Riders in the Chariot

by Patrick White

Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Classics, Novels, Literature, 20th Century, Historical Fiction

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

There is more than one author by this name on Goodreads. For the Canadian Poet Laureate see "Patrick^^^^^White".

Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian author widely regarded as one of the major English-language novelists of the 20th century, and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Born in England while his Australian parents were visiting family, White grew up in Sydney before studying at Cambridge. Publishing his first two novels to critical acclaim in the UK, White then enlisted to serve in World War II, where he met his lifelong partner, the Greek Manoly Lascaris. The pair returned to Australia after the war.

Home again, White published a total of twelve novels, two short story collections, eight plays, as well as a miscellany of non-fiction. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantages and the stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature."

From 1947 to 1964, White and Lascaris lived a retired life on the outer fringes of Sydney. However after their subsequent move to the inner suburb of Centennial Park, White experienced an increased passion for activism. He became known as an outspoken champion for the disadvantaged, for Indigenous rights, and for the teaching and promotion of art, in a culture he deemed often backward and conservative. In their personal life, White and Lascaris' home became a regular haunt for noted figures from all levels of society.

Although he achieved a great deal of critical applause, and was hailed as a national hero after his Nobel win, White retained a challenged relationship with the Australian public and ordinary readers. In his final decades the books sold well in paperback, but he retained a reputation as difficult, dense, and sometimes inscrutable.

Following White's death in 1990, his reputation was briefly buoyed by David Marr's well-received biography, although he disappeared off most university and school syllabuses, with his novels mostly out of print, by the end of the century. Interest in White's books was revived around 2012, the year of his centenary, with all now available again.

Sources: Wikipedia, David Marr's biography, The Patrick White Catalogue

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world is a great sum of the infinitesimally small human beings and the majority of little souls remain unnoticed and unobserved.
But in the eye of the beholder the world often turns into a thing quite different from what it may seem.

The well-planned establishment which he had known as Friedensdorf was enclosed in a blood-red blur, or aura, at the centre of which he lay, like a chrysalis swathed in some mysterious supernatural cocoon. Other forms, presumably, though not distinguishably human, moved on transcendental errands within the same shape, no longer that intense crimson, but expanding to a loose orange. Of blue edges.

And some of these disregarded simple souls are uniquely divine and they are always ready to redeem mankind.

Then there is the Chariot of Redemption, much more shadowy, poignant, personal. And the faces of the riders. I cannot begin to see the expression of the faces.

These are the souls of seemingly ordinary human beings that stand tall and they are those who deserve to ride in the chariot of God.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this novel has brought me great joy. I admire the way the narrative edges along, and that is the word, almost sidewise like a crab. The narrative thrust is at diagonals, and counter diagonals, thus often surprising the reader.

Mary Hare is from a well-to-do if dysfunctional Australian family that could do with a few lessons on the analyzed life. She lives alone in the huge decaying mansion Xanadu at the edge of town. She is known as the village mad woman but she is merely (fascinatingly) eccentric.

Mordecai Himmelfarb loses his beloved wife but survives a Nazi death camp. Soon thereafter, after a stop in Palestine, he emigrates to New South Wales. He views his capricious survival as due to some miraculous intervention.

Ruth Godbold is perhaps the most overtly religious of the four main characters but not cloyingly so. She suffers terribly at the hands of her drunken husband, but overcomes all and becomes the town’s chief solacer in that big hearted manner that can only be described as Australian.

Alf Dubbo was a product of the state policy that produced the Stolen Generation. That is, because he was of mixed white & aboriginal blood, he was taken by the state from his black mother to be raised for later reintroduction to white society. (Please Google it.) He is sexually abused by his missionary guardian and as an adult becomes an artist.

All of the characters are misfits, solitary sufferers who espouse enormous interest for the world around them. It might be argued that each of the four main portraits is a mini-Bildungsroman adroitly fused with its fellows. Few authors—there’s Joyce!—have beguiled me with such a rich range of fresh distinctive voices. White also possesses a beautifully controlled knack for metaphor, and this is often used to reflect some thought process of the characters, or reinforce the lush description, or, occasionally, to serve as the vehicle for intrusive commentary by the narrator. There’s something, too, about White’s ability to slow time and examine its every facet, or his ability to make the reader feel he is doing so. Please read this wonderful novel.

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't die without reading.

In order to tempt readers into Riders in the Chariot, I can think of no better strategy than simply sampling White's prose:

- ...the travesty of experience.

- ... they had been taught firmly to suppress, like wind in company, the rise of unreason in their minds.

- Reason finally holds a gun at its head - and does not always miss.

- Miss Hare continued, "I still have to discover. Perhaps somebody will tell me. And show me at the same time how to distinguish with certainty between good and evil."

- Happy are the men who are able to tread transtional paths, scarcely looking to left or to right and without distinguishing an end.

- ...faith is never faith unless it is to be wrestled with.

