![]() The eponymous explorer has trudged four kilometres from Sydney to the outer suburbs, to Potts Point, home of the Bonner family. ![]() We meet the book’s two central characters in the opening pages. White wrote Voss whilst his previous novel The Tree of Man (a separate post on this site) was being published, and the two novels combine into a hugely powerful depiction of Australia as a colony emerging into a nation with its own identity. ![]() White took these events and moulded them into a psychological drama of the most extraordinary power. Many of Patrick White’s characters are sufferers and this is no less true of both White himself and of the eponymous Voss whom White based on the real-life Ludwig Leichardt who completed a number of successful expeditions into Australia’s interior before mounting a final one in 1848 from which none in his party returned. But the description of, one presumes, God - or a deity - as “the supreme torturer”, author of illusions, who had by that stage in the story winnowed so many souls, comes with a parallel meaning that it is Patrick White himself as “supreme torturer” who conceived the searing catastrophe of Johann Ulrich Voss’s expedition into the burning heart of Australia in the 1840s. The image is startling and freighted with meaning. Towards the end of Patrick White’s novel Voss, White observes for one of his characters that only “the supreme torturer would have tweaked the curtain of illusion” (and thus caused her to imagine her childhood garden to be reflected in the face of her cousin Laura). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |