Voss - Patrick White

'Laura Trevelyan was at that moment tracing with her toe the long, ribbony track of some sea-worm, as if it had been important. In the rapt afternoon all things were all-important, the inquiring mouths of blunt anemones, the twisted roots of driftwood returning and departing in the shallows, mauve scum of little bubbles the sand was sucking down, and the sun, the sun that was hitting them over the heads. She was too hot, of course, in the thick dress that she had put on for a colder day, with the result that all words became great round weights. She did not raise here head for those the German spoke, but heard them fall, and loved their shape. 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.'

-pg. 57

Voss is about a man driven by a single-minded purpose to map the Australian interior, and perhaps it's fitting that this was the first of Patrick White's books I've ever read, since from the first two sentences it felt like I'd discovered a mysterious and hidden world, old as stone, that was just waiting to be roamed over, plumbed, fathomed, explored. The prose, as can be seen above, is weighty; White's style is capable of alternating from the minutely particular to all-encompassing accuracy from polished period to polished period, and the unflinching seriousness of the ideas and themes are brilliantly punctuated by a devious humor. In many ways, he reminds me of Faulkner, with his ability to wreath the story round with elements of legend, or mythology, born not out of classical allusion or grand deities, but the memorializing lies all people tell themselves of themselves.

Voss, the explorer, is a man driven by an ideal. While his purpose is to explore Australia and tame the wild desert with his body and mind, he is also on a quasi-mystical quest, which can best be described as an attempt at apotheosis. He is, to his own mind, a god of the wilderness, and the aboriginals of the land he seeks to conquer he views as his natural subjects; the expedition is simply a test of this belief, and his success will be determined by whether or not he has overcome all of his human weakness. But while he is preparing for the trip, gathering supplies and men and plotting out his expected course, he unexpectedly falls in love with Laura Trevelyan, the orphaned niece of the expedition's primary sponsor.

It is this odd love affair that dominates the book, despite the fact that the bond they share is unacknowledged until after Voss takes off for the desert. They share a psychic link by which they are able to communicate, even across the vast expanse that lies between them, and they often turn to each other when under some particular stress. Voss and his party inevitably endure the inevitable hardships of any adventure narrative—thirst, hunger, hostile natives, mutiny—and Laura must persevere in Sydney’s stuffy society. The connection between the two lends a stark, parched quality to the society scenes, and an oppressiveness to the vast and open desert lands, and Laura and Voss seem to become the only free individuals in a book filled with ex-convicts, madmen, property-owned people and those hemmed in by society’s strict proprieties, and yet their freedom is built on a dependence on one another, almost a shackling.