The Hanging Garden by Patrick White, Knopf Australia, $29.95
An unpublished manuscript by Australia’s only Nobel Prize-winning author was always going to be big news, and here it is.
Unfinished, it’s true, White having written only a third of the novel before being distracted by politics and his theatre work, but elegantly formed and far easier to read that some of his more magisterial novels.
Set on the shores of Sydney Harbour, two children meet in a wild garden — “a country of lantana and feral cats” — having been either lost or abandoned by their parents during the Second World War.
They are “reffoes”, strangers in a strange land, and form a powerful bond in a city dominated by elderly women who mean to help but are locked into their own values and prejudices. Who knows where he would have taken the story next?
But White’s writing is sharp as a knife and conveys a strong sense of a long-ago time in Australia when a foreigner — even a foreign child — would struggle ever to feel at home.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
