The Cockatoos: Shorter Novels and Stories [Hardcover]

Patrick White (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 13, 1974

The wild and beautiful birds of the title are the cockatoos who - welcome trespassers in a suburban garden - transform the lives of those they condescend to visit. The Davorens, who for seven years have lived in total silence, are united suddenly in mutual worship of their exotic guests. Miss Le Cornu, the lonely spinster for whom Davoren's calls have become a needed ritual, regards the birds' descent on her chimney-pot as a privilege little short of divine grace. Savage but kind-eyed, tearing with fierce beak at his chosen victim, the cockatoo appears in many disguises in this masterly collection of short novels and stories. Essentially, the book's theme is intimacy, that close relationship in which possessive love can invade and cripple the spirit. In A Woman's Hand, and elderly man married to a proud, manipulative woman perceives in another man's magnificent isolation the stillness and contentment that he will never achieve. Allegedly raped by a mystery intruder, the respectable daughter of respectable and doting parents in The Night the Prowler sets out to violate the social codes that chain her to an unreal identity. In Sicilian Vespers, a doctor's wife on holiday attempts to exorcise her childhood specters in what could be a blasphemous and joyless act of adultery or, on the other hand, a surrender to hysterical fantasy. So complete and richly furnishes is the writing of Patrick White that ideas and images within each story are as satisfying as the whole; each story is as nourishing as the book itself. The Cockatoos achieves a majesty to match the grandeur of his finest novels.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patrick White was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature, 'for an epic, psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature'.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 307 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd (June 13, 1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0224009923
• ISBN-13: 978-0224009928
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,516,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but not the best from a Nobel Prize winner..., July 5, 2003

By 

Alejandro Teruel (Caracas, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cockatoos: Shorter Novels and Stories (Twentieth-Century Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

This is a collection of short novels and stories by the 1973 Australian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Most of the stories analyse in thorough detail the same themes, studying with ruthless detachment the behaviour and thoughts of ageing couples who have drifted apart as incomprehensibly as they originally came together or irrational eruptions of violence or senseless rebellion against the superficial orderliness of mediocre lives.

Three of the stories stand out from the collection: "A Woman's Hand", "The Night the Prowler" and the story which gives the collection its name ""The Cockatoos".

In "A Woman's Hand" an elderly couple meet an old bachelor friend of the husband. Even though she is appalled at the shabby life the friend, a retired sailor lives, and even though she does not particularly care for him or for her husband's friendship for him (and in fact rather dislikes the ex-sailor), she decides to intervene in his life by throwing him together with a spinster friend of hers, who used to be an uncomplaining lady's companion. Rather unexpectedly, the bachelor and the spinster, decide to marry, for companionship in their old age, only to drive each other to madness. Two stories are brilliantly intertwined by the author. The first couples' life unfolds in White's characteristic detailed fashion in front of our eyes and constitutes an elegantly written winding down of a rather uneventful life. The second story unfolds in fits and starts, from snippets of news, conversations or observations and is the slow unravelling of the the second couple, which leads to the spinster's commitment to a mental institution and in the bachelor's probable suicide. The title is grimly ironic, since the wife's excuse for meddling in the bachelor's life is that she feels his life and home lacks a woman's hand.

"The Night the Prowler" particularly remind me of some of Graham Greene's short stories from the 1930s and 1940s but also pre shadow some of White's better known novels like "Riders in the Chariot". A sexual molester breaks into a solid, middle class home and apparently rapes a young woman. Her life falls apart, her parents are bewildered by the changes she carries out in her own life and in the end never ever really try to understand or reach out to her. However, as the story unfolds, we learn that though a man did break into her bedroom, she reversed their position, terrified the rather pathetic would-be molester and starts a double life in which she prowls her middle class neighbourhood at nights, breaks into other homes and vandalizes them in cold rage.

"The Cockatoos" again explores the relationship between an ageing couple in a small, drab, nondescript outback town, who have given up speaking to each other. As with many small towns in the literature, the story of the couple cannot be told without involving some of their neighbours: the woman with whom he has a rather long-standing and passionless affair, the woman's irritable neighbour, a gossipy would be do-gooder, his wife and their outsider son. A mob of white cockatoos inexplicably descends on the town and we are carried along with them as they visitate the characters of the story, touching and changing their lives. The mob is a brilliant literary device and Patrick White makes it work to perfection, carefully blending observation, points of view and staying away from heavy handed symbolism
which would have ruined the whole delicate effect. The couple starts reaching out, and there is a hint of locked doors being slowly unlocked, of light dawning and hearts blossoming, or perhaps more accurately budding, recovering a measured sense of wonder, a creaking, halting reconciliatory motion, a growing sense of potential for sharing and of falling away from everyday mediocrity. At this point, the whole delicate structure which has been painstaking built up is, it most be said, brilliantly smashed, as the irritable neighbour slides into madness and starts shooting at some of the cockatoos to stop them from eating his magnolia blossoms, only to end up shooting the husband who has rushed out of his lover's house. The rest of the story is anticlimactic, and though it hints that some fragile common bond has somewhat diffidently touched the widow and the lover, it also shows that the senseless violence which erupted from the irritable neighbour has also taken seed in the outsider son and will continue its destructive path.

White is a brilliant craftsman and his prose carries you along effortlessly. I have always considered that Patrick's White most fatal flaw in his writing is his lack of closure: his endings do not end, they simply peter out. Even in his short stories, White is a novelist, his stories are rarely surprising in their development, let alone their dénouement, and in this sense bear little resemblance to such master storytellers such as Graham Greene or the undeservedly lesser known V.S. Pritchett. White simply and slowly overwhelms you with a sense of inevitability for which there is no neat ending; perhaps it can be said that White does not bother to end his stories: he simply decides when the reader can continue the story on his own.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Very Funny Satires, July 13, 2009

By 

Helpful consumer (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cockatoos: Shorter Novels and Stories (Twentieth-Century Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

Human social hierarchy in juxtapose .White is the eye in the sky .Funny and very cleaver .