The Eye of the Storm

Mrs. Hunter’s Deathbed

Elizabeth Hunter is dying in her large Sydney house, attended by two nurses—Sister de Santis and Flora Manhood—whose relationship with their patient is more complex and more honest than anything her children can manage. The present action of the novel is largely confined to this house: the elaborate daily ritual of Mrs. Hunter’s dressing, which she insists on performing with full ceremony even as she approaches death; the visits of friends, servants, and medical staff; and, finally, the arrival of her children.

Mrs. Hunter herself is one of White’s most formidable characters: a woman who was, in her prime, beautiful, manipulative, and socially commanding—a woman who used people and was cruel in the way that powerful beautiful people often are, and who knows it. She is not sympathetic in any conventional sense. But she has had an experience—at the eye of a cyclone, on an island, in her late middle age—that has given her a perspective on her own life that none of the people around her can share. The daily ritual of her dressing, her insistence on being fully present even as her body fails, is White’s image of a woman who has seen something and is not going to look away from it.

The nurses who attend her are rendered with White’s characteristic democracy of attention: Sister de Santis, devout and essentially spiritual, recognizes something in Mrs. Hunter that she cannot name; Flora Manhood, earthier and more confused, is drawn into the old woman’s orbit despite herself. Both understand more about Elizabeth Hunter than her children do.

The Eye of the Storm

The cyclone sequence—rendered in the novel’s central section through Mrs. Hunter’s memory—is the key to everything. Stranded on a small island off the Queensland coast, Mrs. Hunter experiences the storm’s approach with a mixture of terror and aesthetic exhilaration. When the storm reaches its full force, she takes shelter and survives. And at the storm’s center—in the eye—she finds a stillness that is not merely meteorological.

White presents this experience with deliberate ambiguity. Mrs. Hunter does not see a vision, hear a voice, or undergo a religious conversion in any doctrinal sense. She simply, for a period of time that is impossible to measure, exists in a state of absolute clarity—a state in which the usual categories of self-interest, social performance, and temporal anxiety are simply absent. This moment has changed the quality of her consciousness for the rest of her life, though it has not changed her character: she is still manipulative, still capable of cruelty, still Elizabeth Hunter. What has changed is her relationship to her own impending death. She knows something about the center of things that her children cannot reach.

The Children’s Return

Dorothy, Princess de Lascabanes, has made a European marriage that is failing; Basil Hunter is an acclaimed London actor whose technique has long since swallowed his inner life. Both have come to Sydney expecting their mother to die quickly so they can collect their inheritance and leave. Neither can understand why she is taking so long, or why the nurses seem more genuinely connected to her than they are.

White’s treatment of the children is his most sustained comic-cruel achievement. Dorothy’s social pretensions—the French title, the European address, the disdain for Australian ordinariness—are rendered with savage precision. Basil’s theatrical self-absorption—his habit of playing every moment as if it were a scene from a play he is performing in—is equally exact. Both are intelligent, educated, and entirely unable to see their mother as anything other than a mother. The irony White builds from this is vertiginous: the dying woman, who has glimpsed something genuinely rare, is surrounded by people who cannot see past their own needs and anxieties. The novel meditates on what it costs to have seen the center of the storm—and what it means that the inheritance the children want is only money.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — White’s most psychologically concentrated late novel. Demanding but essential for readers willing to follow it to its end.