- To abandon self is, after all, to accept the course that offers.

- Everything has always happened before. Except to children.

- I would like to persuade you that the simple acts we have learnt to perform daily are the best protection against evil.

- ...he shuddered to realiuze that there could never be an end to the rescue of men from the rubble of their own ideas.

- Children and chairs conversed with him intimately.

White is witty, humorous, philosophical, and gently ironic in about equal measure. He constitutes an entire literary world on his own. An Australian national treasure.

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Visionaries

What makes a great novel? Many things, but among them I would certainly list Scale, Characters, and Moral Vision. All three of these qualities are to be found in this towering novel by Patrick White. It is the first book by the Nobel laureate that I have encountered; it will not be the last.

This is a long book (640 pages), but a very easy one to read. In any case, when speaking of scale, physical length is less important than breadth of implication. White concentrates on a small group of people living on the outskirts of Sydney after WW2, but makes them seem emblematic of the entire continent. There is also a wide range of origin and social class; the characters include the last survivor of a once-rich aristocratic family, a German Jewish professor fleeing the Holocaust, a poor washerwoman who emigrated from England as a child, and a half-aboriginal painter. Since each character is given almost 100 pages of back-story, the novel is by no means confined in place or period either; the section set in Germany between the wars can hold its own with the best Holocaust writing anywhere, with particular insights into Jewish social, intellectual, and spiritual life. But the most important aspect of the book's scale is the feeling held by each of the four major characters that the universe is an immensely greater place than anything they may see around them.

White has the great gift of loving his characters. Each of the four is something of an outcast. Miss Hare, the faded aristocrat, is clearly mad; Himmelfarb, the professor, now chooses to work in a menial job, without possessions or other signs of status; Mrs. Godbold, the washerwoman, lives with her many daughters in a tumbledown shack; Alf Dubbo, the half-caste painter, works by day as a janitor and is given to fits of drunkenness. And yet White writes so convincingly through the eyes of each that we do more than feel sympathy for them; we begin to see the others around them as impoverished of spirit, living only partial lives. White is brilliant in creating a gallery of semi-comic secondary characters—some bad, some well-meaning, some merely lacking in imagination—to set off the qualities of his principal quartet, but even these have dimension and are far from caricatures.

One of the curious aspects of the book is that the four characters hardly ever meet, although they recognize an immediate kinship when they do. For all four are religious visionaries. Their visions may occur only once or twice in their lives, but the image is the same for each: the approach of Ezekiel's fiery chariot, both wonderful and terrible. I can think of few books that are so successful at portraying the mystical dimension while being so firmly rooted in the mundane. This is clearly a religious book, but not at all a sectarian one. It is White's strength that he endows his visionaries with everyday failings, and gives each a very different religious background. Miss Hare's religion, if she has one, is a pantheism rooted in the plants and animals on her moldering estate. Himmelfarb has returned to Judaism only after years of secular life, and considers himself morally unworthy. Mrs. Godbold is a staunch evangelical, but her religion shows more in her practical kindnesses to others than in any doctrinal fundamentalism. And Alf Dubbo, though raised by a preacher and especially inspired by religious subjects, is dissolute and virtually autistic in his day to day life.

A fourth quality that I might have mentioned is Style. White's writing, as I say, is easy to read, but very varied and always appropriate to the tone of the moment. While he can neatly skewer the social pretensions of the Rosetrees (the employers of Himmelfarb and Alf), he can also shift to the kind of description that portrays everyday things as symbolic of eternal conflicts or reflections of the infinite. His descriptions of Alf Dubbo's paintings, for example, are equaled by no author I can think of except perhaps Chaim Potok in My Name Is Asher Lev, in their ability to convey a truly incandescent artistic vision. Such mastery of style is essential because, as loners, his characters cannot interact much together in terms of everyday plot, and in narrative terms the concluding section of the book is less compelling than the long set-up. But where the characters do meet is in their common vision, their unspoken sense of rightness, and it is precisely in White's evocative language that this sounds, resonates, resounds.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is quite a bit of meat on the bone, here. The Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White (1912-1990) presents four protagonists: the excentric millionaire's daughter Mary Mare, the wandering Jew Mordecai Himmelfarb, the half-aboriginal Alf Gubbo and the angelic housekeeper Ruth Godbold. They live in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, and have each had their own special life trajectory. They are nonconformist 'misfits', so-called socially maladjusted people; that is, they are viewed as such by the bourgeois community (here personified by the malicious Mrs Jolley and Mrs Falck). But appearances are deceiving.

White takes quite some time to outline their background and life story and delves deep into their psyche, which is quite battered for each of them: Mary has always been spit out by her parents as 'too ordinary', Mordecai wandered through the Holocaust as a kind of outsider, Alf was raped by a protestant pastor and Ruth had to face an abusive husband. They see themselves as unworthy sinners, suffering to a greater or lesser extent from an inferiority syndrome. But White sheds quite a different light on them.

