Customer Reviews

Voss

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This epic about a man's journey into the heart of the Australian desert and into his own heart and mind is a classic of modern literature. Johann Ulrich Voss, though he remains always just beyond the reader's grasp as a character, is as memorable as any great figure in modern literature. If Marlow and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness were one man, this would be him.

The novel is also a love story about two people who go beyond the mediocrity of their surroundings to embark on interior journeys where they learn to know themselves and unite with each other in spirit.

For 80% of the novel I was gripped, running home from college to read more and more. My only qualm would be the ending, as the tension dissipates and the last 80 pages or so peter out under the excessive Christian symbolism. But there is no way that a potential reader should be put off by this assessment

Sentence for sentence, word for word, Patrick White is as good a prose stylist as I've ever read. The phrase "tour de force" could have been invented for this book.

This novel opens in Sydney, 1845, with the German explorer Voss preparing to cross the Australian continent. This physical aspect of the novel is loosely based on the ill-fated expedition of Ludwig Leichhardt.

Prior to leaving Sydney, Voss meets Laura Trevelyan. Laura is the niece of one of Voss's patrons and is perhaps the only person apart from Voss himself who perceives that his journey is a challenge of will as much as a geographical journey of discovery. Voss and Laura, despite only meeting four times before he departs, form a spiritual bond which strengthens during the course of the novel.

The novel is about discovery, about triumph and about failure. The physical elements of the journey describe many of the challenges facing explorers within central Australia at the time and combines elements of human suffering and religious metaphor.

The intense relationship between Laura and Voss develops during the course of the journey, and is conducted both through letter and telepathy.

This novel can be read as a simple story of an ill-fated expedition. Alternatively, it can be read as one man's challenge to the physical world, and of the good and evil in each of us.

By the end of the novel, the discovery seems clear, the triumphs and the failures are obvious. Or are they? Perhaps it depends on which viewpoint you choose to adopt.

I recommend this novel to anyone who wants to read well written literature which, under the guise of telling a story, invites the readers to confront their own thinking. The choice is yours.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

This is a deeply sad story of tragic love in Australia's colonial times. Voss, "The German" and Laura, a young Sydney woman, are societal misfits who meet quite awkwardly in drawing room one day. Soon after this meeting, Voss begins his epic journey into the unknown Australian outback. As the journey progresses he realizes his love for Laura and writes her a letter asking for her hand in marriage. She accepts his proposal and a love affair of the minds begins. More letters are written but never received by either party. Amazingly, their love blossoms for each other in a small minded, petty, and class driven society. Sadly, in the end their love is tragically never to be.
I found this book to be extremely well written and deeply moving. I believe that this novel is on par with Bronte's Jane Eyre and I do not understand why it is not on any classical reading lists. There are parts of the book that move somewhat slowly, but each part has its purpose in bringing you deeper into the story. The insights into the human soul are incredibly poignant. If you do decide to give Voss a chance read it slowly and in quite spaces. Soak up the meanings within the writing and enjoy this sad, sad tale.

I found the reviews here to be very interesting as they are so different to my own interpretation of the novel. I write this as an Australian who is familiar with the outback, and with some experience of contemporary aboriginal culture. Where I diverge from other reviewers is that, while I agree with many of the comments on characterisation, plot and so forth, I feel that this is all quite secondary.
What struck me most about the story was White's empathy with, and extraordinarily sensititve portrayal of the aboriginal characters. I have never read anything like it. I think Thomas Keneally has tried to reach these lofty heights but hasn't quite managed the poetic majesty of Voss. It seems extraordinary to me that the reviewers here have ignored this aspect of the novel, as it is this that excludes it from being a great tale of love and misadventure, as opposed to a genuine literary work of subtle complexity.
I am guessing that some reviewers have assumed White associated the aboriginal characters with a sort of spiritual surrealism. Not so. While this may have been a secondary effect, the aboriginal narrative is actually a remarkably honest and insightful portrayal of the aboriginal dreaming, or their worldview, particularly during the early days of European settlement in Australia.
To my mind it was for this reason that White wrote the novel - not so much to tell a tale of European hardship and naivety within the Australian deserts but to delve into the unique mindset of aboriginal Australia. This is no more evident than in its brutal clash with the logical, causal mindset of the Judeo-Christian West, as portrayed so wonderfully in the stiff and formal character of Voss. Read from this perspective, I believe the novel will offer readers an even more rewarding experience.

