summary of the novel voss by patrick white

The imagery is striking and metaphysical―without the reader realizing it, White leaps from the real world into the harshest imaginable psychological depths. White’s narrative floats effortlessly between characters and perspectives, between the harsh realities of the desert and the dreams, fantasies, and feverish hallucinations of the characters.

We find ourselves equally in the minds of the other members of Voss’s ragged party―an emancipated convict, a wealthy landowner, a devout and tormented ornithologist, a Romantic poet, a poor street urchin, a dried-out alcoholic, and two aboriginal guides. Voss may be pushing onwards through the desert, but we find ourselves spending a great deal of time in the mind of Laura Trevelyan―who has found herself smitten with the mysterious explorer, albeit on quite unsettling and distressing terms―as the narrative hops between the exploration team and the quiet, mundane world she inhabits on the outskirts of Sydney in its infancy. But rather than simply giving us an adventure narrative, White lets us spend most of our time inside the characters’ heads. Voss tells the story of a man determined against all odds to lead an expedition overland across the Australian continent, inspired by real-life 19th explorer century explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. It is difficult not to have your soul wrenched along with the torments of the text. It is simultaneously lucid and dreamlike, fantastic and magical and cruel and harsh as the desert.

The prose is perfect―White deserves a place at James Joyce’s right hand for his mastery of the art.

“And stood breathing.” That floating sentence fragment, the likes of which he peppers throughout the text. “There is a man here, miss, asking for your uncle,” said Rose. If you don’t have a copy handy, I’ll enlighten you: The first words of the novel should suffice to convince anybody that White was an absolutely astounding wordsmith. So Voss was sought out from the public library shortly after returning home. I happened to catch The Eye of the Storm, a recent film adaptation of one of White’s later novels,, on the flight back home and was further piqued. Patrick White―a long-term Sidneysider―figures strongly in Falconer’s book, and her allusions to him piqued my interest. The name came up in a book I picked up in Sydney called, appropriately, Sydney, by Delia Falconer―an instalment in the brilliant “City Series” from New South Press, which has a local author paint an impressionistic portrait of the city combining memoir, legend, and local history. I find it hard to believe I only recently caught wind of one of Australia’s most renowned authors (Peter Carey does not have a Nobel Prize, and likely gets more play in North America because he is published and lives in New York).

Summary of the novel voss by patrick white