Through secondary characters and all kinds of developments, the novel takes on a truly Dickensian allure (sometimes just as over-the-edge elaborate), but White adds his own accents: his irony and satire are ubiquitous, and regularly the magical, the spiritual and even the mystical seem to take over the narrative. His writing style regularly misleads us, as in this passage, where Himmelfarb at night walks back to his city, an episode in WW2: “The winter evening was drawing in as he approached the darker masses of the town, which had already begun to receive its nightly visitation. The knots and loops, the little, exquisite puffs of white hung on the deepening distances of the sky, all the way to its orange rim. The riot of fireworks was on. Ordinarily solid, black buildings were shown to have other, more transcendental qualities, in that they would open up, disclosing fountains of hidden fire. Much was inverted, that hitherto had been accepted as sound and immutable. Two silver fish were flaming downward, out of their cobalt sea, into the land.” Yes, this poetic, almost pastoral scene in fact is a description of a brutal bombing of a German town by Allied Forces.

And the Chariot? Well, it is briefly touched upon in each part, in such a way that you can sense it’s something important, crucial to the story. White consciously leaves it to the reader to fill in its meaning, but it’s another original find of his, the combination of an antique (The Chariot of Apollo) and a biblical (Ezekiel) image. White seems to suggest, no, clearly indicates that his four protagonists are the Riders of the Chariot, because they 'see' more than ordinary people, they are Enlightened (shades of light, and especially that of white, play a prominent role in White's descriptions), they are half or whole saints themselves, who transcend the banal, and are clearly on the right side, representing the pinnacle of humanity. The bourgeois, conventional, materialistic world is the opponent force, anti-human and downright evil. So, ultimately, this novel is a variation on the theme of the battle between good and evil, but in a very original form.

To the reader of today this novel may be quite demanding. Not only because of the sometimes very strange (mystical) passages, and because of the story structure that seems a bit too constructed. At times I found White stressed too much how saintlike his 4 Riders of the Chariot are (especially Mrs Godbold). But the extraordinary style, the humor, and the spiritual imagery make this into an impressive novel, and a delight to read.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more I read the more Patrick White seemed like an inspired eccentric rather than a Nobel Laureate. I prefer inspired eccentrics to Nobel Laureates, but then Patrick White proves that one can be both.

This is a book about the burdens and dangers of being a visionary; the Chariot of the title coming from Ezekiel and representing a palpable vision of a higher order of reality. The four main characters have all had their own particular visions of the Chariot, the four roughly representing four different pathways to the divine. One is an eccentric old maid nature mystic living alone in a crumbling estate, another is a German Jew whose parents arranged for his escape from the evil that soon killed them and who connects with the divine through Cabala, one is a half-aborigine outcast who gets there through oil painting, while the last is an old washerwoman who abides in the higher orders through humility. Each of these four characters comes off as a type which is a minor flaw, some more so than others, but each is also provided with a substantial backstory which fleshes out the “typeness” of their representation.

These four blessed souls are set against a backdrop of petty suburbanites who are sometimes represented as ridiculously satirical as anything in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; esp. near the end when one woman shows up with a hat that incorporates an actually smoking volvano. Rather than in the mysticism it’s in this portrayal of the suburban backdrop where White’s eccentricities fully flower. His naturally ornery nature is rarely obscured by objectivity, throbbing with spleen that only reaches the comic at its outer limits, the bulk of it being a smoking disgust only slightly tempered by his gentility.

His eccentricity also flowers in the structure of the book. While White’s prose, when it’s inspired as it is for the greater part of this book, is a thing of beauty to be savored, his structure is awkward, as back stories go on and on (however fascinating) until they threaten to overwhelm the very action of the book. The present tense gets oddly short shrift, and characters who aren't provided with back stories have no chance against White's stinging portrayal of them. While reading I kept imagining large paintings that, say, have an irresistibly attention-grabbing, obsessively detailed section in the bottom left, while the center of the canvas is rendered in loose non-specific strokes; this juxtaposition causing eye cramps and brain discomfort as you move back and forth between them. This effect left me uncertain how to proceed at times, as I went from prose that demanded undivided attention to prose that almost begged to be skimmed. Mahler's symphonies also came to mind for similar reasons. Given White’s overall mastery I can’t help but think this flaw was intentional for some reason.

The overall plot itself is a well-handled religious allegory roughly mirroring the life of Christ that only rarely becomes heavy-handed. It is also a portrayal of the old notion that there are at any one time on Earth a very limited number of wise souls who are responsible for the salvation of the world by propogating that wisdom, but wedded to this arefied idea is the notion of the artist as filling this role also.

This book will appeal to outsiders, to people who feel generally at odds with the times and their environment, but who are substantial and significant in and of themselves; or just to someone who seethes with hate at what they say but who still harbors some vision of goodness. Patrick White was something like an aristocratic bohemian near crank with a genuine sympathy for the truly excluded, for which I’d like to shake his hand.

