Where to Start with Patrick White: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Patrick White — whether to begin with Voss, Riders in the Chariot, or The Tree of Man. A complete reading guide to the Nobel Prize-winning Australian novelist.
Patrick White (1912–1990) is the Australian novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 — the first Australian to do so — and who is widely regarded as the greatest novelist Australia has produced. Born in London to Australian parents and educated at Cambridge, White returned to Australia in 1948 and spent the rest of his life there, writing fiction that was simultaneously deeply Australian (in its preoccupation with the continent’s landscape, its colonial history, and its suburban complacency) and deeply engaged with European modernist tradition (Woolf, Lawrence, Proust, Faulkner). His novels — The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966), The Vivisector (1970), The Eye of the Storm (1973) — are unified by a spiritual preoccupation: the search for transcendence in the most unpromising material — the Australian bush, the Sydney suburbs, the lives of the marginalised and the eccentric.
Where to Start: Voss (1957)
The essential White — and the most dramatically accessible of his major novels. In 1845, Johann Ulrich Voss, a German explorer of immense pride and spiritual ambition, leads an expedition of six men from Sydney westward into the Australian interior. The novel alternates between Voss’s journey — the heat, the landscape’s indifference, the gradual disintegration of the party — and the life of Laura Trevalyan in Sydney, a young woman who barely knows Voss but with whom he conducts a profound, imaginary communion across thousands of miles.
White presents Voss as a figure who wants to conquer the continent through will alone: he believes himself extraordinary, beyond the ordinary constraints of human society. The landscape disagrees. The novel is both a portrait of colonial hubris and a spiritual narrative: Voss’s annihilation — by the desert, by betrayal, by his own pride — is also a form of revelation. The most dramatic and the most accessible starting point.
Riders in the Chariot (1961)
White’s most comprehensive and most politically engaged novel — his most ambitious structurally. Four visionaries in a postwar Sydney suburb: Miss Hare, a reclusive eccentric clinging to the ruins of her family estate; Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who has survived the camps; Mrs. Godbold, a working-class woman of simple but absolute faith; and Alf Dubbo, an Aboriginal artist who paints the visions he cannot otherwise express. The four barely interact, but they share a common vision: the chariot of Ezekiel, the divine presence that makes reality bearable.
The novel is White at his most politically committed: anti-Semitism, racism, and the persecution of the outsider are treated with the same seriousness as the mystical vision. The most demanding of his novels and the most rewarding.
The Tree of Man (1955)
White’s breakthrough novel — the book that established his reputation after years of neglect. Stan Parker, a young man, takes up land on the fringe of the Australian bush at the turn of the twentieth century, clears it, builds a farm, marries Amy, raises children. The novel follows Stan and Amy through their entire lives — their marriage, the birth of their children, bushfire, flood, the Second World War, old age — in a prose style of extraordinary lyrical density.
The novel is White’s least dramatic — nothing very dramatic happens, in the conventional sense — and his most meditative: it is an attempt to find the sacred in the most ordinary material, the transcendent in the banal dailiness of Australian rural life. Begin here if you want to understand White’s fundamental concerns; read Voss first if you want narrative propulsion.
Reading Patrick White
White’s fiction insists that the most unpromising material — the Australian bush, the Sydney suburb, the life of the eccentric and the outcast — can contain the same spiritual intensity that European culture sought in cathedral and opera house. His prose style is his most distinctive feature: elaborate, figurative, highly wrought, and capable of sudden compression and beauty. He is demanding and rewarding in roughly equal measure. Begin with Voss for the most accessible and the most dramatically structured introduction; read Riders in the Chariot for the fullest demonstration of his range; approach The Tree of Man for the most purely meditative account of his fundamental concerns.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Patrick White?
Voss (1957) is both the most celebrated and the most accessible starting point — the novel based loosely on the ill-fated expedition of Ludwig Leichhardt into the Australian interior, in which Johann Ulrich Voss leads a small party westward from Sydney in 1845 on an expedition that will destroy them all. It is White's most dramatic novel, built around the most charged relationship in his fiction: the mystical communion between Voss and Laura Trevalyan, a woman he barely knows, conducted through letters and imagination across the thousands of miles between Sydney and the interior. Riders in the Chariot is the more comprehensive but also the more demanding demonstration of his full range.
What is Voss about?
Voss (1957) follows Johann Ulrich Voss, a German explorer, who in 1845 leads an expedition of six men and several Aboriginal trackers from Sydney westward into the Australian interior. The novel alternates between Voss's journey and the life of Laura Trevalyan, a niece of the Sydney merchant who has funded the expedition. Voss and Laura barely meet; their communion is conducted through imagination, letters, and eventually (as the expedition fails and the men begin to die) through a form of mystical telepathy. White presents Voss as a figure of immense pride and spiritual ambition — a man who wants to conquer the continent as a proof of his will — and traces the destruction of this pride in the face of the landscape, the heat, and the desert.
What is Riders in the Chariot about?
Riders in the Chariot (1961) follows four visionaries — Miss Hare, a reclusive eccentric who lives in the remains of her family's estate; Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany; Mrs. Godbold, a working-class woman of simple faith; and Alf Dubbo, an Aboriginal artist — in a postwar Sydney suburb. The four characters barely interact but are connected by a shared mystical vision: the chariot of the Book of Ezekiel, the divine presence that illuminates reality. The novel is White's most comprehensive and most politically engaged — it deals with anti-Semitism, racism, and the destruction of the outsider — and his most ambitious structurally.
Is Patrick White difficult to read?
White is demanding but not obscure. His prose is elaborate and highly figurative — sentences that build through accumulation, imagery that reaches for the mystical or the visionary — and his characters are frequently inner-directed to the point of opacity: we spend much of the time inside consciousness rather than observing action. He is also formally demanding in the sense of requiring patience: his novels are long, their movement is meditative rather than plot-driven, and their rewards come from immersion rather than from plot-level engagement. Readers who have enjoyed Woolf, Lawrence, or Faulkner will find him accessible; those who need rapid narrative propulsion will find him difficult.
