and evil in each of us.

By the end of the novel, the discovery seems clear, the triumphs and the failures are obvious.Or are they?Perhaps it depends on which viewpoint you choose to adopt.

I recommend this novel to anyone who wants to read well written literature which, under the guise of telling a story, invites the readers to confront their own thinking.The choice is yours.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Cardboard Characters Set In The Australian Frontier, But Excellent Prose
Patrick White gained fame as the Australian Nobel prize winner in literature, and as a person with a prickly or what some call a difficult personality. He was educated at Cambridge but then settled and wrote in Australia after World War II. He has about a dozen novels and I have read two of them, the other being The Tree of Man which is set in rural but agricultural Australia, not in the Outback as is Voss.

This is a good novel, and it deserves 5 stars. After a dozen pages or so it becomes clear to the reader that White has an unusual style and he is a gifted writer. There is no question about his writing ability.

This particular story starts off in Sydney in the mid-19th century, and White uses real street names and locations in central Sydney, just east of Darling Harbour. Since the same streets still exist today, his setting and references to the city bring a high degree of realism to the story.

The plot is about a man and a woman who become engaged by mail after meeting. Voss is the man, and he leads a voyage of discovery into the Outback, north and west of Sydney. The plot involves the hardships of the trip, the interaction among the characters travelling with Voss, the natives, and what takes place in Sydney with his fiancee while Voss is away on the trip.

The discouraging feature of White's writing is that the characters seem stiff or cardboard, a bit lifeless. Voss is not a man to show much emotion or talk. So, there are many passages where White simply describes the activities. That gives the book - especially in the middle - a dry feel. This was reinforced for me when I read The Tree of Man where White has a similar strong male protagonist, the farmer; but there, White goes into much more depth with the man's personality in the novel.

The tale has a strong and a surprise ending, and the novel picks up as the story closes.

Overall, I enjoyed the read and would recommend the book. It is not a quick read nor is it compelling stuff to digest, but it is an interesting and well written novel.

Voss - powerful Australian epic
Big, powerful novel by a skilled storyteller, a master of the Australian landscape and peoples.In the 1800's the German settler Voss meets Laura Trevelyan in Sydney once or twice, then together with an ill-assorted ragtag of followers he sets off on an ill-fated expedition from Sydney westwards through the Australian desert.

Voss's purpose seems to be to get to 'love the land'.Laura waits in Sydney; she's a thoughtful person, different from the others, aware that Australian white society in those days could be shallow and not in tune with deeper things.When Voss and Laura are not together, the relationship takes place in the mind, with some sort of sixth sense resulting in a synchronisation of feelings.The is cleverly done and works well.

Aboriginals figure strongly - they are part of the land, timeless, noble.But, in the period set in this novel, there is a dark side; through and through they come across as bestial savages.They could help and save Voss, who reaches out to them, but instead they thwart and eventually kill him.

Patrick White won the 1973 Nobel prize for literature, and it's not surprising.But his style in Voss is not always easy; he's always invading his characters' minds and trying too hard to explain every nuance of their thinking.This slows it down.Ideas about 'point of view' have to be put on hold in this novel.

Ultimately though it's an indelible experience, and one is left with haunting images of Australia.

Tragic and unforgettable
This is a deeply sad story of tragic love in Australia's colonial times. Voss, "The German" and Laura, a young Sydney woman, are societal misfits who meet quite awkwardly in drawing room one day.Soon after this meeting, Voss begins his epic journey into the unknown Australian outback.As the journey progresses he realizes his love for Laura and writes her a letter asking for her hand in marriage. She accepts his proposal and a love affair of the minds begins.More letters are written but never received by either party.Amazingly, their love blossoms for each other in a small minded, petty, and class driven society. Sadly, in the end their love is tragically never to be.
I found this book to be extremely well written and deeply moving.I believe that this novel is on par with Bronte's Jane Eyre and I do not understand why it is not on any classical reading lists.There are parts of the book that move somewhat slowly, but each part has its purpose in bringing you deeper into the story.The insights into the human soul are incredibly poignant.If you do decide to give Voss a chance read it slowly and in quite spaces. Soak up the meanings within the writing and enjoy this sad, sad tale.

One of the great novels
This epic about a man's journey into the heart of the Australian desert and into his own heart and mind is a classic of modern literature. Johann Ulrich Voss, though he remains always just beyond the reader's grasp as a character, is as memorable as any great figure in modern literature. If Marlow and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness were one man, this would be him.

The novel is also a love story about two people who go beyond the mediocrity of their surroundings to embark on interior journeys where they learn to know themselves and unite with each other in spirit.