Oddly, I lost this book just before I finished it, and just as everything in the book was falling apart - main characters dying, the mansion crumbling, paintings being thoughtlessly sold off - and just as I was wondering if there would be a Resurrection in keeping with the overall Christ-allegory. Losing the book dashed my hopes for any positive outcome in the novel, and besides being pissed I got a bit depressed. But the next day after fruitlessly checking the library lost and found and the various help desks, I went to the chair where I had been sitting the day before, and there was the book! And even though the low-keyed joy that the "resurrection" of my copy brought me wasn't exactly paralleled in the book itself, the coincidence somehow injected an optimism into my reading experience.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me just say, right up front, this book is difficult. Hard to wade through the prose, hard to understand when you do (what just happened?) hard to accept the small cruelties of everyday life and fate and bad decisions. I think this book may be better as I mull it over than it was while reading.

We follow 4 characters as they interact with each other, and get their personal biographies as well. Mary, the ugly, simple-minded, unwanted daughter of eccentric parents. Himmelfarb, the Jew who emigrated to Australia after escaping from a German concentration camp. Dubbo, a half-caste Aborigine who only lives for his art, and Mrs Godbold, mistreated, poverty stricken washerwoman who becomes the Angel in the Chariot that is dreamed of by the other three.

Here's the amazing thing about this book. I'd be reading along, trying to understand (I determined to give this up three times), then there would be a sentence of such beauty and wisdom and clarity that I knew I needed to struggle on. Such as:

"But the earth is wonderful. It is all we have. It has brought me back when otherwise I should have died."
" And at the end? When the earth can no longer raise you up? "
"I shall sink into it," she said, " and the grass will grow out of me. "

AND: "I am going now. I would like to persuade you that the simple acts we have learnt to perform daily are the best protection against evil."

AND: "Men are the same before they are born. They are the same at birth, perhaps you will agree. It is only the coat they are told to put on that makes them all that different. And in the end, they are naked again, as they were in the beginning."

I was happy to turn the last page of this novel, just to be done with it. But it seems I'm not really done at all, because it's in my head, roiling around, trying to make me understand. Maybe Patrick White is the Australian Faulkner. He won the Nobel Prize in 1973.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think, first, David Mitchell's interconnectivity, how we link: person to person, era to era, war to war, genre to genre. Transmigrating spirits.

Miss Hare is an only child, born to some money, in Australia. She is, let's just say, a disappointment. Not pretty; not pretty at all. And something wrong with her, too. She likes the woods, and the creatures there. She prefers it there. There it is where she meets Himmelfarb, the Jew, who has survived Auschwitz, and made it down under. He is no safer there. An aborigine painter, of sorts, is drawn to him, fulfilling the agony of painting Christ. Ruth Joyner, a washerwoman and abused wife, stout, will heal them all while she can.

This is a large canvas: history, mythology, bible. Who brings the light? Who brings the sun? The Chariot of the title is a constant presence. For each of the players, as they try to find meaning. We are told to look at the painting of Odilon Redon, The Chariot of Apollo:



Rarely, in Literature, is a painting so prominent. And yet, the Riders in the book title are absent from the painting. I could jabber for a long time about what that means, about the colors of heaven, the driving forces of history, the reader filling a void; but it'd just be me, well, jabbering.

Instead, let me tell you that near the end of the book there is a crucifixion. It's written over the top, obvious. And no poorer for it.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patrick White is an Australian writer who should be better known, and more widely read. Riders in the Chariot is probably my favorite novel of his, a moving and beautifully written testimony to the yearning for redemption so inherent even in these, the days of the ascension of science and rationalism.

The novel takes place in White's fictional Australian city of Sarsaparilla, a locale wherein the rising tide of recent immigrants intermingle with an ofttimes suspicious and bigoted populace. Four residents of the city—an eccentric heiress, a tormented Jewish refugee from post-Nazi Europe, a big-hearted and long-suffering working class washerwoman, and an alcohol-ravaged but artistically gifted aboriginal—are united by the baleful ghosts of their past, and a shared vision of the Chariot, the redemption offered through faith by a forgiving God. Surrounded by actors motivated by pettiness, malice, ignorance and fear, the four individuals—haunted by glimpses of the Chariot and pursuing their archetypal personal salvation—come together in the final act in a lovingly-rendered testimony to human grace.

White deftly illuminates how very many of our fears and doubts are engendered by guilt—survivor's guilt, the guilt of being different, the guilt of disobedience, guilt from violence and from succumbing to the endless temptations proffered to both flesh and spirit. Yet guilt itself can be the prime motivator for the very acts of deliverance and succor that will assuage, if not our stains, then the dreadful burden of another's sin. Guided by wisdom and faith, sprinkled with lacerating barbs, populated by lost and damaged souls even amongst the wicked, White's novel renders a unique homage to the transformative power of art and the spirit.

