Patrick Victor Martindale White (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White) was an Australian author who is widely regarded as a major English-language novelist of the 20th century.
From 1935 until his death, White published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantagepoints and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In Voss (1957) the plot is of epic simplicity. It’s 1845 and Johann Ulrich Voss sets out with a small band to cross the Australian continent for the first time. The tragic story of their terrible journey and its predictable end is told with imaginative understanding. The figure of Voss takes on superhuman proportions, until he appears to those around him as both deliverer and destroyer. His relationship with Laura Trevelyan is the central personal theme of the story. The true record of Ludwig Leichardt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Leichhardt), who died in the Australian desert in 1848, suggested Voss to the author.
White rejected the gritty, documentary realism that had dominated early Australian literature. In Voss, he employs a dense, baroque, and highly poetic prose style. He shifts seamlessly between the sharp, satirical comedy of colonial Sydney high society and an intense, feverish interiority. By doing so, he transforms the harsh Australian outback from a physical obstacle into a mirror of the human mind – a ‘psychological geography’ where characters are stripped of societal pretension and forced to confront the void within themselves.
The novel concludes with Laura surviving into old age to see Voss’s tragic failure mythologised by the nation. White suggests that a country’s identity is built not on its triumphs, but on its ghosts. This is a story that will remain with you long after the last page is turned.
Check if Voss by Patrick White is in stock at your local library by consulting the online catalogue here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
Patrick White died on 30 September 1990. An obituary may be read here From the Archives, 1990: Patrick White, author and stirrer, dies at 78 (smh.com.au)
Patrick White
First published 1957
ISBN 978-0099324713