Big, powerful novel by a skilled storyteller, a master of the Australian landscape and peoples. In the 1800's the German settler Voss meets Laura Trevelyan in Sydney once or twice, then together with an ill-assorted ragtag of followers he sets off on an ill-fated expedition from Sydney westwards through the Australian desert.

Voss's purpose seems to be to get to 'love the land'. Laura waits in Sydney; she's a thoughtful person, different from the others, aware that Australian white society in those days could be shallow and not in tune with deeper things. When Voss and Laura are not together, the relationship takes place in the mind, with some sort of sixth sense resulting in a synchronisation of feelings. The is cleverly done and works well.

Aboriginals figure strongly - they are part of the land, timeless, noble. But, in the period set in this novel, there is a dark side; through and through they come across as bestial savages. They could help and save Voss, who reaches out to them, but instead they thwart and eventually kill him.

Patrick White won the 1973 Nobel prize for literature, and it's not surprising. But his style in Voss is not always easy; he's always invading his characters' minds and trying too hard to explain every nuance of their thinking. This slows it down. Ideas about 'point of view' have to be put on hold in this novel.

Ultimately though it's an indelible experience, and one is left with haunting images of Australia.

White has done it again: rich characters, indulgent language play, fascinating setting, gentle Australian imagry and beautifully balanced overall. For it's elegance and surprises, this book belongs in the poetry section. If you've a fan of White, this is his masterpiece; if you're new to White, what took you so long?

I bought this book in Melbourne, 28 years ago, took it back to the US nine years later, and now have read it in India. An intercontinental scale like this is appropriate to a book of such power and large canvas. Loosely-based on the story of Ludwig Leichhardt, a German explorer of Australia in the 1840s, it is much more an exploration of human nature laden with symbolism and religious questions. "All truths are particolored. Except the greatest truth of all.", says Laura Trevelyan, the explorer's soul sharer, at the end of the novel. White establishes this fact over the course of 448 pages in his magnificently oblique prose. He makes no attempt whatsoever to make his dialogue sound natural. White is one of those few authors who can turn a long novel into a prose poem. For example, (p.71), "The silver flags, breaking, and flying on high, almost escaping from their lacquered masts, were brought back continually by the mysterious ganglion of dark roots." He is describing a bamboo thicket in a Sydney garden.

The construction of the novel reminded me of "War and Peace" because of its pattern of alternating chapters. In the former they concern scenes of war and of upper class life in Moscow. In VOSS the two themes are the semi-urban life of the self-assured, self-satisfied Sydney upper class and raw struggle with nature and Aborigines in the bush by the searching, tortured German who cannot disconnect himself from God. Laura is the link between these two worlds, a woman dissatisfied with the pettiness of bourgeois female existence of that time, a woman who questions religion and the given truths of her society.

The deep psychological portraits of Voss, German mystic and explorer, and of Laura, the woman he meets only briefly, but connects to forever, form the bulk of the book, but there are any number of other skillfully drawn characters. They all form a composite of Australian society at mid-19th century, a country in formation, not yet fully-baked, the English settlers completely unfamiliar with the continent they have appropriated. Perhaps the Aborigines, frail ghosts flitting in and out of the bush, are more dreamlike than real. Their land, so sheltering of them over thousands of years, proves utterly hostile to the European explorers who fatally do not take any lessons in survival from those who knew.

Some may hold that Patrick White's style is tedious and hard to absorb. I can grant that to some extent, but if you persist, he has a unique power and gives the majesty of a symphony with many minor melodies. I have read "The Aunt's Story", "The Burnt Ones", and "The Tree of Man" besides VOSS. I liked "The Tree of Man" best, but VOSS is a most powerful and amazing work of poetry, hopeless love, human frailties and human failures. On reading it, you will definitely understand why Patrick White deserved a Nobel Prize.

The poetically writhing words of Patrick White's Voss imbue the novel's inanimate world with a life commonly attributed to humankind alone: darkness strangles, the sun cauterizes, leaves slash at one another, rain sighs, and dawn shrieks with jubilation as red light flows out along the veins of morning. Such anthropomorphizing imagery reinforces a view of the protagonist's voyage of discovery into Australia's heart as a metaphor for the inner journey beckoning us all.