The best review I've ever come across for this book is Eddie Watkins', a poignant and thoughtful reflection that makes me want to proceed directly into rereading Chariots to discover anew its unique charms.

[Hux · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first quarter of this book included some of the most astonishingly accomplished prose I have ever read; writing of such fluid genius and creative invention, sentences that were exquisite, lyrical, original. Every second paragraph, I would have to stop and re-read a sentence because it was just so mesmerising and beautiful. Each chapter was a work of art in itself. And this language was used in service of a grotesquely fascinating story of two cantankerous old women, Miss Hare, the owner of a house called Xanadu and her new, equally cantankerous and aged housekeeper Mrs Jolley. These two women spar with one another in a manner reminiscent of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane," their acidic jibes and one-upmanship utterly compelling, full of bluster and wit, callous judgementalism and endless passive/aggressive etiquette. I had never read anything quite so good with such an entertaining premise. 

Although there was no more mention of Mrs Flack she was always there at Xanadu. Miss Hare could feel her presence. In certain rather metallic light, behind clumps of ragged, droughty laurels, in corners of rooms where dry rot had encouraged the castors to burst through the boards, on landings where wallpaper hung in drunken brown festoons, or departed from the wall in one long limp sheet, Mrs Flack obtruded worst, until Miss Hare began to fear, not only for her companion and housekeeper, at the best of times a doubtful asset, but, what was far more serious, for the safety of her property.

I honestly could have read writing of that calibre all day. And as I said, I was loving every inch of this book. But alas, White then introduces Mordacai Himmelfarb, another elderly character, a Jew who, having grown up in Germany, endured the First World War, and lost his wife to the growing Third Reich, finds himself emigrating to Australia. The book then focuses an enormous amount of time on him and while the writing is still good, I felt it took second place to the more necessary purpose of giving him a coherent and properly realised backstory. The problem is I just kept reading all this and wanting Miss Hare and Mrs Jolley to come back. And slowly but surely my interest started to wane. It isn't until Part Five (the book has seven parts) that the book does finally go back to them by which point I was already struggling to remain invested. But then, once again, White drops them and introduces yet another character, this time an aboriginal man called Alf Dubbo. And again, I was somewhat losing my initial feeling of awe and adoration. Meanwhile, we also get Ruth Godbold, a woman with a large brood of children who, like the other main characters, shares a religious vision of four horses drawing a chariot towards a better future (hence the title).

I was intrigued by the religious themes, not to mention the importance of being an outsider, or a visionary, and each of these main characters were profound and thoughtful, touched by sadness in various ways, and capable of seeing deeper into life than most people. But I'm not a fan of books that introduce new characters as it goes along, it's often jarring, especially if the first characters you encounter are the ones you find most compelling. Had Mordacai Himmelfarb had is own book, I might have been more engaged but here, he essentially took me away from what I was enjoying -- those two wonderfully mad women. Then comes another new character. Then another. It feels disjointed and remote, difficult to warm to, and I was sad to discover my initial excitement dissipating. Had the book been a short Novella simply focusing on Miss Hare and Mrs Jolley, their irascible sparring and friction, using such insanely brilliant language, I would have considered it an all-time favourite. A stunning work of literature. But, similar to Voss, White slightly outstays his welcome. 

I understand what White was attempting to do but I'm not a fan of continuous introductions of new characters and directions. Maybe drip feed them into the story rather than suddenly change gear. Or just keep them away entirely. It may also be partly my own failing since I was so overwhelmed by that first part, so stunned by its utter magnificence, that I became slightly unwilling to engage with the narrative that came after. But it has to be said, Patrick White is capable of some of the most insanely glorious writing I have ever encountered. 

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had already read several of Patrick White’s books when I came across the ‘Riders in the Chariot’, of whose existence I was completely ignorant, in a bookshop in Philadelphia during a conference visit there. Reading this book was a revelation. It is not often that you get a mixture of mysticism and suburban Australian life in a novel! The book describes the lives of four figures who turn out to share the same vision of the chariot described in Ezekiel.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A searing novel. The story-telling gifts of Patrick White are truly out of this world. I remember reading Voss decades ago. A humbling experience. I had to bushwhack my way through the first hundred pages. Then the recalcitrant narrative allowed me into a clearing and nudged me on until it was too late and, spellbound, I could not tear myself away from the protagonist's final dissolution. Riders vibrates with similar themes and sensations. Here again, we see the world through the eyes of 'chosen' people with archetypal contours: an artist, a guardian, a mother-servant, a priest. Each in his or her own way acts as a spiritual leader, even if they are confined to the margins of society. We can quote Deleuze who wrote: "We will say of pure immanence that it is a LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing, is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss." It demands supreme artistry to conjure these impenetrably simple and profound lives so vividly before our eyes. The general populace registers their qualities mostly subliminally and reacts with unease or hostility. White suggests that drawing-room conspiracies easily spill over into scapegoating and ostracism. The acrid smell of KZ ovens may flare our nostrils any time.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably a masterpiece. Certainly it's 643 pages of almost nonstop virtuosity, thickly-laid words bound together in sentences, a highly idiosyncratic style sui generis to White.

