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Beautifully written, this novel documents hte prevailing attitudes of the British colonizers to the colonized.

Banal, toothless in its liberalism, weak in its poetic arguments and in formal invention, another exercise of favoritism among academic coteries and their identitarian cohorts.

They all want to jump on Richard Branson's yacht.

Check out Adolf Reed and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on this phenomenon.

Another exercise in toothless liberalism salted over with bland POC/PC sentiments. Example: Pliny the Elder was one of the first mansplainers. Elsewhere, an ode to our vice president (who once suggested jailing the parents of truants). Very little that is adventurous or inventive formally. That's the nature of the beast.

If you want to read Patrick White, as well as a keystone to Australian literature, I'd recommend Voss first. (Eventually I will get to The Tree of Man: next up.) See also Less Murray, Freedy Neptune, but that's another story.

As a companion volume, you could read From Caligari to Hitler, which argues that German Expressionism was a stage to National Socialism.

There are a lot of dense conversations (isn't that what Eliot initially complained about in Paradise Lost?) that unravel this theme, a theme of the abandonment of the rational in the service of the communal and orgiastic.

Secondary characters enter the plot at this point, in one instance, a bad marriage to one of the narrator's friends. The war has begun to a collective jubilation. Composer Adrian's cold eye on life and death as it relates to his compositional practices, his use of parody (reminiscent of Stravinsky). Had to take a break for something contemporary, more colloquial.

Peeking into it for the first time, I found it almost too weighty and huge, but when I drilled more into its contents, I found some gems I don't believe I've crossed in the much smaller Collected of 1982. Some of the occasional verses I might pass however. He is altogether a needed antidote to the saintly aspirations of verse-makers whom academia nurtures and shields.

Leverkuhn, the composer in the novel, seems to be proposing a system of composition similar to twelve-tone row. You can learn something about musical theory reading some of the conversations.

A densely woven discursive rhetoric recalling Hart Crane and John Ashbery (especially from Rivers and Mountains to Houseboat Days). A moralized landscape informed by a materialist understanding, and a tendency to employ a collage of a "found" commercial language. The poems are often meditations on the interplay between landscape and architecture. Highly lauded in its time but deserving of reading in the present.

I wanted to return to Marx, particularly 18th Brumaire and maybe German Ideology, for references to ghosts and spectres.