Riders in the Chariot

The Four Visionaries

White builds his novel around four characters whose only apparent connection is that they each, at some point in their lives, have had a vision of the chariot of God described in the Book of Ezekiel. Miss Mary Hare is the last occupant of Xanadu, a decaying estate outside the fictional Sydney suburb of Sarsaparilla—an eccentric spinster who lives among the property’s undergrowth and animals, regarded by the suburb as harmlessly mad. Mordecai Himmelfarb is a German-Jewish refugee, a professor of literature who survived the Holocaust through a series of near-miraculous accidents and now works in a factory. Alf Dubbo is an Aboriginal painter, illegitimate and educated by missionaries, who has fled both the white world that exploited him and the Aboriginal world he cannot return to. Mrs. Ruth Godbold is a washerwoman—uneducated, gentle, the most apparently ordinary of the four—whose simple goodness White presents as the most genuine of all their spiritual gifts.

What connects these four is not theology but experience: each has been vouchsafed a moment of direct perception that lies entirely outside the categories the suburb can recognize or tolerate. They are not connected to each other by doctrine or community but by the fact of having seen. White’s theological vision is deliberately ecumenical—the chariot appears to an Anglican spinster, a Jewish scholar, an Aboriginal artist, and a Methodist washerwoman—suggesting that genuine vision is not the property of any single tradition.

The Suburb as Anti-Vision

Sarsaparilla is one of literature’s great fictional places: not a landscape but a social atmosphere, the atmosphere of postwar Australian suburban conformity at its most suffocating. It is organized entirely around the comfortable and the comprehensible. Its cruelties are casual—the children who mock Miss Hare, the factory workers who subject Himmelfarb to a mock crucifixion on Good Friday, the neighbors who assume Mrs. Godbold’s charity is madness—because they are the cruelties of people who have never been asked to look at anything more difficult than their own reflections.

White’s treatment of the suburb is his most overtly savage writing. He makes no attempt to be fair to Sarsaparilla’s comfortable inhabitants—they are rendered as a collective organism of self-protective mediocrity, capable of violence whenever a visionary life threatens to make them feel the inadequacy of their own. The mock-crucifixion of Himmelfarb—workers at his factory enact a parody of the Passion on Good Friday—is the novel’s most extreme sequence, connecting suburban Australian cruelty to the European genocide that Himmelfarb survived, suggesting that they arise from the same source: the human capacity to destroy whatever it cannot absorb.

White’s Theology

The chariot of Ezekiel—the divine vehicle seen by the prophet in his vision—is White’s central symbol throughout the novel. It appears not as a doctrinal concept but as an image of the directness of spiritual experience, the moment when the divine impinges on the ordinary without mediation or interpretation. White was not a conventionally religious man, but he was deeply concerned with what could be called the sacred—with those moments of experience that cannot be accounted for by the categories of secular, suburban rationality.

The mock-crucifixion that climaxes the novel connects this theology to White’s diagnosis of Australian anti-intellectualism and anti-mysticism. Himmelfarb, the Jewish scholar who survived one Europe-wide attempt at total destruction, is subjected to a smaller version of the same impulse in the Australian suburb. White’s argument is uncomfortable: that the Holocaust was not a German aberration but an extreme expression of what ordinary societies do to people who refuse to be ordinary. The Nobel Prize committee recognized Riders in the Chariot as central to White’s achievement—a novel in which the spiritual stakes of ordinary life are made devastatingly clear.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — White’s most theologically charged and socially savage novel. The mock-crucifixion sequence alone justifies its place among the great works of twentieth-century fiction.