Patrick White–RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT
Posted in Australia, Classic Novel, Literary on Jan 9th, 2011
This complex, exciting, and tension-filled Australian novel by Patrick White begins as the straightforward story of Mary Hare, a strange, half-mad spinster who lives in Xanadu, a crumbling “pleasure dome,” with the busybody Mrs. Jolley, a servant she fears. At various times in her meanderings outside Xanadu, Mary meets a kind laundress named Mrs. Godbold, who lives in a shed with her nine children; Alf Dubbo, an often-drunk aborigine artist; and Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Jewish concentration camp survivor who has emigrated to Australia and now works in a machine shop. In succeeding sections, in which these characters overlap, their intricate interior lives are developed in colorful, memorable detail, and the reader quickly sees that each is a lonely survivor of some traumatic experience which has made him/her question the nature of good and evil. Each hopes to unravel some of the mysteries at the center of the universe.
