Riders in the Chariot

Having just re-read it, LiveJournal (that is reminding me of past posts from my time when I used it living in Moscow), today offered up Patrick White's 'Riders in the Chariot'.

"After contemplating the books not read, thoughts naturally turn to those read and enjoyed of which one always stands out: Patrick White’s ‘Riders in the Chariot’. A contemporary reviewer for ‘The Times’ called it, by comparison to other current novels, a ‘cathedral surrounded by booths’ and the analogy with religious architecture is apt.

Like all great art it is a novel that takes risks: it has as a central character a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who rejects his intellectual past and an offered Zionist future and settles in Australia to become an ordinary worker at the ‘Brighta Bicycle Lamp’ factory. Here on one Good Friday he is subjected, as an outsider and as a Jew, to a mock drunken crucifixion by his fellow workers.

Into the vortex of his life come three, equally eccentric, characters, each bearing, as does Himmelfarb, one of Jung’s personality typologies. If Himmelfarb is the thinker, Mrs Godbold is all feeling as she contends with an abusive husband, a growing family and the necessities attendant on her work as a washerwoman. As she helps him with random acts of kindness, so too she attends to the needs of Miss Hare, who lives in the crumbling mansion nearby, exploring with a sensory intensity the mystery of objects in the hope that they will burst forth with revelation. All three are observed by the ‘abo half-caste’ Alf Dhubbo whose intuitions of life overwhelm him, forcing him to try and capture them in the shifting allegiances of paint.

All four are united by a vision of the chariot – Ezekiel’s vehicle and its four mysterious riders – and the novel is saturated with White’s intuitive assimilation of patterns of Jewish mysticism. Indeed White writes about the mystical in an utterly compelling way precisely because you neither see the intelligence that informs it so deeply woven it is into the realities of the narrative nor does he say too much, he knows that you can only point the way, never capture it in the folds of language.

The book is a profound meditation on the nature of evil that too comes embodied in the narrative especially in the forms of Mrs Jolley, Miss Hare’s truly awful housekeeper, and Mrs Flack her dubious friend. 

One of the triggers for evil in White is always a refusal to comprehend otherness, to take on empathetically and imaginatively, the complexities of the world. Kindness for White is both a grace and a discipline and its practice is open to all but it is a spaciousness of heart that for many is a freedom too far, too difficult to navigate, too uncertain in its consequences. We refuse it and shrivel.

White also forces you to read slowly: his texts are always intensely visual as befits a writer who secretly yearned to be a painter, who wanted to show not tell. He is also fiercely funny and part of the poignancy about his search for the nature of kindness (and the seeing that accompanies it) is his recognition of how difficult it was for him to practice. He was notoriously thin skinned and a formidable hater who sacrificed friendships on the altar of the too high expectations he invested in them; and, his life long companion Manoly Lascaris must have had the temperament of a saint."