Reviews for Riders in the Chariot

The average rating for Riders in the Chariot based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-06-23 00:00:00 Kristin Jones Reading this novel has brought me great joy. I admire the way the narrative edges along, and that is the word, almost sidewise like a crab. The narrative thrust is at diagonals, and counter diagonals, thus often surprising the reader. Mary Hare is from a well-to-do if dysfunctional Australian family that could do with a few lessons on the analyzed life. She lives alone in the huge decaying mansion Xanadu at the edge of town. She is known as the village mad woman but she is merely (fascinatingly) eccentric. Mordecai Himmelfarb loses his beloved wife but survives a Nazi death camp. Soon thereafter, after a stop in Palestine, he emigrates to New South Wales. He views his capricious survival as due to some miraculous intervention. Ruth Godbold is perhaps the most overtly religious of the four main characters but not cloyingly so. She suffers terribly at the hands of her drunken husband, but overcomes all and becomes the town�s chief solacer in that big hearted manner that can only be described as Australian. Alf Dubbo was a product of the state policy that produced the Stolen Generation. That is, because he was of mixed white & aboriginal blood, he was taken by the state from his black mother to be raised for later reintroduction to white society. (Please Google it.) He is sexually abused by his missionary guardian and as an adult becomes an artist. All of the characters are misfits, solitary sufferers who espouse enormous interest for the world around them. It might be argued that each of the four main portraits is a mini-Bildungsroman adroitly fused with its fellows. Few authors�there�s Joyce!�have beguiled me with such a rich range of fresh distinctive voices. White also possesses a beautifully controlled knack for metaphor, and this is often used to reflect some thought process of the characters, or reinforce the lush description, or, occasionally, to serve as the vehicle for intrusive commentary by the narrator. There�s something, too, about White�s ability to slow time and examine its every facet, or his ability to make the reader feel he is doing so. Please read this wonderful novel.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-30 00:00:00 Joe Larkin �Who are the riders in the Chariot, eh, Mary?� (14) asked Miss Hare�s father when she was still fresh and innocent and uncorrupted by years of forced isolation. Mary Hare is now an eccentric spinster who lives in the wilderness her long gone parents� decaying estate has become. Considered socially inept, she seeks refuge in the natural world where her sharp solitude can be soothed by bizarre visions of a riderless golden chariot. �There is the Throne of God, for instance. That is obvious enough- all gold, and chrysoprase, and jasper. Then there is the Chariot of Redemption, much more shadowy, poignant, personal.� (129) Mr. Himmelfarb is a scholarly Jewish immigrant who survived the terrors of Auschwitz but lost his faith in intellect when the beast of humanity drained him of his lifeblood. He is now a hermit who nourishes his guilt with menial work, carries a self-imposed cross of a scapegoat and prays to the faceless rider of the Chariot of Redemption to be saved from existence. �She had her own vision of the Chariot. Even now, at the thought of it, her very centre was touched by the wings of love and charity.�(478) Charitable Mrs Godbold (such an apt surname) bears the life sentence of love and labour. First a maid and now a laundress trapped into a bad marriage with too many children, she believes Bach�s music to be the proof of God�s existence and her duty to spread his gospel not in vacuous words but in tangible good deeds. �Just as he had not dared completely realize the body of Christ, here the Chariot was shyly offered.�(449) Dubbo is an Australian aborigine raised by an English missionary who clings to the margins of a bigoted society and exorcises his inner turmoil with brush, palette and oil paints. His aim is to map the contours of his life and art in permanent spiritual expression. Set in the contemporary Australia of massive migration and post-war expansion, these Dostoevskian four characters are irreparably bound together by ecstatic hallucinations of an empty Chariot. Allegorical riders galloping in barbed unison for an apocalyptic climax or mere outcasts searching for serendipitous absolution? The novel will appeal both to followers of the burlesque morality play and to subscribers of cathartic drama. Patrick White imposes numinous pondering impregnated with stylized mysticism and atypical religious imagery on his literary creations, which suffer either from the commonality of simple-mindedness or the curse of alienation foisted by a detached, vicious society. It�s precisely through the prism of these marginalized characters that the reader can discern a plain philosophy, maybe idealistic but of a vast scope, of bounding the transcendental with the simple and supple natural order of things, bestowing the dispossessed with blinding clairvoyance in the abiding �status quo� of self-sacrifice over the rulers of a rigid social hierarchy. The voices of White�s characters combine inner perceptions delivered in stream of consciousness technique and dialogues assimilating the theatrical satire that provide the narrative with an inexpressible musical tonality that is rather intuited than fully grasped. Colors that recall the Australian landscape are emphasized in the text in arrhythmic cadence producing a peculiar lyricism that eludes standardized patterns of beauty but moves inwardly like an abstract painting. Some might perceive sardonic pessimism and bitter mockery interlocked within White�s taut prose that avoids the precipice of sentimentality but I discern a deep sense of artistic independence that endorses the extraordinariness of the mundane and boosts its poetry and mystery following the English Romantics fashion as a conduit to reach existential lucidity and an indissoluble insight of the divine. And reaching the pinnacle of spirituality devoid of dogma is for me miraculous enough to touch the electric blue vaults of heaven. �I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover�d the infinite in everything.� William Blake.