For 80% of the novel I was gripped, running home from college to read more and more. My only qualm would be the ending, as the tension dissipates and the last 80 pages or so peter out under the excessive Christian symbolism. But there is no way that a potential reader should be put off by this assessment

Sentence for sentence, word for word, Patrick White is as good a prose stylist as I've ever read. The phrase "tour de force" could have been invented for this book. ... Read more

Book Description
Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. His search for identity, self-affirmation and love takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Radiant
In his autobiography, Patrick White calls this one of his three best books.

(The other two: The Aunt's Story and The Solid Mandala.)

I agree.

It shimmers with his usual lustrous prose.And the journey of his main character through various incarnations--drag queen in Greece, WWI soldier in France, jackaroo (ranch hand) in Australia, and finally expatriate again in England--is little short of amazing.

It is also eye-opening about White himself, and his parents.

Brilliant stuff.

As always with White, while reading it you have the sense that you are not reading but listening to your own mind.Or listening to God's mind.

Wonderful. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A dark voyage
Patrick, the greatest novelist to have come out of Australia, had already produced a number of classic novels by the time he released "The Eye of the Storm" in 1973- the year that also saw him win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It is to his credit as a writer that rather than merely repeating the formula of these past successes he explored new territory in terms of style, characterisation and theme with this book.
He had made his reputation by writing about the inner journeys of individuals struggling to find spiritual enlightment in the relentlessly materialistic world of Australia. His heroes had included a ragtag bunch of fascinating outsiders- the mad old nature mystic Miss Hare, neglected Aboriginal artist Alf Dubbo and a visionary explorer in "Voss". In these earlier books White seemed to be suggesting that the mindless fascination with wealth, property and normalcy that pervaded Australian society only left room for individuals to explore deeper issues of spiritual meaning and significance out on the fringes.
It comes as a surprise then that in "The Eye of the Storm", White's heroine is wealthy society woman, Elizabeth Hunter, who seems to embody everything that he most abhored about Australia. The novel explores the life of Elizabeth Hunter through the relationships she has had over many years with a variety of characters, including her lovers, children and servants. The heroine may have been based on Patrick White's own mother and she is presented as essentially destructive in her insistence on dominating others.
The novel is much less religious in its outlook than White's early books. One reviewer described "Riders in the Chariot" as more of a "mystical essay" than a novel but such a description could not be applied to "The Eye of the Storm". Like its heroine, the novel is less mystical and more worldly than what White had given us before. "The Eye of the Storm" is centred more in the painful, toxic relationships that exist between members of a dysfunctional family than in issues of spiritual transcendence. Eventually, during a tropical storm in Queensland, Elizabeth Hunter does experience a moment of spiritual epiphany but this time the heroine is out of her element. She is a stranger to this world and hardly knows what to make of it.
The Nobel Committe had been put off awarding the Prize for Literature to White in 1970 because of the bleak, cynical presentation he had given of the way artists use other people to create art. After all, The Nobel Prize, is supposed to be given to literature of an 'idealistic' nature. It seems fanciful however to think that "The Eye of the Storm" offers a rosier view of human nature than its predecessor. In exploring the emotional wreckage that comes out families and such dark themes as incest, both emotional and physical, "The Eye of the Storm" is unlikely to leave readers with a warm, inner glow. But it may appeal to an audience who like literary fiction which take big chances with language, style and theme. Whilst not one of his best three or four books, it is still rich and rewarding. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good but not the best from a Nobel Prize winner...
This is a collection of short novels and stories by the 1973 Australian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Most of the stories analyse in thorough detailthe same themes, studying with ruthless detachment the behaviour and thoughts of ageing coupleswho have drifted apart as incomprehensibly as they originally came together or irrational eruptions of violence or senseless rebellion against the superficial orderliness of mediocre lives.

Three of the stories stand out from the collection: "A Woman's Hand", "The Night the Prowler" and the story which gives the collection its name ""The Cockatoos".

In "A Woman's Hand" an elderly couple meet an old bachelor friend of the husband. Even though she is appalled at the shabby life the friend, a retired sailor lives, and even though she does not particularly care for him or for her husband's friendship for him (and in fact rather dislikes the ex-sailor), she decides to intervene in his life by throwing him together with a spinster friend of hers, who used to be an uncomplaining lady's companion. Rather unexpectedly, the bachelor and the spinster, decide to marry, for companionship in their old age, only to drive each other to madness. Two stories are brilliantly intertwined by the author.The first couples' life unfolds in White'scharacteristic detailed fashion in front of our eyes and constitutes an elegantly written winding down of a rather uneventful life. The second story unfolds in fits and starts, from snippets of news, conversations or observations and is the slow unravelling of the the second couple, which leads to the spinster's commitment to a mental institution and in the bachelor's probable suicide. The title is grimly ironic, since the wife's excuse for meddling in the bachelor's life is that she feels his life and homelacks a woman's hand.

