“Who are the riders in the Chariot, eh, Mary?” (14) asked Miss Hare’s father when she was still fresh and innocent and uncorrupted by years of forced isolation. Mary Hare is now an eccentric spinster who lives in the wilderness her long gone parents’ decaying estate has become. Considered socially inept, she seeks refuge in the natural world where her sharp solitude can be soothed by bizarre visions of a riderless golden chariot.“There is the Throne of God, for instance. That is obvious enough- all gold, and chrysoprase, and jasper. Then there is the Chariot of Redemption, much more shadowy, poignant, personal.” (129) Mr. Himmelfarb is a scholarly Jewish immigrant who survived the terrors of Auschwitz but lost his faith in intellect when the beast of humanity drained him of his lifeblood. He is now a hermit who nourishes his guilt with menial work, carries a self-imposed cross of a scapegoat and prays to the faceless rider of the Chariot of Redemption to be saved from existence.“She had her own vision of the Chariot. Even now, at the thought of it, her very centre was touched by the wings of love and charity.”(478) Charitable Mrs Godbold (such an apt surname) bears the life sentence of love and labour. First a maid and now a laundress trapped into a bad marriage with too many children, she believes Bach’s music to be the proof of God’s existence and her duty to spread his gospel not in vacuous words but in tangible good deeds.“Just as he had not dared completely realize the body of Christ, here the Chariot was shyly offered.”(449) Dubbo is an Australian aborigine raised by an English missionary who clings to the margins of a bigoted society and exorcises his inner turmoil with brush, palette and oil paints. His aim is to map the contours of his life and art in permanent spiritual expression.Set in the contemporary Australia of massive migration and post-war expansion, these Dostoevskian four characters are irreparably bound together by ecstatic hallucinations of an empty Chariot. Allegorical riders galloping in barbed unison for an apocalyptic climax or mere outcasts searching for serendipitous absolution? The novel will appeal both to followers of the burlesque morality play and to subscribers of cathartic drama.Patrick White imposes numinous pondering impregnated with stylized mysticism and atypical religious imagery on his literary creations, which suffer either from the commonality of simple-mindedness or the curse of alienation foisted by a detached, vicious society. It’s precisely through the prism of these marginalized characters that the reader can discern a plain philosophy, maybe idealistic but of a vast scope, of bounding the transcendental with the simple and supple natural order of things, bestowing the dispossessed with blinding clairvoyance in the abiding “status quo” of self-sacrifice over the rulers of a rigid social hierarchy.The voices of White’s characters combine inner perceptions delivered in stream of consciousness technique and dialogues assimilating the theatrical satire that provide the narrative with an inexpressible musical tonality that is rather intuited than fully grasped. Colors that recall the Australian landscape are emphasized in the text in arrhythmic cadence producing a peculiar lyricism that eludes standardized patterns of beauty but moves inwardly like an abstract painting.Some might perceive sardonic pessimism and bitter mockery interlocked within White’s taut prose that avoids the precipice of sentimentality but I discern a deep sense of artistic independence that endorses the extraordinariness of the mundane and boosts its poetry and mystery following the English Romantics fashion as a conduit to reach existential lucidity and an indissoluble insight of the divine. And reaching the pinnacle of spirituality devoid of dogma is for me miraculous enough to touch the electric blue vaults of heaven.“I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in everything.” William Blake.
