Patrick White reactions

       With Patrick White's posthumous The Hanging Garden coming out in Australia and the UK (the US ? who knows ...) there's been quite a bit of coverage -- see also my recent mention.
       Richard Davenport-Hines reviewed it in The Spectator, and while he calls it: "a coherent and polished read" he recommends:

Readers who want to explore the difficult, uneven terrain of White's novels should, however, begin with the masterpieces of his mid-career, The Vivisector and The Eye of the Storm. These are thunderingly powerful, full of emotional depth and grandeur, epigrammatic and ironic, with brilliant scrutiny of human character and motives. Their intermittent bursts of livid misanthropy come like an asthmatic's rasping spasms.

       And now Geordie Williamson finds that Patrick White, the outcast, returns to the fold with The Hanging Garden -- and notes that:

White has been sacrificed on the altar of an activism that he helped bring about. On indigenous rights, censorship, immigration, nuclear power and a host of other issues White was an impassioned spokesperson for those who believed that the old Anglo-Australian order was culturally stultifying and politically backward. A disgust for materialism, racism and philistinism in Australian society pulses through his work, as does compassion for the outcast and excluded who suffer their effects. For a reminder of these truths we need only turn to the opening pages of The Hanging Garden.

       See also the publicity pages from Jonathan Cape and Knopf Australia, or pre-order your copy from Amazon.co.uk; I look forward to getting my hands on a copy ... eventually.