"The Night the Prowler" particularly remind me of some of Graham Greene's short stories from the 1930s and 1940s but also pre shadow some of White's better known novels like "Riders in the Chariot". A sexual molester breaks into a solid, middle class home and apparently rapes a young woman. Her life falls apart, her parents are bewildered by the changes she carries out in her own life and in the end never ever really try to understand or reach out to her. However, as the story unfolds, we learn that though a man did break into her bedroom, she reversed their position, terrified the rather pathetic would-be molester and starts a double life in which she prowls her middle class neighbourhood at nights, breaks into other homes and vandalizes them in cold rage.

"The Cockatoos" again explores the relationship between an ageing couple in a small, drab, nondescript outback town, who have given up speaking to each other. As with many small towns in the literature, the story of the couple cannot be told without involving some of their neighbours: the woman with whom he has a rather long-standing and passionless affair, the woman's irritable neighbour, a gossipy would be do-gooder, his wife and their outsider son. A mob of white cockatoos inexplicably descends on the town and we are carried along with them as they visitate the characters of the story, touching and changing their lives. The mob is a brilliant literary device and Patrick White makes it work to perfection, carefully blending observation, points of view and staying away from heavy handed symbolism
which would have ruined the whole delicate effect. The couple starts reaching out, and there is a hint of locked doors being slowly unlocked, of light dawning and hearts blossoming, or perhaps more accurately budding, recovering a measured sense of wonder, a creaking, halting reconciliatory motion, a growing sense of potential for sharing and of falling away from everyday mediocrity. At this point, the whole delicate structure which has been painstaking built up is, it most be said, brilliantly smashed, as the irritable neighbour slides into madness and starts shooting atsome of the cockatoos to stop them from eating his magnolia blossoms, only to end up shooting the husband who has rushed out of his lover's house. The rest of the story is anticlimactic, and though it hints that some fragile common bond has somewhat diffidentlytouched the widow and the lover, it also shows that the senseless violence which erupted from the irritable neighbour has also taken seed in the outsider son and will continue its destructive path.

White is a brilliant craftsman and his prose carries you along effortlessly. I have always considered that Patrick's White most fatal flaw in his writing is his lack of closure: his endings do not end, they simply peter out. Even in his short stories, White is a novelist, his stories are rarely surprising in their development, let alone their dénouement, and in this sense bear little resemblance to such master storytellers such as Graham Greene or the undeservedly lesser known V.S. Pritchett. White simply and slowly overwhelms you with a sense of inevitability for which there is no neat ending; perhaps it can be said that White does not bother to end his stories: he simply decides when the reader can continue the story on his own. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Classic
Patrick White is of course Australia's most famous novelist. He lived for some time in exile but returned to Australia and lived there for some years before dying some years ago. He was a somewhat prickly character but his winning of the Nobel Prize for literature helped solidify his reputation.

This book is unusual in is clarity and sheer joy. A number of White's books are heavy going, densely written and pretentious. This book however was simply sheer delight. It concerns two old men who live together and are brothers. One is reasonably intelligent and has worked in a library. The other is what might be described as intellectually simple. The book consists of both of these characters speaking and talking about their lives and their past.

White was a gay man who lived most of his life with a companion who he was deeply attached to. One suspects that the book is loosely based on their later life, but of course this is only speculation. The character who is most hardly done by is the librarian who clearly is White.

It is hard really to describe the delight and joy of the book, however once I picked it up I could not stop reading it. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

What was this author thinking!?!
Quite possibly the worst book I have ever read.The characters are annoying and bland and the writing itself is superfluous and confusing. I felt that I had to force myself to finish it and then was angry that Ididnt put it down halfway through.This book has nothing to say and isannoyingly terrible. ... Read more

Book Description
Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

The Visionaries
What makes a great novel? Many things, but among them I would certainly list Scale, Characters, and Moral Vision. All three of these qualities are to be found in this towering novel by Patrick White. It is the first book by the Nobel laureate that I have encountered; it will certainly not be the last.

This is a long book (640 pages), but a very easy one to read. In any case, when speaking of scale, physical length is less important than breadth of implication. White concentrates on a small group of people living on the outskirts of Sydney after WW2, but makes them seem emblematic of the entire continent. There is also a wide range of origin and social class; the characters include the last survivor of a once-rich aristocratic family, a German Jewish professor fleeing the Holocaust, a poor washerwoman who emigrated from England as a child, and a half-aboriginal painter. Since each character is given almost 100 pages of back-story, the novel is by no means confined in place or period either; the section set in Germany between the wars can hold its own with the best Holocaust writing anywhere, with particular insights into Jewish social, intellectual, and spiritual life. But the most important aspect of the book's scale is the feeling held by each of the four major characters that the universe is an immensely greater place than anything they may see around them.

White has the great gift of loving his characters. Each of the four is something of an outcast. Miss Hare, the faded aristocrat, is clearly mad; Himmelfarb, the professor, now chooses to work in a menial job, without possessions or other signs of status; Mrs. Godbold, the washerwoman, lives with her many daughters in a tumble-down shack; Alf Dubbo, the half-caste painter, works by day as a janitor and is given to fits of drunkenness. And yet White writes so convincingly through the eyes of each that we do more than feel sympathy for them; we begin to see the others around them as impoverished of spirit, living only partial lives. White is brilliant in creating a gallery of semi-comic secondary characters -- some bad, some well-meaning, some merely lacking in imagination -- to set off the qualities of his principal quartet, but even these have dimension and are far from caricatures.

One of the curious aspects of the book is that the four characters hardly ever meet, although they recognize an immediate kinship when they do. For all four are religious visionaries. Their visions may occur only once or twice in their lives, but the image is the same for each: the approach of Ezekiel's fiery chariot, both wonderful and terrible. I can think of few books that are so successful at portraying the mystical dimension while being so firmly rooted in the mundane. This is clearly a religious book, but not at all a sectarian one. It is White's strength that he endows his visionarieswith everyday failings, and gives each a very different religious background. Miss Hare's religion, if she has one, is a pantheism rooted in the plants and animals on her moldering estate. Himmelfarb has returned to Judaism only after years of secular life, and considers himself morally unworthy. Mrs. Godbold is a staunch evangelical, but her religion shows more in her practical kindnesses to others than in any doctrinal fundamentalism. And Alf Dubbo, though raised by a preacher and especially inspired by religious subjects, is dissolute and virtually autistic in his day to day life.

A fourth quality that I might have mentioned is Style. White's writing, as I say, is easy to read, but very varied and always appropriate to the tone of the moment. While he can neatly skewer the social pretensions of the Rosetrees (the employers of Himmelfarb and Alf), he can also shift to the kind of description that portrays everyday things as symbolic of eternal conflicts or reflections of the infinite. His descriptions of Alf Dubbo's paintings, for example, are equaled by no author I can think of except perhaps Chaim Potok in MY NAME IS ASHER LEV, in their ability to convey a truly incandescent artistic vision. Such mastery of style is essential because, as loners, his characters cannot interact much together in terms of everyday plot, and in narrative terms the concluding section of the book is less compelling than the long set-up. But where the characters do meet is in their common vision, their unspoken sense of rightness, and it is precisely in White's evocative language that this sounds, resonates, and resounds.

Down And Out Down Under
This is not a particularly cheery book.It deals with the lives of outcasts and what we today would, callously, call freaks.The book, while it does go into meticulous detail of the biographical material of the main characters' respective lives, is not primarily concerned with these elements. The book is centred around the visionary, otherworldly qualities of each, particularly a shared vision each of the four main characters has of a chariot mentioned in the book of Ezekiel.-This quality separates them from the world and people around them, which are clearly meant to be disparaged.-As Miss Hare cogitates in regard to the danger one of these normal people, Mrs Jolley: "But she did sense some danger to the incorporeal, the more significant part of her."-That significant part in all the four characters is the essential matter of the book.

Other people in the book are given to insubstantial matters, cruelty, and obliviousness, frequently rendered comically by White:

The other ladies glanced at her skin, which was white and almost unprotected, whereas they themselves had shaded their faces, with orange, with mauve, even with green, not so much to impress one another, as to give them the courage to confront themselves (p.323)

All very well. But it is this Manichean dualism between the saintly four characters and, well, everybody else which leads me to refrain from giving it five stars. Anyone who has encountered the world in its chaos of identities, acts of kindness, visionary aspects, thuggish and sadistic aspects knows that we all carry in us both the visionary, sensitive private individualism of the main characters, on the one hand, and the thuggish herd instinct of----everyone else in this book.

Still, it's well worth the read. White is a remarkable writer, and the work, despite my misgivings, is one every thoughtful person should not merely have on his or her bookshelf, but have read, from beginning to end.Its insights into prelinguistics subconscious perception are not to be surpassed---anywhere.