White is fascinating: he has precisely two tools in his kit, and when they're working, I couldn't care less about his failure to, you know, structure his books or think through his incredibly vague ideas. When the two tools aren't working, I can't stomach more than about 15 pages at a time. Luckily, in 'Riders', White is at or near peak. As seasoned readers will know, White can't focus on more than two people at a time, which means that almost every scene/chapter/section/book he's ever written involves two or fewer people. Here, I do not care, because the individuals are so fascinating--whether they fill me with joy, as in the case of Mordecai; with hatred for my country, as in with Dubbo (a victim of it) or the Mrses Jolley and Flack (the victors); love, as with Mrs Godbold; or deep ambivalence, as with Miss Hare. And their interactions are things of stupendous wonder. I do not care about White's failings, because he hits you over the head with things like: "Where fippancy is absent, truth can only be inferred" and"I am afraid it may soon be forgotten that our being a people does not relieve us of individual obligations" (I can't help but wonder if White and Arendt stole each other's ideas)and, gloriously--I say this as someone who isn't much impressed by descriptions in literature-- "the plump, shiny, maculated birds, neither black nor grey, but of a common, bird colour, were familiar as her own instinct for air and twigs. And one bird touched her deeply, clinging clumsily to a cornice. Confusion had robbed it of its grace, making it a blunt thing, of ruffled gills." The flipping and flopping between incredible precision--plump, shiny, maculated, ruffled gills--and intentional generalities--bird colour, a blunt thing; the way the initial hards cs pile up higher and higher, and then, just when you think you're done, he throws in one more to start the final sentence, and then lets you relax into grace: not many can pull that off. Don't worry, the bird is okay in the end, too. Similarly, there's a scene at the end of chapter 12, too long to quote, in which a train makes its way through the city, which is simply too good.Well, well. It is also, in the end, a book about how good will triumph over evil, and how nature mysticism, art, the major world religions and general kindness are all one, and all good. The plot is a fine, but overly schematic, retelling of the great world religious myths. That's okay. White, like Joyce, is a great wordsmith, and it would be silly to read him for ideas--not because his ideas are bad or wrong, but they are uninteresting. I, too, hope that good triumphs over evil. But that train in the city: "Sodom had not been softer, silkier at night than the sea gardens of Sydney. The streets of Ninevah had not clanged with such metal. The waters of Babylon had not sounded sadder than the sea, ending on a crumpled beach, in a scum of French-letters." Nobody is better than White at coming close to intellectual and aesthetic collapse and somehow saving his sentences with a phrase.
What do You think about Riders In The Chariot (2002)?
I gave this book 3 stars for originality and unusual subjects. Some of it was brilliant but other parts were trying too hard to be brilliant. It was overworked in places and that's when it fell down for me. The characters were interesting and kept you wanting to know more about them. But they were not convincing as flesh and blood people but rather contrivances to convey the same messages over and over again. I think the book revealed more about the author than anything else. His feeling of despair, being an outcast because of his sexuality, and general dissatisfaction with life. Still, the mark of a good book is to remember it after reading the last page. It wins on that score. It does stay with you. And I understand The Tree of Man is a better representation of White's writing. So that's on my to-read list.
—Connieh
“Even at her most communicative, talking with the authority of the weather..."The sentence goes on, it gets better, longer; but that: “talking with the authority of the weather”.... I felt this pain in me. And tossed the book. 15 yards. I said, that's IT. GOOD-BYE! I was just so flummoxed by its genius; mostly because the tone it is talking about IS everything in life, but then the whole thing, the line: it’s in the middle of a paragraph. And I could tell White wasn’t “really” trying to write it! It took me 6 months to get over that first page and then 2 weeks to almost be at the end of this 600+ page fantastic novel.
—Walter
Her instinct suggested, rather, that she was being dispersed, but that in so experiencing, she was entering the final ecstasy. Walking and walking through the unresistant thorns and twigs. Ploughing through the soft opalescent remnants of night. Never actually arriving, but that was to be expected, since she had become all-pervasive: scent sound, the steely dew, the blue glare of white light off rocks. She was all but identified. Riders in the Chariot wrestles throughout its sprawling 640 page course with this notion of Ascension. The core quartet of characters struggle and persevere. Their motivations and responses are hardly ideal. The craven and the petty are a common currency here. Colonial traditions wither, crack and collapse. A modern mediocrity arrives at the end of the war, along with streams of refugees and migrants. Names are nativised, genealogies whitened, decisions to emigrate are regretted and allowed to petrify in the bleak sun of the Outback.It does force one to contemplate the nature of the Elect.I found a number of analogies with Faulkner here. The opening scenes harken to The Sound and the Fury and later details conjure Absalom, Absalom!. Whereas the original sin of Faulkner's South was slavery, a misdeed which poisoned the history, the land and the souls of Southerners, Patrick White isn't that specific, but finds the hollow idols of postwar Australia to be sufficiently damning. Many of the accursed are slain in atonement. Those that survivie maintain faith but little hope.
—Jonfaith