She snorted, and began to suck the hot, rubbery lumps of her exasperated lips.

This is the story of four good, guileless individuals living in a postwar Sydney, Australia suburb - Miss Hare, a muddled, virginal old woman living in her parents' decaying mansion; Himmelfarb, a Holocaust survivor and former scholar, now working in a bicycle lamp factory; Mrs. Godbold, an impoverished laundress with a gaggle of children and a husband who beats her; and Alf Dubbo, an aboriginal of extremely mean origins who is a gifted and visionary painter. Around these four is a cast of morally substandard and even evil characters who make their lives difficult. Toward the end of the novel in particular, religious allegories and Christlike comparisons abound.

David Malouf writes in the introduction that White wanted to give this novel "the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint," which he certainly does. Malouf also adds, accurately, that the book's "interweaving voices and visions barely connect at the level of the actual." At many points, the writing rises to a level of textural complexity such that you aren't sure exactly what's happening. And sometimes there are agreeably clever, but not entirely sensical, sentences like:

Indeed, her breasts would not have existed if it had not been for coming to an agreement with her vest.

I suppose my main problem with the novel is that it's hard on the reader to get through, or process, this much unrelenting virtuosity. Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody, for example, is 13 and a half minutes of musical virtuosity, which is an absorbable amount. What if Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody went on for 8 hours? Then it would be like this novel.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

If anybody ever asked Patrick White about Riders in the Chariot as he was working on it, I imagine his response: he would have rolled his great patrician eyebrows and said, ‘I am going to make these pseudo-egalitarian Australians know about their underclass, and I am going to make them care about them’.

Because although Riders in the Chariot is a masterly exploration of faith in all its forms, rich in symbolism, powerful in its themes and written in Patrick White’s trademark piercing style, it also has four of the most engaging characters in modern literature, and I defy anyone to read to the end and not feel bereaved by it.

The book begins with Miss Hare, a tragi-comic figure of fun in the fictional town of Sarsparilla. Heiress to a bizarre crumbling mansion called Xanadu, she is an eccentric in a society that values conformity. Too plain and too odd to have been married off by her equally odd parents she has lived on alone in Xanadu until finally she takes on a housekeeper called Mrs Jolley. Mrs Jolley specialises in working for elderly spinsters in need of a friend to whom a fortune might be bequeathed, but she is taken aback by Xanadu with its fallen masonry, mould covered interiors and invading plant life. Xanadu reminded me of Angkor Wat with its trees inextricably entwined through the walls, and of the gothic ruin in Karen Foxlee’s The Midnight Dress.

But simple as she is, Miss Hare has a rich spiritual connection with the earth, the plants and small creatures of her estate. She is the first of four ‘Riders’ in Patrick White’s conception of Ezekiel’s chariot and her moments of spiritual ecstasy come upon her when she is at one with nature. Her visions derive from her instincts, her patient observations of the minutiae of life, and the timelessness of her days. The object of patronising gossip at the post office, grubby, foolish Miss Hare in her shabby hats and crumpled stockings is linked to prophecy, punishment, purification and redemption.

To read the rest of my review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/05/04/ri...

[George Ilsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thick strain of mysticism that permeates White's work is more or less flaunted here. The set-up is theatrical, and yet, of course, the result is magnificent.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, I feel parallaxed.
Some books I dread finishing for two reasons. First, obviously I don't want it to end, and second, with a rare book like this, when it comes to getting down some thoughts, the task overwhelms with a sense of paralysis.
Riders in the Chariot is an experience similar to revisiting that high back in my youth in discovering another level I never knew existed, like discovering Hermann Hesse and Alan Watts.

[Tzatziki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vagando a caso per i vicoli di un villaggio greco, mi fermo ad ammirare incantato una gigantesca buganvillea che come una cascata viola ricopre una casetta antica. Pur estasiato da questa magnifica immagine e da questa esplosione di colore, non mi sfugge su un gradino davanti alla porta un mucchietto di libri. Quando vedo un libro abbandonato non riesco a trattenermi e devo immediatamente andare a curiosare: c’è qualcosa in greco, ma di nessun interesse, e poi un bel volumone “I passeggeri del carro”, edizione Einaudi del 1976. Lo raccolgo anche se la copertina è molto rovinata, c’è pure una cacca di uccello secca che gratto via con un bastoncino; le pagine però sono pulite e ben conservate. Leggo qualche riga e decido di portarlo via con me.
Quando la sera inizio a leggerlo mi rendo conto di trovarmi davanti a un capolavoro: c’è Steinbeck della valle dell’Eden col tema dell’opposizione delle forze del bene e del male, ci sono la spiritualità e i temi religiosi che mi ricordano il Kazantzakis del Cristo di nuovo in croce, e poi l’Australia, di cui si legge così poco; sono senza parole, non avevo mai sentito nominare Patrick White e mi chiedo perché vista la potenza della sua prosa. Vado a cercare e scopro che ha vinto il Nobel per la letteratura nel 1973. Ma quanto sono ignorante? E perché non viene più pubblicato? Qui su Goodreads non è neppure presente l’edizione italiana di quest’opera.
Ma io sono contento: se invece di quel vicolo ne avessi preso un altro, non avrei mai scoperto un autore di cui adesso voglio leggere tutto tutto tutto.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded down.

