*The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White (Viking Press, 1974)

 

Another peculiar, dense novel by Patrick White that took a long time to read.  It doesn't have as coherent or engaging a narrative as Voss or A Fringe of Leaves.  In fact, one might say it is rather incoherent and disengaging.  A wealthy, independent, mercurial, formerly beautiful widow smugly languishes on her deathbed in a mansion in Sydney sometime in the 60s (or early 70s?) attended by a rotating slate of three nurses and her holocaust-surviving housekeeper/cook.  Her son and daughter, who have both escaped from her withering disapproval and from Australia itself -- the son an actor, knighted, to England; the daughter, a princess, to France -- return home both needing money to continue their dead-end, thwarted lives.  Not much happens; the central drama occurs in a flashback: mother and daughter visit friends on a remote barrier island and both become interested in and attracted to the same Norwegian naturalist, while a hurricane threateningly approaches.  Back in the present, the the son and daughter make a very odd visit to the family's (former) country home which is now occupied by a woman from a good family who has married far beneath her and her glowering husband and their many children.  The son flirts with two of the three nurses and sleeps with one of them, a sexually progressive and wily young woman named Sister Manhood (!).  Much ado about not very much, but the interesting characters and the dense, idiosyncratic, brilliant writing kept me reading with much admiration and interest.