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From the Back Cover
"One of the great magicians of fiction ... White's scope is vast and his intention endless" ANGUS WILSON, Observer
"Patrick White is, in the finest sense, a world novelist. His theme are catholic and complex and he pursues them with a single-minded energy and vision" ROBERT NYE, Guardian
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Customer Reviews
As a member of the Courtney family, Hurtle travels and becomes educated, though he continues to interpret the world more visually than thoughtfully. For him, the usual emotional traumas of adolescence are accompanied by unique questions of his identity, both because of his two families and also because of his view of the world. Not religious, he sees God as the Great Vivisector, and men treating each other as animals. As an artist, he behaves as a vivisector himself, using women who love him as vehicles for his own self-expression. White says about his painting of one model, "[Hurtle] disemboweled her while she was still alive." Throughout his life, Hurtle continues to search for love, inspiration, self-expression, and some sort of balance in his life between his immense need to paint, his desire for personal connection, and his simultaneous need to be alone.
White's prose style is direct and concise, elegantly simple, and easy to understand. He uses colloquial speech--words like "smoodge," "sook," "slommacky," and "mumped," which must be understood from context--and reveals character and action through dialogue. The novel is old-fashioned, using a straight chronological narrative with no complex flashbacks, and it is quite romantic in its plot elements, despite its serious theme development. The biggest problem for the reader is that the main character is not very likable, nor does he inspire a great deal of empathy--a difficult character to live with for approximately six hundred pages as he engages in his personal quest. Mary Whipple
Episodes from his solitary and bohemian existence are vividly transformed into written paintings which each occupy a chapter, beginning with his adoptive parents, his crippled sister, his abortive affairs with prostitues and society ladies, a nocturnal encounter with a voyeur, and ultimately his death, which is possibly the most mesmeric death ever written. The artist is submerged in his final, Yves Klein-esque painting, in a stylistic tour-de-force of Joycean disintegration and epiphany. This scene is not only very moving and mystical, but it also almost succeeds in the extraordinary task of committing the transcendence of an abstract painting to words.
The general impression left by this great book is that the artist is a modern shaman incapable of a successful existence within society, as he cruelly vivisects his acquaintances and lovers for the benefit of his art. The paintbrush is deadlier than the sword...
The other reviews cover the book's plot pretty well so I won't repeat. But though the title suggests (clearly not literally) Hurt dissects people for his art (and is thereby a torn, challenging, using individual), I found this more a novel where we (and the narrative) end up dissecting him and his relationships to a greater extent. Not least because each of the key women in his life (deformed sister Rhoda, Boo, Hero and Kathy are episodes in his life) produce paintings but we can't actually see Hurt's output.
Patrick writes a clever worthy literary insight to an anguished artist with lots of existential moral/religious overtones. The style is graphic and exciting but not sexually explicit. It does ask questions about if one ever real knows someone else.
The basic subject I've read before: Zola's 'The Masterpiece'; Maugham's 'Moon and six pence' and Llosa's 'Way of Paradise'. Zola manages to encapsulate the pain of an artist (hints of Cezanne); Maugham the shear bad-selfishness of an artist (i.e. inspired by Gaugin); and Llosa perhaps the excitement of being an artist (a fictionalisation of Gaugin too). I'd say White has managed to deliver all three aspects in the Vivesector in a stylish, readable way - if you don't fancy taking up the long 600page challenge the three I've mentioned are shorter and perhaps more readable, if a little less 'worthy'. If I had one criticism if would be that perhaps, to a modern reader, Hurt could be a little stereotyped - but an easy 4 stars.
Some quotes:
"I realised how immoral it is to be rich: to be in a position to clothe them adequately at every moment of their growth is very immoral."
"God or whatever couldn't have been entirely honest in creating the world."
"He saw past her green-sickness and menstrual torments into the hazy future of a bungled marriage and hushed-up attempt at suicide."
"God - God is cruel! We are his bag of cats, aren't we? When God is no longer cruel many questions will be answered."
And the classic summary of the entire book: "God the Vivisector God the Artist God"
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