perserverance is key.
I must admit that I didn't' choose to read this book myself, it was placed on our reading list for Literature so it was with slight apprehension and curiousity that I approached White's nobel prize winning novel. Reading the first few chapters made me realize why it was a nobel prize worthy, White's style was so different and at times confusing - it had never been done, it was strange, so it won. Of course as i slowly ploughed my way through the eccentric shadows of Xanadu which was Ms. Hare's home I gradually grew to appreciate the novel.
The novel centres around four main protaganists in post WWII Australia: Ms. Hare, Alf Dubbo, Himmelfarb and Mrs. Godbold. All of whom in some way are seeking redemption as outsiders. His novel is strongly critical of our society and it's one of those novels that makes you ask rather than answer questions that it poses. It highlights the cruel abuse of Aborigines and Jews within our world, showing the perhaps inevitable traits of humanity, that any country at any time must inexplicably have a scapegoat to fall back on.
It's a powerful novel and although slightly relieved when I was finished I was glad that I had read it. Raising many questions about human nature, White is a skilled writer that doesn't reach the finish line in the biggest, most obvious path but takes his time, weaving subtly and skillfully through metaphors and symbols to take you by surprise, emotionally and mentally to the finish line.
However it is not for those without patience, but give it a go and I can guarantee you will be hooked after the first 70 pages.

The richest novel in the world
Riders in the Chariot, Patrick White's international superseller at the time, was born from an incident in the late 40s, when a taxi driver, demanding the full fare of the journey from Sydney's Central Station to Petty's Hotel, was refused by White and began screaming "Go back to Germany!" White later confessed: "I think it was this more than anything which persuaded me to write the novel Riders". Fortunately, such germ was the foundation of one, perhaps the greatest, of the 20th century literary monuments, dense as the greatest novels are, but fleshy in the end, too much indeed. It is a plotless novel-as are most works by White, and if there's a plot, its one of living and surviving. The novel traces the lives of the 4 characters from their origin to their ends (something White is an undoubtful master doing, and White puts his hand on marvellous devices of narration as stream of conscioussness, epiphanies and of course, the wonderful and hillarious use of adjectives, though sometimes the image, nearer to incongruency but finally well put, is difficult to convey.
The chariot, itself, was familiar to Blake, Ovid, the apocalyptic writers of the Bible and to Redon. In White's chariot, as David Marr reported, "the riders are those who have known illumination as he had experienced it in mystical ecsatsy, in creation, music", etc. White wrote, according to his letters (to his Viking editor Ben Huebsch in February 1959): "What I want to emphasise through my four "Riders" - an orthodox refugee intellectual Jew, a mad Erdgeist of an Australian spinster, an evangelical laundress, and a half-caste Aboriginal painter- is that all faiths, whether religious, humanistic, instinctive, or the creative artist's act of praise, are in fact one". And for example, is a brilliant detail that in general, the novel is a study of GOOD people pitted against EVIL; nowadays... how nice!
Riders in the Chariot is not a novel easy to read, neither meant to be read to relax. As one of the 40 best Australian books ever, it's a work of pleasure for the deep and restless mind.A novel written to music, something important to the writer and the reader, and like a baroque piece exhibiting a down-to-earth accumulation of detail, this work is a must for anyone interested in the best literature of the past century and an innovative psychological narrative art that, in the hands of this Australian Nobel Prize winner, soars to the highest ranks.

The amazing richness of literature and mysticism
About a quarter of the way into this book I realized I was reading a brilliant treatise on mystical theology written in the form of a novel. This is a magnificent piece of work that brings together several realms of meaning, various settings, and divergent attitudes and dispositions about what it means to be truly human and live among other humans. There are four major protagonists of widely differing backgrounds. Each represents a peculiar moral stance that makes them capable of some unexpected actions and disables them with regard to others. Most of the action takes place in and around Sydney, Australia, but there are "lead up" sections in England and Germany. Mary Hare is ugly, less than intelligent, and stark raving mad. She lives in a crumbling mansion and experiences difficulty in trying to communicate with other people. For her, words are fragile and sometimes breakable and people use them in cruel ways. Yet she is an attractive personality whom we come to like because she is described from the inside. That is, we know what she feels, suffers and, most of all, remembers. Himmelfarb is a German Jew, a brilliant professor of philosophy whose father inexplicably converts to Christianity, thereby causing his mother to fade slowly away from sadness and a sense of being betrayed and victimized. He escapes the "final solution" by immigrating to Australia and taking a meaningless job in a factory owned by another German Jew who has also "converted." Ruth Godbold, a saintly laundress who lives in a shed with four daughters and an abusive husband, communicates mainly through acts of kindness.She nurses Mary Hare during a long illness and takes care of Himmelfarb in his last agony when some redneck thugs at the factory try to crucify him. Alf Dubbo, a native Australian brought up by religious people whose religiosity is questionable, develops his talent at painting and communicates through art. His ability to make moral decisions is confounded by his early experience with the preacher who kept sticking his hand into Alf's trousers.

These four have little contact and less communication with each other. None of them understands what the others are saying, except in a pre-linguistic sense. At a certain level, they already know what the others are saying, but they know it on a non-conscious level, like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible (whence the book's title is derived).

