Reviews for Voss

The average rating for Voss based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-05 00:00:00 Chris Wilks Voss is a splendidly dark and uncompromisingly realistic novel. The story is a conflict of the ideal and the actual� They realized, standing on the wharf, that the orderly, grey, past life was of no significance. They had reached that point at which they would be offered up, in varying degrees, to chaos or to heroism. So they were shaking with their discovery, beside the water, as the crude, presumptuous town stretched out behind them, was reeling on its man-made foundations in the sour earth. Nothing was tried yet, or established, only promised. Patrick White purposely writes in such a manner that a reader trips over his sentences and I believe he does it on the principle that steep and thorny ways are to be remembered best. And he depicts his personages as the skeins of psychological paradoxes� This is an ideal world of the heroine: So far departed from that rational level to which she had determined to adhere, her own thoughts were grown obscure, even natural. She did not care. It was lovely. She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep. Herself disembodied. Air joining air experiences a voluptuousness no less intense because imperceptible. And this is the real hell of the hero: Voss, he began to know, is the ugly rock upon which truth must batter itself to survive. If I am to justify myself, he said, I must condemn the morality and love the man. If one aims too high one�s ideals turn against one and begin to ruin a person� And in the end reality always defeats idealism.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-14 00:00:00 Bill Smith �There were occasions, this fever-gutted man suspected, when his leader was not sensible of their common doom, and so, he must see for him, he must feel for him. By now he was able to read the faintest tremor of blood or earth, the recording of which was perhaps his sole surviving reason for existence.� (p. 280) This is a novel of astonishing vision and talent. An adventure story and a love story, the writing is vivid and lush. Its characterizations have an emotional resonance that does not flag. It�s about an expedition through what in 1845 were Australia�s uncharted northern territories. Not unknown territories, as a friend recently reminded me, but land unknown to the Europeans who were then colonizing it. Interestingly, it was written by a gay man about ostensibly straight men alone with each other under punishing conditions for long periods. It is based on the life of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt who crossed from Newcastle to Port Essington in Australia�s Northern Territory. The North American parallel would probably be the Lewis & Clark expedition. A later Leichhardt expedition is believed to have met its demise in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. For narrative purposes the various expeditions have been condensed into one. A second part is the love story. In Sydney, before setting out, the explorer, Johann Ulrich Voss, is smitten by the intelligent and attractive Laura Trevelyan. There�s a scene in the garden of Mr. Bonner�Miss Trevelyan�s uncle and Voss�s sponsor�that is among the finest I have read this year. They meet only a few times, but affinities, and areas of disagreement, especially with regard to the idea of humility, are found. Later, in the middle of his expedition, Voss, an eccentric, writes to ask for her hand, or rather for permission to ask her uncle for it. There are especially long passages of dialogue and interior monologue which defy the reader�s expectations in their ability to extend character. Moreover, White�s ease in describing everything from a forlorn expedition to a gala ball is striking. Nothing seems beyond him. Voss is dense, however, and I don�t think it will reward anything but careful reading. Some of the characters� names are irresistible: Dr. Badgery, a ship�s surgeon; Rose Portion, Laura�s servant impregnated by a scoundrel; Mr. Palfreyman, an ornithologist with Voss�s expedition; even Trevelyan, with it suggestion of travail. In terms of evocation of landscape, another major strength of the book, I am reminded of Cormac McCarthy�s The Crossing: The Border Trilogy 2, not in terms of style so much as ability or perhaps capacity. There is something here, too, of Henry James�s late style, though without the terse obliquity and resulting tedium. Here�s a rare bit of authorial misogyny that stopped me dead. �Because she was a woman, she was also dishonest whenever it was really necessary.� (p. 314) Is this the exception which proves the rule? It would seem so, for elsewhere Laura Trevelyan is portrayed as an independent-minded woman chafing somewhat against propriety and society. She is also, deplorably, a reader of books.