Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.
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A poetically vivid narrative…It is a finely written novel with a rare flavor.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Riders in the Chariot is the most compassionate and the most beautiful of all Patrick White’s works; colours fly everywhere; his words, comic, ecstatic, are like the brushstrokes on a canvas by Nolan or Blake.
— Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín, The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950
Patrick White is an outsider, and his characters are outsiders, outlaws, afflicted, and linked by their affliction. The visionary element in his novels is inseparable from a tough irony and a microscopically close, sometimes savage attention to physical minutiae. The coarser the texture of the physical—of bodies especially—the more likely to be illuminated by flashes of meaning and power.
— Rosemary Dinnage
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Riders in the Chariot is the most compassionate and the most beautiful of all Patrick White’s works; colours fly everywhere; his words, comic, ecstatic, are like the brushstrokes on a canvas by Nolan or Blake.
— Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín, The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950
Patrick White is an outsider, and his characters are outsiders, outlaws, afflicted, and linked by their affliction. The visionary element in his novels is inseparable from a tough irony and a microscopically close, sometimes savage attention to physical minutiae. The coarser the texture of the physical—of bodies especially—the more likely to be illuminated by flashes of meaning and power.
— Rosemary Dinnage
About the Author
Patrick White (1912-1990) was born in London and traveled to Sydney with his Australian parents six months later. White was a solitary, precocious, asthmatic child and at thirteen was sent to an English boarding school, a miserable experience. At eighteen he returned to Australia and worked as a jackaroo on an isolated sheep station. Two years later, he went up to Cambridge, settling afterwards in London, where he published his first two books. White joined the RAF in 1940 and served as an intelligence officer in the Middle East. At war’s end, he and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, bought an old house in a Sydney suburb, where they lived with their four Schnauzers. For the next eighteen years, the two men farmed their six acres while White worked on some of his finest novels, including The Tree of Man(1955), Voss (1957), and Riders in the Chariot (1961). When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973, he did not attend the ceremony but, with his takings and some of his own money, created an award to help older writers who hadn’t received their due: the first recipient was Christina Stead. Late in life, when asked for a list of his loves, White responded: “Silence, the company of friends, unexpected honesty, reading, going to the pictures, dreams, uncluttered landscapes, city streets, faces, good food, cooking small meals, whisky, sex, pugs, the thought of an Australian republic, my ashes floating off at last.”
David Malouf is a novelist and poet. His novel The Great Worldwas awarded the Commonwealth Prize and Remembering Babylon was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has received the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles TimesBook Award. He lives in Sydney, Australia.
David Malouf is a novelist and poet. His novel The Great Worldwas awarded the Commonwealth Prize and Remembering Babylon was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has received the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles TimesBook Award. He lives in Sydney, Australia.
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Customer Reviews
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By JR Dunn
Format:Paperback
Yeah, he's Australian, and a Nobel Laureate to boot, two immediate strikes against any serious literary interest. His prose is so thick it could be used to reinforce concrete. His characters run the gamut from the Symbolic to the Deeply Symbolic, and have a tendency to climb onto soapboxes at the drop of a digger hat (often to ludicrous effect, as at the end of "Voss", where the 19th-century characters turn their backs on the business at hand--the death of a noted explorer--to spend the final pages on a 20th-century-style debate concerning the Status of Australian Literature). It often seems as if he went out of his way to adapt only the worst traits of his master, Dostoevsky, while tossing all the worthwhile ones.
But there's something to Patrick White, and this novel is where it all came together for him. Anthony Burgess, unlike the Nobel committee, didn't select this as one of his 99 great novels simply to shoehorn an Aussie onto the list, and there's a touch of the Burgessian in this novel's sprawl and reach. The characters, especially Alf Dubbo and Mrs. Godbold, stand well apart from whatever it is they're supposed to Represent. Although it occasionally falls to the level of a morality play, the story gains power as it progresses--one of the chief benefits of writing at this length. And though the climax, embodied in the murder of the Holocaust survivor Mordecai Himmelfarb, has its flaws (the author of "Days of Cain" can tell you that subtlety is the chief requirement for dealing with the Holocaust--the subject is simply too vast to handle otherwise), the conclusion is satisfying on all levels, with no (well, very little) last-minute thumping of the lectern on the author's part. In fact, the final pages are rapier-sharp examples of a writer hitting exactly what he was aiming at--the final fate of the vicious Miss Hare and Mrs. Jolley is as harrowing a portrayal of damnation as anything this side of Charles Williams.
In the end we're left with a pure rendering of the quiet power of human decency, and the lovely image of that chariot in which we all wish to ride--the one that leaves its tracks in the salmon clouds of sunset.
Format:Hardcover
This is certainly one of the great masterpieces of world literature. There were occasionally some Australian slang or particular terms that I didn't understand but it did not detract from my immense enjoyment, and ultimate catharsis I derived from reading this novel. The character of Himmelfarb will be with me forever, and the other 4 major characters were equally vivid, unique, and profound.
Format:Paperback
Riders in the Chariot is a supreme work of art. At least a dozen times, I found White's writing so moving and beautiful that I had to put the book down and reflect on what I'd just read. All too rarely has a book prodded me to deeply examine my own life and priorities -- this book is one of them. Riders in the Chariot provides a reaffirmation for the jaded 21st century reader: humilty over arrogance, beauty over ugliness, good over evil.
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