These four major personages suffer physically and morally and profoundly. This book zeroes in on the reality of human suffering and shows that we suffer or cause others to suffer because of some flaw in our own characters, in the sense of Sophocles. This is not, of course, the "message" of the novel (novels don't have messages; we all know that). More importantly, we see throughout the book the collective and communitarian dimension of suffering and its intellectual connections to some prophetic books of the Old Testament that emphasize the unitary nature of humankind and the need for a "suffering servant" to atone and expiate for the sins of others.

As a prose stylist, Patrick White is impressive, maybe supreme. This is the most well written book I have read in many years. His sentences are beautifully fragmented and fractured. His language (use of adjectives, etc.) is extraordinarily rich. In fact, it is gorgeous. Words and ideas have colors and smells. He omits unnecessary direct-object pronouns and even definite articles. Even the sound of his prose is amazingly satisfying: he makes liberal use of alliteration, especially in initial consonants, but in other contexts as well. Figures and tropes abound, even zeugma. And finally, if anyone wants an example of a memorable sentence, let me offer this one from page 26:

Mrs. Hare had soon taken refuge from Mary in a rational kindness, with which she continued to deal her a series of savage blows during what passed for childhood. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Inside Information On The Greatest Television Series Of All
In my humble opinion, Mission: Impossible is the most imaginative television series of all time. This book is the perfect companion, giving
much information on the gestation of the series, the creator, Bruce Geller, the actors, directors, writers, producers and a list of every episode made, including the 1980's revival of the series.What is not apparent to the viewer but comes out in this history of the series, is that the series underwent a number of major crises, any one of which could have finished it off, yet it survived to last for seven seasons, while generally maintaining its quality.For example, not many know that creator Geller actually only wrote one episode, the pilot (the story of the nuclear bombs stored in the vault of a hotel in a Latin American country). Although he rode herd on the show for several seasons, he was finally forcibly ejected from the studio.Original star of the series, Steven Hill was forced to leave the show due to matters of concience.
During season three, when the finest episodes of the series were being
produced, the top writers got into a fiery dispute with Geller and quit in the middle of the season leaving no scripts ready to be filmed. Fortunately, Paul Playdon, possibly the best writer of all to work on the series was recruited at this crucial moment and saved the show.At the end of this same third season, stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain both quit the show. In spite of all this, the show survived and more or less maintained its quality.
One of the best things in the book is that it lists the stuntmen-doubles who appeared in the show.In the first-season episode called "The Confession", there is one of the most amazing stunts I have ever seen on television....Rollin Hand (played by Martin Landau) and bad-guy Andreas Soloweichek (David Sheiner) are hand-cuffed together and jump out of a moving vehicle.According to this book, the stunt was performed by Buzz Henry and Chuck Wilcox. It is about time these two heroes got credit for doing one of the most dangerous stunts I have ever seen...as you see them rolling around on the road, it is amazing that they didn't break every bone in their bodies and have their arms dislocated.And for all this, they weren't even mentioned in the credits!Kudos to Mr White for giving them and their colleagues their due.

Now that Mission: Impossible is being brought out in DVD, it might be time
to bring this book out as a reprint.

Mission: Impossible Review
This book is a perfect companion for any MI fan. Includes plot details and breakdowns and actor bio's and series reviews. Everything is here. Definetly worth buying and now all i want is for Paramount to release series on DVD. Life would be perfect then.

A very thorough, detailed, entertaining book!
This book is outstanding! I own 4 copies myself. If you like entertainment, or research, this is the book for you. It's full of pictures, details, information, and synopsises. I love it! A classy,intelligent book, for a classy, intelligent show!

Excellent reference book for the popular TV series
The book delivers as promised. Filled with interesting facts about the actors, plots, creators and devices of the series. Comments critically on each show. I wish there was a multimedia CD ROM available ... Read more

Amazon.com
Patrick White (1912-1990), author of The Living and the Dead, 1973 Nobel Laureate in Literature, officially Australian but also partly upper-crust Englishman by education, rejected alike English stuffiness and Australian philistinism. These letters, edited by his biographer David Marr, chronicle White's gradual reluctant engagement with the world: his interest in Jewish culture after an early ignorant anti-Semitism; his idyllic wartime period in West Africa; his passionate and rancorous anti-royalism, sparked by the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis when the British Queen's representative sacked the Prime Minister; his deep held belief in the validity of homosexual unions, based on his own life-long relationship. These letters give an inner glimpse of a mostly private life.Book Description

Customer Reviews (3)

