Riders in the Chariot (New York
Review Books Classics) by Patrick
White
The Visionaries
Miss Hare lives alone in the ruins of her family estate in the 1960s suburbs
of Sydney, attended only by her housekeeper Mrs. Jolley. In her
wanderings Miss Hare meets Alf Dubbo, an aboriginal artist; Mordecai
Himmelfarb, a Holocaust survivor; and Mrs. Godbold, a local
washerwoman. Tender and lacerating, subtle and sweeping, Patrick
White’s boldest novel traces the personal and spiritual histories of these
four lost souls toward the moment they meet and recognize their shared
vision. Riders in the Chariot was the winner of the 1961 Miles Franklin
Prize for Best Australian Novel and the 1965 Gold Medal of the Australian
Literature Society. Author Patrick White (1912-1990) was Australias Nobel
laureate in literature.

Personal Review: Riders in the Chariot (New York Review
Books Classics) by Patrick White
What makes a great novel? Many things, but among them I would certainly
list Scale, Characters, and Moral Vision. All three of these qualities are to
be found in this towering novel by Patrick White. It is the first book by the
Nobel laureate that I have encountered; it will certainly not be the last.
This is a long book (640 pages), but a very easy one to read. In any case,
when speaking of scale, physical length is less important than breadth of
implication. White concentrates on a small group of people living on the
outskirts of Sydney after WW2, but makes them seem emblematic of the
entire continent. There is also a wide range of origin and social class; the
characters include the last survivor of a once-rich aristocratic family, a
German Jewish professor fleeing the Holocaust, a poor washerwoman
who emigrated from England as a child, and a half-aboriginal painter.
Since each character is given almost 100 pages of back-story, the novel is
by no means confined in place or period either; the section set in Germany
between the wars can hold its own with the best Holocaust writing
anywhere, with particular insights into Jewish social, intellectual, and
spiritual life. But the most important aspect of the book's scale is the
feeling held by each of the four major characters that the universe is an
immensely greater place than anything they may see around them.
White has the great gift of loving his characters. Each of the four is
something of an outcast. Miss Hare, the faded aristocrat, is clearly mad;
Himmelfarb, the professor, now chooses to work in a menial job, without
possessions or other signs of status; Mrs. Godbold, the washerwoman,
lives with her many daughters in a tumble-down shack; Alf Dubbo, the half-
caste painter, works by day as a janitor and is given to fits of drunkenness.
And yet White writes so convincingly through the eyes of each that we do
more than feel sympathy for them; we begin to see the others around them
as impoverished of spirit, living only partial lives. White is brilliant in
creating a gallery of semi-comic secondary characters -- some bad, some
well-meaning, some merely lacking in imagination -- to set off the qualities
of his principal quartet, but even these have dimension and are far from
caricatures.
One of the curious aspects of the book is that the four characters hardly
ever meet, although they recognize an immediate kinship when they do.
For all four are religious visionaries. Their visions may occur only once or
twice in their lives, but the image is the same for each: the approach of
Ezekiel's fiery chariot, both wonderful and terrible. I can think of few books
that are so successful at portraying the mystical dimension while being so
firmly rooted in the mundane. This is clearly a religious book, but not at all
a sectarian one. It is White's strength that he endows his visionaries with
everyday failings, and gives each a very different religious background.
Miss Hare's religion, if she has one, is a pantheism rooted in the plants and
animals on her moldering estate. Himmelfarb has returned to Judaism only
after years of secular life, and considers himself morally unworthy. Mrs.

Godbold is a staunch evangelical, but her religion shows more in her
practical kindnesses to others than in any doctrinal fundamentalism. And
Alf Dubbo, though raised by a preacher and especially inspired by religious
subjects, is dissolute and virtually autistic in his day to day life.
A fourth quality that I might have mentioned is Style. White's writing, as I
say, is easy to read, but very varied and always appropriate to the tone of
the moment. While he can neatly skewer the social pretensions of the
Rosetrees (the employers of Himmelfarb and Alf), he can also shift to the
kind of description that portrays everyday things as symbolic of eternal
conflicts or reflections of the infinite. His descriptions of Alf Dubbo's
paintings, for example, are equaled by no author I can think of except
perhaps Chaim Potok in MY NAME IS ASHER LEV, in their ability to
convey a truly incandescent artistic vision. Such mastery of style is
essential because, as loners, his characters cannot interact much together
in terms of everyday plot, and in narrative terms the concluding section of
the book is less compelling than the long set-up. But where the characters
do meet is in their common vision, their unspoken sense of rightness, and
it is precisely in White's evocative language that this sounds, resonates,
and resounds.
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