One of the most wondrous books I have ever read, and one I return to whenever I need a reminder of the joys of literature.

This will be too dense for some, too languid for others, but it fits neatly into my Venn diagram of literary interests. Broadly well-intentioned characters slowly moving toward personal relevation? Check. An epic scope grafted on to ordinary lives? Check. A sense of tightly-spun character profiles in which each person is seen through multiple eyes, until a fully honed person emerges? Check. Other things I could list just to annoy you with this repetitive rhetoric? Check check check.

Although The Tree of Man is quintessentially Australian (so much so that it feels like a Tom Roberts has sprung to life) it has an abstract, intimate quality that suggests to me it could be read by anyone. As long as your culture has gone from rustic to urban, as long as you yourself have felt the quiet pull of loneliness, unexpected intimacy, doubt, and thwarted ambition. As long as you have at some point wondered if there was more to the universe than your tiny role in it, but perhaps put those thoughts away rather than face what they may mean.

This is a book that might be classified as "tough going" (like so much of White, whom I adore) but it's not intended to be read in one sitting. This really is a novel to be savoured. Let the language and the gradual expanse wash over you. You'll be okay in the end. If there is an end. ( )

If Henry James had written about settlers in the Australian Outback this might be what he would have written. Ordinary peoples loves revealed in limpid prose. A profound book summed up in tits last line "In the end there is no end" ( )

Multi-generational story of the trials and tribulations of an Australian family. ( )

So poetic. So beautiful. Took me too long to begin my Patrick White journey. ( )

From my journal notes, 8th January, 2006
The Tree of Man is a very rich work, deceptively simple in plot, and mysteriously dense in language. I read it first years ago when I was at Teachers’ College, where it mystified us all. I don’t remember now, how much of it I then understood, but I did retain over the years, a sense of the simple heroism of Amy and Stan Parker. What has also stayed with me is a sense of the Australian bush — its vast spaces, its silence, its timelessness.

Re-reading it, thirty years later [i.e. in 2006], there are new resonances. I begin to understand White’s theme of the tension between permanence and transience as they play out in the Parkers’ lives. I begin to understand how both of them are never sure if they love one another but have a long marriage based on affection and habit.

BEWARE: SPOILERS (though anybody reading PW for the plot is going to be disappointed).

There are many sterile relationships in the novel. Thelma Parker marries the solicitor Mr Fosdyke, for reasons of status. She has no children, only asthma, and as she discovers at the club to which she belongs, she is never really accepted despite her efforts with elocution and the purchase of a ‘crocodile bag’. Madeline Fisher’s family ignore her after Madeline’s death because she cannot ever be rich enough. White is merciless in his depiction of this wasted tragic life, preoccupied with society and appearances and achieving nothing at all, not even attendance at the Government House dinner because her father’s funeral is held that day.

The imperatives of sex are comprehensible now too, as they were not 30 years ago. The one-ness of young lust and love becomes transformed into a separateness. Amy has an adulterous but brief relationship with a travelling salesman; in her old age she thinks she would have liked to have had many more. But Stan’s only shame comes from the night he found out about this relationship, went down to the city and got drunk and nearly strangled an old hobo woman in his rage. In my twenties, I simply did not even notice the tragedy of this event in their marriage. I forgot about it and read on, absorbing the betrayal as part of things. Just as Stan seemed to, but did not. He remembered it on his deathbed.

The final scenes are more confusing than ever. I know that there are religious aspects to White’s writing, and I have an inkling that he’s drawing on Revelations but I’m not sure how*. Mrs O’Dowd’s death, for example, is almost comic, with hordes of people from the district there, and almost no room for her husband near the bed. Yet they send for Amy, who has neglected her friend out of inertia, and amongst all the hubbub, and the strange two-page story that is told by the nameless Man from Deniliquin, it is she who announces the death even as the doctor, awash with self-importance, prepares some belated pain relief. He has been out delivering a baby — inverting the words of the Book of Common Prayer in the midst of death we are in life. Amy has been holding her friend’s hand, and felt it grow cold, but in an echo of Stan’s long ago inability to tell about the dead man upside-down in the tree in the flood, Amy could not say anything until she had to. And then she gets up and goes away, leaving the carnival crowd to lay out Mrs O’Dowd and mutter about how Amy Parker had always been stuck-up and had no reason to be.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/12/02/the-tree-of-man-by-patrick-white-winner-of-t... ( )