An opportunity to enter the private world of Patrick White
I read 2 negative reader reviews of this book on the day I bought it and thought I had thrown my money down the drain. Luckily we all come at books from a different perspective and I am very pleased I stumbled on this 677 page volume of letters written from 1919 to 1990. Reading this is like sitting in someones living room unseen and hearing all from the everyday to the important being discussed. It gives us a strong human connection to this hugely talented, crotchety, driven, private, argumentative man of strong opinions and unpredictably diverse views of the world. Rather than writing him off as a typical Australian as previous reviewers have, I found his letters fascinating, surprising, and a damn good read and his life and thought are very un-typical of Australians of his era in my view. The fact that my house is in walking distance of Dogwoods made their Castle Hill life doubly pertinent to me but in any event I would have enjoyed the book immensely. White's comment about wishing to spend his time on his acreage atDogwoods rather than 'watching a landscape slowly destroyed by a race whose most pronounced gift is that of creating ugliness' was prescient, a McDonalds now stands nearby opposite a shopping centre carpark. Certainly worth a read.

Boring and bitter is right!
What an awful life! As an Australian this dreadful, wizened old cockroach of a man makes me ashamed.Nothing but boring twisted hatred and ingratitude. Why publish such a book at all?

what a boring bitter old man!
patrick white is one of the 20th century's finest novelists - his thick tome of letters compiled by david marr was given to me by someone who knew of patrick white only as awriter from my country- I was living in TX at the time feeling acute homesickness of which, upon reading the book,was immediately cured bypage 2 when the reasons why I left australia in the first place came vividly galloping towards me with a loud yawn. The scratchy nib of discontentment mark 400 pages of this old sod's rather boring snippy life with his companion manoly. His mandarin mouthed mug scowling at u courtesy of the brush strokes of Brett on the cover really tell u the whole sad story .. dinner parties, gossip, gardening, writing, gossip, travelling, bitching, writing etc go on and on -- most telling aspect is that patrick wanted all his correspondence destroyed after being read - obviously not enough of his friends took him seriously - so why should we ... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"You can only do. Or be, sort of."
In his longest novel, written in 1970, Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White examines the question of an artist's creativity, where it comes from, whether it can be controlled, and what obligations, if any, accompany it. As he traces the life of Hurtle Duffield from the age of four until his death as an elderly (and successful) avant-garde artist, we see Duffield always as somehow different from his peers. The son of a laundress and a bottle collector, Hurtle is from birth inspired, painting large images on walls as a toddler, but he recognizes at an early age that "people look down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful.'" To provide him with opportunities which will allow his genius to flourish, his parents sell him to the wealthy family for which his mother works when he is four years old.

As a member of the Courtney family, Hurtle travels and becomes educated, though he continues to see rather than think. For him, the usual emotional traumas of adolescence are accompanied by unique questions of his identity, both because of his two families and also because of his view of the world. Not religious, he sees God as the Great Vivisector, and men treating each other as animals, slaughtering each other in war. When he himself goes off to war and returns to find that the family has gone in separate directions, he devotes himself, once again, to his art, using women who love him as vehicles for his own self-expression and behaving as a vivisector himself. About his painting of one model, White says "[Hurtle] disemboweled her while she was still alive." As time passes, Hurtle continues to search for love, inspiration, self-expression, and some sort of balance in his life between his immense need to paint, his desire for personal connection, and his simultaneous need to be alone.

White's prose style is direct and concise, elegantly simple, and easy to understand. He uses colloquial speech--words like "smoodge," "sook," "slommacky," and "mumped," which must be understood from context--and reveals character and action through dialogue. The novel is old-fashioned, using a straight chronological narrative with no complex flashbacks, and it is somewhat romantic in its plot elements, despite its serious thematic development. The biggest problem for the reader is that the main character is not very likable, nor does he inspire a great deal of empathy--a difficult character to live with for approximately six hundred pages--and I'm not sure how typical he is of the artists he is supposed to represent. Mary Whipple
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fabulous biography about a not very likeable person
I found the biog hard to put down, unlike White's fiction which I find easy to put down! Marr has written a scholarly yet entertaining biography, and you really feel you come to know something about an Australian icon -our only Nobel laureate in literature.

In everything i have read(including White's own portrait of himself, Flaws In The Glass) he comesacross as a horrible man - a misogynist, but with some political principleswith which I might agree.

Nevertheless, that is not the point ofliterature, or art, to be loved by one and all. White's voice certainlyadded immensely to the cultural life of this country, and it is worthgetting to know something about his life and works. Marr's book is anexcellent place to start. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Do Not Read About The Plot Until Later: One of White's Better Novels
There is a touch of the chaos in Fringe of Leaves. It is not boring and it is one of White's better novels. It has a good story and I will not reveal the plot beyond what the publisher reveals on the book jacket.

