#CAREY_Peter

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Battling with Life

(people at odds with the society around them)

James Baldwin, Go, Tell It on the Mountain

T. Coraghessan Boyle , The Tortilla Curtain

Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Maxim Gorky, Foma Gordeev

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Emile Zola, Nana

See also: EMOTIONALLY ILL-AT-EASE    PERPLEXED BY LIFE    REVISITING ONE'S PAST   

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WHITE, Patrick

Australian novelist and playwright (1912-1990)

White was interested in Nietzsche's idea of superbeings', people endowed with qualities or abilities which set them apart from the rest of the human race. But White's characters are cursed, not blessed, by difference: their chief attribute is a cantankerous individuality which makes it impossible for them to adjust to society or it to them. In some books (eg Riders in the Chariot, 1961, about anti-semitism, or The Vivisector, 1970, about a convention-defying painter) the enemy' is the stifling gentility of lower-middle-class Sydney suburbanites. In others (eg The Tree of Man, 1956, about a young farmer in the 1900s, or A Fringe of Leaves, 1976, see below), the battle is symbolic, against the wilderness itself. But wherever conflict takes place, it is of epic proportions: White's craggy prose puts him in the company of such past writers as Melville or Conrad, and in the 20th century only Golding equals his blend of fast-paced story-telling and brooding philosophical allegory.

VOSS  (1957) In 1857, financed by a group of Sydney businessmen, a group of explorers sets out to cross Australia. The expedition is led by the German visionary Voss: physically awkward, ill-at-ease in towns and houses, speaking a tortured, poetic English which sounds as if he learned it by rote, phrase by painful phrase. The other members include an ex-convict and a dreamy aboriginal boy, Jackie, torn between the white people's culture and his own. White balances reports of the ex-pedition's struggle against the desert and to understand one another with accounts of the life of Laura Trevelyan, a young woman fascinated by Voss (at first as a larger-than-life character, an epic personality, and then as a vulnerable human being) as she waits in Sydney, like a medium hoping for spirit-messages, for news of him.

White's other novels are Happy Valley, The Living and the Dead, The Aunt's Story (a comedy about an indomitable spinster travelling alone), The Solid Mandala, The Eye of the Storm and The Twyborn Affair. The Burnt Ones and The Cockatoos are collections of short stories. Flaws in the Glass is an autobiography, good on White's own battles against the wilderness (he was an outback farmer) and against convention (he was homosexual).

READ ON

A Fringe of Leaves (about a woman shipwrecked in Queensland in the 1840s, who is captured by Aborigines and brought to terms not only with an alien culture but with her feelings about the ‘civilization’ she knew before)

To Voss : Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus William Golding, Darkness Visible Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

To A Fringe of Leaves : D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent Katharine Susannah Prichard, Coonardoo Jim Grace, Signals of Distress

To White's work in general : Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children Elizabeth Taylor, Blaming

 more :Tags  Pathways  Themes & Places

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The Playmaker

Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker

(1780s English officer guides convicts in Australia through production of a Restoration comedy)

Australian Life (the funny side)

Rodney Hall, Kisses of the Enemy

Peter Carey, Illywacker

Howard Jacobson, Redback

Elizabeth Jolley, The Funny Side

Convicts (prison as living Hell)

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit  (19th-century England: corrupting effects of money, and life in the Marshalsea Debtors" Prison)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (20th-century USSR: unsparing account of life in labour-camp for dissidents)

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables  (19th-century France honest man wrongly convicted to the galleys tries to rehabilitate himself)

John Cheever, Falconer  (20th-century USA: life in "correctional facility" as experienced by mentally unstable, middle-class wife-murderer)

Faction (novels embroidering real events)

John Fowles, A Maggot  (witchcraft, murder and possible UFOs in18th-century England)

Tony Weeks-Pearson, Dodo  (extermination of dodo brings culture-shock to native inhabitants of idyllic Pacific island)

Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal  (plot to assassinate General de Gaulle of France)

E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel  (lives of children of US immigrants executed for espionage)

Martin Cruz Smith, Stallion Gate  (Mexican magic versus development of first atomic bomb)

Frontiers of Civilisation

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  (religious hysteria and persecution in Puritan New England)

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart  (Nigerian tribal life, the rhythms of civilisation, disrupted by coming of white missionaries)

Brian Moore, Black Robe  (Jesuit priest in 17th-century Huron Indian country: irreconcilable culture-clash)

Plays and Plays-Actors ("luvvies" is not the word)

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost  (amateurs in 1950s Canadian university town)

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts  (thoughts and feelings of everyone involved in village historical pageant)

Noel Langley, There"s a Porpoise Close Behind Us  (sour success of "bright young things" on 1930s London stage)

Paul Bailey, Peter Smart"s Confessions  (testimony of unsuccessful, mentally unstable actor)

The Australian Past (Aboriginal culture and the pain brought, and felt, by whites)

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves  (shipwrecked 1910s woman learns survival by assimilating Aborigine culture)

William Golding, Close Quarters  (life on 1790s convict-ship sailing from England to Australia)

Bruce Chatwin, The Song Lines  (writer travels modern Australia, investigating Aboriginal sacred places)

Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land  (first white settlers in Australia)

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Shame

Salman Rushdie, Shame

(feud between ruling families in fantasy-state 'Peccavistan')

Dictators

Augusto Roa Bastos, I, The Supreme  (Francia, dictator of Paraguay)

Miguel Asturias, The President  (corruption and jackboot evil in South America)

Michael Moorcock, Gloriana  (state and ruler one gross, monstrous entity)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch  (deathbed monologue of fanatical, deranged South American dictator)

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion  (Napoleon)

Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief  (England-educated 1930s black African ruler)

Many Generations

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude  (sprawling family dominate small town in fantasy South America)

Peter Carey, Illywacker  (132-year-old Australian conman tells his story)

John Irving, The World According to Garp  (evolution of writer in fantasy New England town)

Gerald Harvey Morris, Doves and Silk Handkerchieves  (magic and realism in 1900s English mining village)

Günter Grass, The Flounder  (fisher-couple and talking fish live through all German history)

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits  (political and personal evolution in rich South American family over 100 years)

Politics

Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah  (emerging African totalitarian state)

Timothy Mo, An Insular Possession  (British imperialism and Honk Kong)

Gore Vidal, Burr  ("traitor" who tried to set up rival republic to Jeffersonian America)

Nadine Gordimer, A Sport of Nature  (white girls joins South African freedom fighters)

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon  (treason-trial of old-guard revolutionary in unnamed but Stalinist dictatorship)

George Orwell, Animal Farm  (animals declare republic which degenerates into dictatorship)