The Vivisector (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

This book comes with great peripherals. On the cover of the Penguin Classics edition is a superb painting by Jason Freeman, showing an operation on a human eye; as brilliant as it is horrifying, the image perfectly captures the mind of the protagonist, Australian painter Hurtle Duffield, whose laser gaze sears into the souls of his subjects, even if he must destroy them in the process. You open the cover to find an excellent introduction by fellow-Nobelist J. M. Coetzee, and four pithy epigraphs that suggest the goals of this huge novel, beginning with the painter Ben Nicholson ("As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing..."), and ending with Rimbaud: "He becomes beyond all others the great Invalid, the great Criminal, the great Accursed One -- and the Supreme Knower. For he reaches the unknown."

No Australian author can match the scope and moral intensity of Patrick White at his best (although Richard Flanagan comes close with GOULD'S BOOK OF FISH), and it takes a Dostoevsky to turn the heat up much higher. His VOSS (1957) is a masterpiece, beautiful both in its containment and its quest to explode conventional boundaries. RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT (1961), by contrast, is a brilliantly unruly study of four very different characters on the fringes of society, linked only by the intensity of their half-crazed visions of God. One of these four is a self-taught, virtually autistic, half-caste painter called Alf Dubbo; although drunken and dissolute in his private life, he has a particular fascination for religious subjects, and White has an uncanny ability to convey the intensity of his vision and the texture and warp of his paint. Now in 1970, he makes such a painter the subject of an entire book.

Although growing up in poor circumstances similar to Dubbo's, Hurtle Duffield is adopted as a child by a rich family and has the benefit of a first-class education. Later, he throws off these bourgeois ties to live in squalor on a patch of waste land, visited occasionally by his mistress, a Sydney prostitute, and a gay gallery owner who becomes his first dealer. Later still, he moves back to Sydney, and though living in a ramshackle house in a poor quarter, begins to find success in selling his paintings and attracting the attention of a number of rich female patrons. The book proceeds in a number of long chapters, jumping from decade to decade in the twentieth century, marked not so much by changes in Hurtle's outer life as by a succession of different lovers and the changing preoccupations of his artistic vision. Towards the end, he meets a young girl who is on the way to becoming an artist in her own right, a concert pianist, and a new tenderness enters the book. But this also brings on a spiritual crisis resulting in the last pictures of all, almost mural-sized daubs of dark tortured paint (one thinks of the "black paintings" of Goya) referred to by rumor as "The God Paintings." Does Duffield find God at the end, come face-to-face with the being he refers to as "The Great Vivisector"? Perhaps. But by this time, White has begun to fracture his language almost abstractly to echo Hurtle's mind, devastated by a series of strokes, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.

Unfortunately, the novel does not quite live up to its promise. The seventy-year story of a life is too loose a form to achieve the jangling juxtaposition of the other books, thrusting flint against steel. As Coetzee says, too much is prelude to what most matters, and too little is written at white heat (his pun, but an apt one). I also find that the double strands of sexual history and artistic exploration detract from one another. There are striking moments of fusion, as when Duffield's accidental sight of his hunchbacked sister naked by a bidet becomes the subject for a series of paintings that one is not only told but believes to be great. But towards the end, in the episodes with the young pianist, I found the various strands pulling against one another just when one might want them to interweave. All the same, one does get some feeling for the work of this artist (a little Sidney Nolan, but mostly Francis Bacon), and an even stronger sense of what it is to be the victim-possessor of an unrelenting, searing vision. And that is no small achievement.

(4.5 stars) In his longest novel, written in 1970, Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White examines the question of an artist's creativity, where it comes from, whether it can be controlled, and what obligations, if any, accompany it. As he traces the life of Hurtle Duffield from the age of four until his death as an elderly (and successful) avant-garde artist, we see Duffield always as somehow different from his peers.

The son of a laundress and a bottle collector, Hurtle is from birth inspired, painting large images on walls as a toddler, but he recognizes at an early age that "people look down at their plates if you said something was 'beautiful.'" To provide him with opportunities which will allow his genius to flourish, his parents sell him, when he is four years old, to the wealthy family for which his mother works.

As a member of the Courtney family, Hurtle travels and becomes educated, though he continues to see rather than think. 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, slaughtering each other in war.

When he himself goes off to war and returns to find that the family has gone in separate directions, he devotes himself, once again, to his art, using women who love him as vehicles for his own self-expression and behaving as a vivisector himself. About his painting of one model, White says "[Hurtle] disemboweled her while she was still alive." As time passes, 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--and I'm not sure how typical he is of the artists he is supposed to represent. Mary Whipple

Riders in the Chariot (New York Review Books Classics)
Voss (Penguin Classics)
The Tree of Man

Makes Brothers Karamazov look like child's play. It's brutal. It's hard. It's wearisome. It's depressing. An incredibly dense slog through mountains of accreted detail that builds toward possibly the most depressive overwhelming novel I have ever read. You'll start by sipping Sherry and quickly reach for the cognac. White was merciless, both toward himself and his readers. The main character is a human insect, devoid of compassion or sympathy except for his own cruel and selfish desires. Have fun!