I sometimes complain that books I read are not about anything substantial. Riders in the Chariot does not have that problem. Every page is about something that is meant to be significant. Sadly, I believe White sometimes goes for too much. Too much symbolism, too much obscurity, and too much mysticism. What he does, in consequence, is interrupt the flow of the story and leave the reader feeling he has missed something that is essential to understanding the ideas presented, but too vague to nail down. I would rather have the narrative suggest and give me some room to interpret; for a man who obviously hates preachers, White tends to preach too much.

There are four central characters, each an outsider, with physical repulsions but pure souls. While White appears to be open to Judaism, he shows a marked loathing for other organized religion, making most of the Christians in his novel nothing short of monstrous. The four visionaries that are his main characters find their spiritual connections through other mediums: Mary Hare through nature; Alf Dubbo through art; Mrs. Godbold through humanism; and Mordecai Himmelfarb through Jewish mysticism.

I believe White means us to see all men as the same and faith and religion as an impediment to society rather than an asset:

‘It is the same’ she said, and when she had cleared her voice of hoarseness, continued as though she were compelled by much previous consideration: ‘Men are the same before they are born. They are the same at birth, perhaps you will agree. It is only the coat they are told to put on that makes them all that different. There are some, of course, that feel they are not suited. They think they will change their coat. But remain the same, in themselves. Only at the end, when everything is taken from them, it seems there was never any need. There are the poor souls, at rest, and all naked again, as they were at the beginning. That is how it strikes me, sir. Perhaps you will remember, on thinking it over, that is how Our Lord himself wished us to see it.

While I could easily agree with the quotation above, my own views on faith in general are almost diametrically opposed to White’s. I see my faith as the thing that sustains and supports me, while he saw faith as a thing that corrupts and defiles. I do not mind considering the other man’s point of view, but there was nothing in this novel to convince me that White’s view had merit. The horrors he detailed were the evils of man, not of God.

Some parts of the book are quite compelling and the prose flows, and then there are sections that seem distracting and the writing punishing. I would be thinking to myself that I could not connect to what was going on, and then White would ease into the story and pull me right back in again. I felt their pain, their convictions, their unfair circumstances and the injustice of the society they occupied. I believe White understood outsiders, but I thought he had perhaps viewed too much of the evil to appreciate that there was also good.

I admit to being happy to be done with this chunker. It will probably prey upon my mind for a while, though, because it has an essential element for a good book--it makes you think, it asks you to question, it demands that you inspect your own beliefs and heart.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

What to say about this epic visionary masterpiece? So heartfelt, original, challenging, it really is a heroic work that daemands heroism from the reader too as with most great books. It takes you to the edges of human perception, and although christian in much of its symbolism, its message is universal: that goodness in human society is either shunned or ignored and that evil manifests itself in those who consider themselves among the righteous.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written, character based novel about four lost souls. Plain Mary Hare lives alone on an old run down family estate, Xanadu. She has a housekeeper, Mrs Hare, who keeps Mary company. A difficult relationship develops. Mary’s neighbour, Jewish emigrant, Mordecai Himmelfarb is another lost soul. The experiences he has suffered with his wife in Europe are movingly told. Another character who lives in the area is half caste Alf Dubbo, who does odd jobs and paints pictures. The other person is Ruth Godbold, a working class washerwoman.

The characters are fascinating, the plot intriguing, the way with words absorbing. White is definitely worth reading, especially if you enjoy a writer at the top of his craft. Be warned that things happen slowly but the writing keeps you turning the page.

This book was first published in 1961.

