“Your country is of great subtlety’, a quote laced with irony: both an exaltation of the hidden beauty of the continent, and a metaphor for how the great nothingness of the vast outback swallows one up with hidden threats one would not expect. So describes just one aspect of Voss, the magnum opus of Australia’s only laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White.
The novel centres around not only a physical adventure as one would expect, but also a romantic one between two characters: The titular German explorer Johann Ulrich Voss and the bookish orphan Laura Trevalyan. Meeting only twice in the beginning of the story, neither of the two think much of their encounters until Voss sets out upon his great odyssey upon which the two grow infatuated with each other. The rest of the story splits in twain, with one side focusing on Voss’ journey into the country with all the adversity and doom that comes with it, while the other focuses on how Trevalyan maneuvers through a world hostile to herself while waiting hopelessly for her lover. As the story progresses, their obsession grows through this adversity, as Voss loses the strength to continue to lie to himself about his metaphorical (or even literal) divinity and clings to the mental phantasm of his love, and as Laura goes through the physical torment that so frequently comes to those with great longing.
The writing is, as is stereotypical of White, dense to say the least. However, despite that I did find it quite enjoyable: the absence of pure kinematic action was made up for with the mental conflict that is the main driver of the story. The way White describes and illustrates the way the characters attempt to grapple with their new environments was very captivating. It is a shame that I cannot go into more detail about the way this almost metaphysical battle carries out in the novel for risk of spoiling the story.
Although the novel overall was great, I did have one main complaint: the opening. Instead of the almost ‘psychological thriller’ like nature of the rest of the novel, the events before the embarkment give off a far more ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Pride and Prejudice’ vibe, full of Victorian niceties, which I found incredibly cumbersome and boring. A pet peeve of mine in particular that I had while reading was the way that the characters seemed to cut off each other’s thought processes, their conversations seemingly very disjointed, as if White was trying to create a dialogue out of Question Time in parliament. However, I do advise to not give up on the novel while trudging this part, but to stick with it as it does get much better once the explorer forms his party and sets out for the interior of the nation. This distaste for the way the opening is written extends to the parts of the novel that deal with Trevelyan, which were in the same style.
Overall, I find the novel to be quite pleasant if a bit hard to read at times. It definitely warrants a re-read, in which case I might do a second review exploring the more deeper themes that only come out from a more thorough analysis.
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Nice review. I like the descriptiveness of the writing but yeh a little long winded in that era of writing.
Wrote my own Voss story... heh
https://saxxoncreative.gumroad.com/l/Roadhousemessiah