![]() ![]() To those who believe in the replenishing powers of fiction to lead you into a region different from any that you have been capable of imagining hitherto, and then to leave you, if for a flicker, with an uplifting sense that you are yourself a slightly different person (while paradoxically someone who under- stands themselves a little better), the fading of White’s reputa- tion is a stain. ![]() ![]() You could have died of him, somewhere in an Australian desert, so it’s fortunate you were frustrated.’ Certainly I wish I’d never written Voss, which is going to be everybody’s albatross. In 1981, after yet another project to film Voss had aborted, he wrote to the director Joseph Losey: ‘I’m a dated novelist, whom hardly anyone reads, or if they do, most of them don’t under- stand what I am on about. Unsentimental, White predicted as much for himself. Patrick White is one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, on a par with his fellow Nobel Laureates William Faulkner, Halldo ́r Laxness and Thomas Mann and yet, one hundred years after his birth, his name seems temporarily and inexplicably lost in the immense desert spaces to which he introduced a new generation of readers, buried like one of those Roman legions of Herodotus, beneath the glare and flies and red Australian sand. That’s where the heat-waves dance for ever – ![]()
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