[Scott Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Australian author Patrick White won the 1973 Nobel Prize for literature. The book's title comes from the drunken utterances of Mary's father during a very disturbing scene at the beginning of the novel, "Who are the riders in the Chariot, eh, Mary? Who is ever going to know?" The remainder of this wonderfully complex and symbolic story intertwines the lives of four colorful characters: an insane heiress, a washerwoman, a Jewish refugee and a mixed-caste aborigine. Patrick White's over-arching theme is that everyone shares the chariot. Listen to these words from the end of the novel, "Men are the same before they are born. They are the same at birth, perhaps you will agree. It is only the coat they are told to put on that makes them different. There are some, of course, who feel they are not suited. They think they will change their coat. But remain the same, in themselves. Only at the end, when everything is taken from them, it seems there was never any need. There are the poor souls, at rest, all naked again, as they were in the beginning." This is perhaps the autobiographical hopes of Patrick White, a man who never felt completely at home in his own nation, or with his own life, but who still hoped to be a rider in the chariot.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunningly brilliant book. Patrick White proves time and time that he deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is a study of four people that share a common vision of the riders in the chariot, a quote from the book of the prophet Ezekiel; Miss Hare, the aged maiden lady and sole possessor of the old house and estate of Xanadu; Mordechai Himmelfarb , a Jew who has passed through Europe and the holocaust to end his days in Australia; Alf Dubbo the aborigine painter who sees and paints in visions and carries the Old Testament with him; and Mrs Goldbud the good woman and washerwoman who befriends them all. Along the way each tells their story and they become intertwined in the present of the narrator. other characters appear and add their own pieces to the story and illuminate other facets of the novel that Mr. White wants to get across. A wonderful wonderful book. It is deeply illuminating of the Australian character.

[RinTinTin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came into this book without prior knowledge or expectations (all I knew is that the author was a Nobel Prize for Literature winner and Australian). It was refreshing in some ways to read a book without having anticipated it or having to resist the temptation to fit it into any preconceived notions of how you expect it/want it to be. I always love well-crafted multi-narrator tales where the narrators and characters all relate and intersect in surprising and interesting ways (like Zadie Smith's White Teeth, for example), and White does that well. I am sure there were allusions and subtext and subtleties that I missed, particularly religious ones, but what captivated me were the characters and their narrative voices. Himmelfarb grabbed me the most but all of the voices and the ways they balanced each other engaged me. Certain elements of it reminded me of Jorge Louis Borges' short story "The Gospel According to Mark", which shouldn't be surprising since the title "Riders in the Chariot" refers to the Book of Ezekiel. A beautifully crafted story that shows how society at its worst can torture the best people, and despite some of the mystical or religious tones of the book, the flaws, atrocities, and discrimination that White displays are all too human and concrete.

[Peter Slater · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patrick White's characters are the poor, the outcasts, the refugees, those who live on the margins of society, and in them he discovers the central truths of what it means to be human.
This has become one of my favourite books. Each time I read it I discover something new. Patrick White has an uncanny ability to capture deep, spiritual meanings in the most unlikely places. He finds the sacred in the derelict, and joy amongst the ruins.And he conveys what one senses to be the essence of character and place in often what seems a casual, off-hand manner.The prose sometimes takes on the form of an abstract painting so that some descriptions at first seem absurd and meaningless; but they never are.

[Jayden McComiskie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure why I gave this 3 stars before...this was amazing second time around.

[Daniel Polansky]

In a small Australian town, four holy fools; the Lamed Wufnik of legend, righteous souls who secretly uphold the universe; do spiritual combat with the terrible darkness of modernity and human indifference.

I want to trumpet this book to the heavens; I want to drop copies of it on strangers (though I will not, because it’s very large). Aesthetically it is a masterpiece. White has that rarest of gift of making each sentence seem like a sentence no had ever written before, and yet the narrative remains compulsively readable. It lyrical, tragic and uplifting; it feels like the visions which are given to its protagonists, a searing insight into the painful wonder of the human condition. It is the sort of book which nearly makes one believe in God.

I’m always skeptical of my first impressions of things I really love, but twenty-minutes after finishing it I can’t help but feel this is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

[David Standing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outsiderdom was something Patrick White understood closely having been a sickly young boy denied the company of other children, followed by a few miserable years as an Australian in a British boarding school. After the war he set up home with his gay lifelong partner in suburban Sydney, many moons before the mardi gras era.

In “Riders in the Chariot” Patrick White places the outsider on center stage. The four outsiders whose fates are destined to intertwine are privy to religious revelation; all four resonating strongly to the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the golden chariot – possibly a glorious means of being transported from their earthly bonds and suffering. For these people will suffer greatly at the hands of their fellow men. Their privilege of religious revelation as well as the revelation of the natural world is greatly outweighed by the pain, cruelty, humiliation and worse, that they will be subjected to.

While White acknowledges the good of mankind as embodied by the Christian benevolence of the aptly named Mrs. Godbold, the evil of mankind as experienced by Himmelfarb the Jew, in both Nazi Germany and post war Australia is what dominates the authors bleak vision of mankind. This is supplemented by the histories of the eccentric naïve Miss Hare and Alf Dubbo, the aborigine who finds expression in art.

Once the climax of the novel has been reached, White seems to falter as how to end his novel and the final chapter seemed to me somewhat weak.

It may not be his masterpiece, but “Riders in the Chariot” remains an important, profound and disturbing novel.