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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).

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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

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