A Biblical History Of Iniquity in Suburban Australia (Or Why I Love Patrick White, Part II)

I wrote two weeks ago about my newfound love for Patrick White, and mentioned that I was enjoying Riders In The Chariot even more than The Vivisector. I finished it, and I loved it. It took me a while to get through because I’ve been busy, but every time I picked it up again I had trouble putting it down.

Set in a fictional Sydney suburb called Sarsaparilla sometime around 1950, Riders In The Chariot is about four radically different people who all have similar religious visions of a chariot in the sky. Mary Hare is a childlike woman who lives alone in her family’s crumbling mansion. Mordecai Himmelfarb is a literature professor who moved from Germany to Australia after surviving the Holocaust. Alf Dubbo is a half-Aboriginal painter. And Ruth Godbold is a deeply religious laundrywoman with an alcoholic husband and six children.

Their lives intersect to various degrees, but for the most part this is a book about the solitary lives of four outcasts. The thing they all have in common, aside from the religious visions, is that they all live on the fringes of society. What’s never clear is whether they’re outsiders because of the visions, or if they’re having the visions because they’re outsiders. The book follows them until they discover that the others have the same visions.

Parts of this novel read like four separate smaller novels. It starts with the story of Mary’s lonely upbringing, and her antagonistic relationship with the housekeeper she hires to keep her company after her family dies. She meets Himmelfarb, who tells her about his upbringing in Germany, his job as an English professor, and how he survived the Holocaust. Alf Dubbo was raised by strict missionaries who tried to discourage his interest in painting. Ruth Godbold also had a strict religious upbringing, but unlike Dubbo, she’s a devout (but nonjudgmental) believer. They’ve all had difficult lives and are grappling with existential questions, but White seems more focused on their experiences than on any answers.

My research (okay, Wikipedia) tells me that the chariot in the book is the merkabah from the Book of Ezekiel. The chariot has four riders, each of which has four faces—a man, a lion, an ox (or a cherub) and an eagle. It’s tempting to assign each of the four protagonists to one of the faces. The book culminates in a startling event that’s at least superficially religious, but I can’t say much more without spoiling it.

But what I liked about the book is that the characters aren’t romanticized, and White doesn’t try to give any big answers. It would have been easy to turn them into martyrs or heroes, but White presents them as ordinary people. Even the religious visions (hallucinations?) are presented without analysis, barely even described. The chariot provides the book’s name and many of its themes, but it’s ultimately only a small part. Sometimes White lets us into the characters’ thoughts, and other times their motivations are left unexplained. The secondary characters are also described in vivid detail. They’re seen as judgmental, but they’re still fully developed, relatable people. This prevents the protagonists from being overly romanticized, because the people who think they’re crazy seem to have perfectly logical grounds for believing that.

There are parallels to The Vivisector, though this novel was published 12 years earlier. The parallel between Dubbo and Duffield, the two painters, is the most obvious. Mary Hare is similar to Duffield’s sister Rhoda. And the wealthy family who hire Ruth when she arrives in Sydney lives much the same lifestyle as the Courtneys. On the whole I found Rider In The Chariot less dense than The Vivisector, and I’d recommend reading this one first. The multiple intersecting stories keep it moving faster, and the it seems like White’s writing style wasn’t as complex as it later became.

And The Award For Best English-Language Writer That No One Ever Told Me About…

… goes to Patrick White. He was an excellent writer, he won a Nobel Prize, and yet none of the well-read people I’ve asked has heard of him. I think it’s partly because his name isn’t very distinctive, and mainly because he was Australian. English-language literature is weirdly segregated, and I suspect that each country has great writers who for whatever reason never become popular outside their home country. I probably would have continued to not knowing about Patrick White until my mother found a copy of one of his books on a plane and gave it to me because “it looks weird.”

The book was The Vivisector, and admittedly it is weird. (Part of what drew me to it is that the cover art reminded me of A Clockwork Orange. I know that saying about books and covers and judging. This book is almost nothing like that book, though I love both.)

The Vivisector is the fictional story of a painter named Hurtle Duffield. Duffield is born to a working class family in Sydney around the turn of the century, but is adopted by a wealthy family, the Courtneys. The Courtneys’ daughter, Rhoda, has a hunchback and is socially isolated. Hurtle forms an initially uneasy but eventually typical sibling alliance with the remarkably calm and almost saintlike Rhoda: he alternates between mercilessly teasing her and conspiring with her against the adults in their lives.

Duffield grows up and leaves Australia to fight in World War I, cutting off contact with his family. After returning to Sydney, he goes through a series of different relationships with various women: a prostitute, a childhood acquaintance of his sister’s, a wealthy Greek woman who becomes his mistress, and decades later, a young musician whom he takes in as a sort of protégée.

Duffield is cruel and calculating and cuts himself off from most of the world around him. He becomes a successful painter, and has no qualms about using people he knows as fodder for his art, usually without their consent. This ends up damaging many of his relationships. Unsurprisingly, his paintings evolve over the course of his career, and White does a brilliant job of using Duffield’s paintings to reflect his psychological state.

© 2010 BookPlotz.

What I liked about White’s descriptions of Duffield’s paintings was that he managed to be evocative without being overly descriptive. It’s hard to write about art, and it can easily get boring. I enjoyed the vague descriptions that managed to convey what Duffield was thinking without describing his paintings in minute detail, like this one: Till then, he had his secret, and his work, and his work was his secret. Throughout this phase of his painting life the colours he used were noticeably clear, which made some of the earlier stuff look over-sombre, congested, muddy. He was conscious of wanting to exclude from this new world of transparent lyricism any of the old threats and tensions.

One thing I’ve noticed in many of the books I’ve read lately is that the protagonists are somewhat unlikable. They’re outsiders, and it’s partially their own fault, for being cruel or judgmental. This was one of those books, as were Pornografia and Snow White and Russian Red. This isn’t to say that Duffield has no redeeming qualities—I wouldn’t have been engrossed in his life for 600 pages if he didn’t. But it takes a certain skill from the writer to keep the reader engaged in the story of someone who’s mundanely unsympathetic without being so horrifically evil as to be fascinating in his own right.

Even when Duffield ostensibly cares about the people in his life, he’s above all focused on his art. His unregenerate soul could feel no more than sympathetic towards her state of mind, while worshipping the aesthetic variations of its incarnation. It was the same with the landscape. He was conscious of God as a formal necessity on which depended every figure in the afternoon’s iconography: goat-troglodytes; the old man pissing against the wind; orphan-whores; the procession of mourners; a martyred Hero.

While it takes places in the 20th-century Sydney we’d expect, The Vivisector has a hallucinatory quality full of fantastical images. It’s a difficult book, and it takes a while to get through. But it’s a fascinating psychological study. I read The Vivisector several months ago. While the details of the book aren’t fresh in my mind, the book as a whole is. I’m reading another of his novels, Riders In The Chariot, which I’m enjoying even more. Realizing how much I’m enjoying that book made me remember how much I enjoyed this one, and how strongly I’d recommend it to anyone.