Voss

5/2017
On second read this book is still my perfect 10.

***
I guess Patrick White is relatively obscure (?) despite his Nobel win — a baffling fact, unless it's just me who'd hardly heard of him despite being what you'd call a ‘serious' (though non-academic/civilian) reader.

This is easily one of my favourite books of all time so far. Every sentence of ‘Voss' is hyper-polished, often delightfully surprising and hilarious in an OH, BURN! way — he shows his characters no mercy, always finding something rotten in even the most outwardly noble figures. It would have been quite nasty if it wasn't so on point (the book is about Victorians after all), and anyway, who doesn't love a magnificent, vivisecting jerk of a narrator? (If you don't secretly love arrogance, don't read White, I guess)

‘Voss' is refreshingly homoerotic — it's all about dudes trying to be close with other dudes, admiring each other's teeth and manes, touching each other's knees, huddling close by campfire. At the same time, what we'd today call ‘fragile masculinity' is a major source of humour in ‘Voss' — not surprisingly, considering White's struggle with his contemporaries' attitudes towards his homosexuality (according to the introduction to the Everyman's Library edition, White felt hounded into an outsider status because of it, and as tragic as that is, it definitely gave a wonderful, bitter dimension to his observations on society).

I'm not sure how ‘out' he was in his lifetime, but it's interesting that despite the book's obvious homoeroticism he decided to make the protagonist's love interest a woman — but in that choice, he created a deeply convincing, complicated female character (and if, as I suspect, she was initially written as a man, ‘Voss' proves definitely just how effective the method of giving male characters female names can be for a male writer who struggles to identify with the female perspective — all other female characters in the book are quite weak and stereotypically ‘female').

In the end I actually began to despise this book. Overwrought and pretentious in my opinion. A simple story based on an explorer disappearing in outback Australia during colonial times I never felt that the simplicity of the story was saved by the writing. Challenging prose is fine by me but this went beyond a challenge.

I almost feel that I read this book two and a half times as I read and reread passage after passage to try and get the nuances that were obviously completely above my tiny little brain. At one point Voss reads a poem written by one of his men and hates it. I reread the poem and his reaction to it four times and even now as I type this, a reread for a fifth time, I am none the wiser as to why he dislikes the poem. What did I miss? Someone tell me.

The presentation of this book is also paragraphless (is that a word?) in what seemed one long almost stream of consciousness delivery that had me returning to reread why the sudden change from character to character. No doubt intentional but it left me frustrated and annoyed.

But again what would I know. Loved by many, a friend of mine adores this and has read it several times, awarded the first ever Miles Franklin and author Patrick White is the only Australian Nobel Prize winner. Yep what would I know. I feel an utter traitor to Australian literature considering the reverence this is held in some circles but to be frank I detested it. It took all my will to finish and I am glad I have. Onwards and upwards.