Few, however, much less those seeking consolation in worldly achievements and society's pretensions, dare venture into the uncharted desert that illumines the soul. Johann Ulrich Voss, a proud, resilient and fiercely independent German with the first touches of grey in his beard, is obsessed by a long-held ambition to cross the immense island-continent. To this misanthrope possessed of seemingly unshakeable belief in his own divinity, the future is nothing but will, its antithesis compassion, grace, humility, repentance, human frailty.

Before escaping the strictures of Victorian Sydney, by chance he meets his sponsor's niece, Laura Trevelyan, a sensitive young woman vacillating in the darkness between atheism and faith, rationalism and God, pride and humility. Despite their few encounters, when the explorer leads his expedition up the coast and turns one morning to follow his shadow into the searing unknown, he is embarking on a voyage leading ever more deeply into an inescapable love between Laura - the feminine side of his Jungian subconscious - and himself.

Their mystical journey together, stripped bare of obfuscating flesh by the tyranny of distance, penetrates into a vast land. As unforgiving as the outback, this unfamiliar realm is governed by an irrationality that confounds human plans and perceptions, and erodes hubris and obstinate self-belief. United by a love born high above the expedience of mundane coupledom, as their physical separation increases, and long after correspondence by letter has become impossible, they draw ever closer. It is testament to the author's imaginative powers and his skill as a novelist that their transcendent union, despite the hundreds of miles between them, is consummated with a wedding and newborn child.

Without marching towards one's own destruction, there can be no humility and therefore no love. Voss and his small party are gradually worn down over the months by the rigours of their journey and the hidden allegiances unearthed by their tribulations. Laura's love, burning with anxious awareness of the leader's fallibility, spreads into the fissures appearing in his beleaguered resolve, prising cracks still wider in a series of dreams shattering erstwhile convictions. In striving to cross these landscapes of land and love, in which all are destined to suffer and fail, the human soul is ultimately liberated to return into a God omnipresent in the very physicality of the earthly environment itself.

Who hasn't rejoiced before a field, a river, an expansive sky, and perhaps tried to capture its essence in words or paint, on film or even as music, just as Voss, albeit more disturbingly, endeavours to take the entire country within his stride? Earth, trees, rocks, sky, air, and indeed all physical forms, are objects of love, illimitable repositories of the all-encompassing whole that is our dreams and our struggles to live as human beings. They absorb and preserve our spirit. To try to depict our physical environs, to strive to encompass them in a journey itself destined to failure, is to create a self-portrait.

This is an ancient wisdom possessed by the many aborigines the party encounters, peoples who in their veneration for the harsh land they inhabit recognize this terrain as their history and all that they are, as the terrestrial home of their revered Great One. To push into the interior in a vainglorious and inevitably futile attempt to conquer the exalted residence and all it signifies is to invoke His wrath, to bring the Great Snake down from the sky in anger.

We all have deserts to cross. Voss grapples in the Australian wilderness with the rocks of his own prejudice and hatred. But he himself is also a desert, vast and ugly by Laura's accurate reckoning. Immured in hide-bound Sydney, capital of coin and kindly conceit, itself no less a desert than the country's scorching centre, she travels the path of love into this man possessed. Only through setting off on such voyages of discovery into the interior, in the final analysis into our own misunderstanding, do we bring life and love to deserts real and metaphysical - to life and love themselves. As a sage Laura senses long after the expedition is over, 'perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind'.

As White acknowledges in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, this novel has a basis in the nineteenth-century expeditions led by the German explorer Leichardt. And years before Voss was written, the seed of its eponymous character was sown in the mind of a sexually repressed wartime intelligence officer unhappily required to censor his own men's letters in the isolation of the Egyptian desert, at a time when all lived in the shadow of 'that greater German megalomaniac'.

But moving irretrievably beyond history, the novel is the product of a creative act to which the spurs are many and various, not least White's frequent respiratory afflictions. Writing the shocking denouement in the desert was fuelled by bronchitis, Bartok's Violin Concerto and a scathing review of the author's most recent book.

Although White did not rank Voss among his top three novels, this best-known of his masterpieces is but one offering from a man who dared to set off into the unmapped desert. Like the struggles of the painter in The Vivisector, the settlers in The Tree of Man and the author himself, Voss's is an epic journey deep into the human condition. On this enlightening voyage, it seems ever less extraordinary when dresses, too, sigh, muscles and hair dream, spurs and complexions accuse, men glimmer or glitter coldly, even kindness cauterizes, and the arches of one's feet become exasperated.