I have read three of White's novels: the present work, the Tree of Man, and Voss. The present novel, is more complex than Voss, and unlike Voss here the author manages to breath some life into the characters. It has a good plot that reminds one a bit of Jane Eyre, but with quite a different setting. It is set in England in the middle of the 19th century. It is about a young woman from Cornwall who marries a wealthy gentleman. They go to Australia and are caught in a ship wreck off the coast of Queensland after visiting the husband's brother in Tasmania.

White uses stream of consciousness in a mild form which seems a bit novel after reading Voss. But the thing that grabs your attention is his use of structure. He introduces the protagonist, Ellen, by having two ladies describe her for about 20 pages. The two women ride in a horse drawn carriage chatting about Ellen. You, as the reader, realize that White will be creative in what will follow in the story.

After that we move the present scene in the story. But Ellen has these flashbacks to fill in the story of her life over most of the first half.

Patrick White gained fame as the Australian Nobel prize winner in literature and as a person with a prickly or difficult personality. He was educated at Cambridge but settled and wrote in Australia after World War II. He wrote about a dozen novels and a biography.

This is a good novel and it deserves 5 stars. After a dozen pages or so it becomes clear to the reader why White is famous: he has an unusual style and he is a gifted writer. There is no question about his writing ability. We see great writing ability in Voss and that skill is present in The Tree of Man and in the present novel.

Overall, I thought it was a good book and an interesting read and an interesting book to read if you are interested in the works of Patrick White.

Timeless Portrait of Humanity and Cross-Culturalism
Read any review of Patrick Whiteýs A Fringe of Leaves and you will expect it to be an exciting tale.One that includes adventures on the sea, a frightening shipwreck, and deaths of important characters; a tale of enslavement by the wild and savage Australian aborigines, sex, and cannibalism; a tale of the heroic rescue of a damsel in distress by an escaped convict.But if you are expecting this adventurous and daring plot, you may turn away disappointed.You may read halfway through the book and not encounter more than one or two of the events mentioned in the reviews.
What is it, then, that makes A Fringe a five-star read?Why do many readers across the globe claim it to be one of Patrick Whiteýs most brilliant works?
This is not, in fact, merely a story of adventure and excitement.Itýs a mission of humanity.Ellen Roxburgh is the image of any individual with conflicting views of life within herself.This is not a story of rescue, but one of survival.It reminds us all of our own personal inner struggles and how much we have been able to overcome.It is a reminder that the loss of innocence in every child is the first step in that childýs becoming an adult.
A Fringe is also an anthem of cross-culturalism that sings true today in America, though it was set in 19th century Australia.Living here, we have all acquired or developed a certain social standard unfamiliar to our infant natures.From living among many legions of immigrants, or even from traveling abroad, we know what it is to subscribe to other social standards.A Fringe explores the effects of such an initiation in Ellen Roxburghýs character.This initiation is exhibited as the cause of her internal conflict of social behaviors.She began as a Cornish farmerýs daughter, and then developed a façade of proper civilized mannerisms when she married her aristocratic husband.She initiated another set of social standards when she was forced to live among the aborigines.Whiteýs moving depiction of this struggle will inspire and comfort the patient reader.
Patrick Whiteýs A Fringe of Leaves may not satisfy an impatient adventurer.But it surpasses its acclaim of literary merit in its brilliant demonstration of timeless humanity and cross-cultural issues.

Upon unknown shores cast
Patrick White writes like a castaway from the Victorian era. His novels are long and full of real characters and the society and civilization of which they are a part and from which they come is equally real. Each character possesses a fully developed history, and the story as a whole progress from one point to another. And in the process people are changed by the experience. If that sounds old fashioned to you, well, it is old fashioned but those are values that some readers miss and for those readers these novels. I don't want to make White sound too antiquated though for his themes are very contemporary ,or timeless, as his themes are those that don't go out of style. This is my favorite of his novels. In A Fringe of Leaves(c.1973) White tells a shipwreck story upon the shores of an as yet uncolonised Australia. The characters who survive the shipwreck are then captured by Aborigines and must adapt to a lifestyle quite unlike the one left behind in fair old England. White uses this tale to examine civilization first by showing his characters in it and then by showing his characters as they appear stripped of it.....in only a fringe of leaves. The examination is quite a thorough and engaging one. The novel feels Victorian partly because it is set in that time (or before) but it only retains the best of that periods use of the form. White himself is Australian(and one who has won many awards, Nobel included, and to many he is the best they have so far produced) and so his study of England is tinged with an insight reserved for the ousider or in his case the postcolonial. The shipwreck portion of the book is only about 150 pages or so near the end of a 500 page plus novel. It takes patience to get to the exciting part of the story but once you are there you will want to read that section more than once. In those blindingly intense pages the characters cling to but a few delicate and sacred strands of belief to keep the savage world from totally adopting them. The aftermath portion of the book is equally interesting. ... Read more