Patrick White gained fame as the Australian Nobel prize winner in literature, and as a person with a prickly or what some call a difficult personality. He was educated at Cambridge but then settled and wrote in Australia after World War II. He has about a dozen novels and I have read two of them, the other being The Tree of Man which is set in rural but agricultural Australia, not in the Outback as is Voss.

This is a good novel, and it deserves 5 stars. After a dozen pages or so it becomes clear to the reader that White has an unusual style and he is a gifted writer. There is no question about his writing ability.

This particular story starts off in Sydney in the mid-19th century, and White uses real street names and locations in central Sydney, just east of Darling Harbour. Since the same streets still exist today, his setting and references to the city bring a high degree of realism to the story.

The plot is about a man and a woman who become engaged by mail after meeting. Voss is the man, and he leads a voyage of discovery into the Outback, north and west of Sydney. The plot involves the hardships of the trip, the interaction among the characters travelling with Voss, the natives, and what takes place in Sydney with his fiancee while Voss is away on the trip.

The discouraging feature of White's writing is that the characters seem stiff or cardboard, a bit lifeless. Voss is not a man to show much emotion or talk. So, there are many passages where White simply describes the activities. That gives the book - especially in the middle - a dry feel. This was reinforced for me when I read The Tree of Man where White has a similar strong male protagonist, the farmer; but there, White goes into much more depth with the man's personality in the novel.

The tale has a strong and a surprise ending, and the novel picks up as the story closes.

Overall, I enjoyed the read and would recommend the book. It is not a quick read nor is it compelling stuff to digest, but it is an interesting and well written novel.

This is the story of an explorer who is obsessed with making his own map of Australia. There was an historic role model for Voss, who disappeared without trace in the Outback, in the mid 19th century. The appearance of Halley's comet dates the time of the adventure to 1830 and before. Voss is a stranger in Australia, but then almost everyone was at the time. He is a German with unclear scientific credentials, no Humboldt. Other than his insistence and willpower, we see no real reason why he is entrusted with the expedition.

He is a loner and something of a mystic: he needs to find `knowledge', in a not really scientific sense. He finds a wealthy sponsor in Sydney, and he finds a soul mate in the sponsor's orphan niece Laura, an outsider due to her emancipated mind. She is the useless, futureless extra in the wealthy family. She is rather like a Jane Austin heroine. Her mental loneliness mirrors Voss's, but their relationship is a misunderstanding, of the kind that relations are often made of since time began.

Voss assembles a team and off they go, towards the huge white spot in the map of the time. He is a lousy leader and a worse team player. He is insane insofar as he plainly rejects tapping information sources that would have been available. He is in a way a trickster, because he has no real intention to provide his sponsors with the useful information that they look for. He is looking for his personal spiritual victory, not somebody else's wealth or fame. Self-destruction seems unavoidable.

His spirituality is based on a self-centered deism. In his god he worships himself. He despises Laura's self-found atheism and calls it self-murder. He is a sort of negative Messiah, attracting followers, that he leads not to redemption, but to neglect and annihilation. He is not a positive hero, he is more like a monster that we watch with amazement. Initial sympathy is gradually eaten up by surprise. On the other hand, says White, his arrogance resolves, sometimes, into simplicity and sincerity, but it is hard to distinguish.
Confrontations between aboriginals and the white invaders of a continent play a major part in the plot, as do the myths of the 'blackfellows'. Voss's and his expedition's appearance happen to co-incide with the comet's show in the night sky. At this stage of the expedition, Voss is already in a mental delirium and halucinates about his 'fiancee'.

This is my second encounter with Voss. The first one, in the 70s, shortly after White was en-Nobel-ed, was with a German edition, and it failed. Since the book may not have changed since then, it must be changes in me, or the simple fact that the German translator slaughtered White's magnificent language. Because now I am often enchanted by his sentences which shy away from simple word combinations and keep surprising me with challenges to normal perception.

One of White's language devices is the fact that Voss struggles with the English language. He is often baffled by others' meaning and never sure if his own meaning is properly expressed. As he says to his sponsor: if we compare meanings, we would perhaps arrive at different conclusions.
White was apparently not much appreciated in his home land, possibly because he lacked conventionality, also in his chosen lifestyle. His success came from the US and England. Well, and Sweden.

My assessment of the novel: a masterpiece with a highly ambiguous message. Or no message.