Voss (novel)

Last updated
Voss
Foto 038.jpg
First edition
Author Patrick White
Cover artist Sidney Nolan [1]
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Eyre & Spottiswoode
Publication date
1957
Publication placeAustralia
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages478 pp
OCLC 316076213
Preceded by The Tree of Man  
Followed by Riders in the Chariot  

Voss (1957) is the fifth published novel by Patrick White. [2] It is based upon the life of the 19th-century Prussian explorer and naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared while on an expedition into the Australian outback.

Contents

Plot summary

The novel centres on two characters: Voss, a German, and Laura, a young woman, orphaned and new to the colony of New South Wales. It opens as they meet for the first time in the house of Laura's uncle and the patron of Voss's expedition, Mr Bonner.

Johann Ulrich Voss sets out to cross the Australian continent in 1845. After collecting a party of settlers and two Aboriginal men, his party heads inland from the coast only to meet endless adversity. The explorers cross drought-plagued desert, then waterlogged lands until they retreat to a cave where they lie for weeks waiting for the rain to stop. Voss and Laura retain a connection despite Voss's absence and the story intersperses developments in each of their lives. Laura adopts an orphaned child and attends a ball during Voss's absence.

The travelling party splits in two and nearly all members eventually perish. The story ends some 20 years later at a garden party hosted by Laura's cousin Belle Radclyffe (née Bonner) on the day of the unveiling of a statue of Voss. The party is also attended by Laura Trevelyan and the one remaining member of Voss's expeditionary party, Mr Judd.

The strength of the novel comes not from the physical description of the events in the story but from the explorers' passion, insight and doom. The novel draws heavily on the complex character of Voss.

Symbolism

The novel uses extensive religious symbolism. Voss is compared repeatedly to God, Christ and the Devil. Like Christ he goes into the desert, he is a leader of men and he tends to the sick. Voss and Laura have a meeting in a garden prior to his departure that could be compared to the Garden of Eden.

A metaphysical thread unites the novel. Voss and Laura are permitted to communicate through visions. White presents the desert as akin to the mind of man, a blank landscape in which pretensions to godliness are brought asunder. In Sydney, Laura's adoption of the orphaned child, Mercy, represents godliness through a pure form of sacrifice.

There is a continual reference to duality in the travelling party, with a group led by Voss and a group led by Judd eventually dividing after the death of the unifying agent, Mr Palfreyman. The intellect and pretensions to godliness of Mr Voss are compared unfavourably with the simplicity and earthliness of the pardoned convict Judd. Mr Judd, it is implied, has accepted the blankness of the desert of the mind, and in doing so, become more 'godlike'.

The spirituality of Australia's indigenous people also infuses the sections of the book set in the desert.

The book was listed among the 100 greatest novels written in English by Guardian journalist Robert McCrum. [3]

Adaptations

Opera

Voss has also been adapted into an opera of the same name written by Richard Meale [4] with the libretto by David Malouf. [4] The world premiere was at the 1986 Adelaide Festival of Arts conducted by Stuart Challender. [4]

Music

David Lumsdaine's Aria for Edward John Eyre also draws inspiration from Voss, in relating Eyre's journey across Australia's Great Australian Bight (that is, along the southern coast from what is now the Eyre Peninsula to King George's Sound, the site of modern Albany), as documented in his journals, but doing so in a psychologised form similar to the relationship White depicts between Voss and Laura Trevelyan.

Film

White wanted Voss to be produced as a film and Sydney musical promoter Harry M. Miller bought the rights. Ken Russell and then Joseph Losey were White's choice for director. Losey and scriptwriter David Mercer arrived in Sydney in 1977 but after a few days in the desert scouting locations the director was hospitalised with viral pneumonia. Miller wanted to cast Donald Sutherland as Voss and Mia Farrow as Laura Trevelyan but White disagreed saying that Farrow was too soft and of Sutherland, "That flabby wet mouth is entirely wrong. Voss was dry and ascetic – he had a thin mouth like a piece of fence-wire. I do think a whole characterisation can go astray on a single physical feature like that." Maximilian Schell was cast to play the explorer and the script was finalised but Miller was unable to raise sufficient capital for production and the film was never made. [5]

The Voss Journey (2009)

The Voss Journey was a four-day event which included seminars, concerts, films, and exhibitions inspired by the novel, hosted by the National Film and Sound Archive in collaboration with Canberra International Music Festival and many other institutions. It included presentations by many of the artists involved in the staging of the opera. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patrick White</span> Australian writer (1912–1990)

Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian novelist and playwright who explored themes of religious experience, personal identity and the conflict between visionary individuals and a materialistic, conformist society. Influenced by the modernism of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, he developed a complex literary style and a body of work which challenged the dominant realist prose tradition of his home country, was satirical of Australian society, and sharply divided local critics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, the only Australian to have been awarded the literary prize.

<i>Jane Eyre</i> 1847 novel by Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first American edition was published the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is a bildungsroman that follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Opera Australia</span> Principal opera company in Australia

Opera Australia is the principal opera company in Australia. Based in Sydney, New South Wales, its performance season at the Sydney Opera House accompanied by the Opera Australia Orchestra runs for approximately eight months of the year, with the remainder of its time spent at the Arts Centre Melbourne, where it is accompanied by Orchestra Victoria. In 2004, the company gave 226 performances in its subscription seasons in Sydney and Melbourne, Victoria, attended by more than 294,000 people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Losey</span> American theatre and film director (1909–1984)

Joseph Walton Losey III was an American theatre and film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and then returned to the United States. Blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s, he moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom. Among the most critically and commercially successful were the films with screenplays by Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1971).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ludwig Leichhardt</span> German explorer of Australia (1813–1848)

Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt, known as Ludwig Leichhardt, was a German explorer and naturalist, most famous for his exploration of northern and central Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Forrest</span> Australian politician (1847–1918)

Sir John Forrest was an Australian explorer and politician. He was the first premier of Western Australia (1890–1901) and a long-serving cabinet minister in federal politics.

<i>Wide Sargasso Sea</i> 1966 novel by Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.

<i>The Sittaford Mystery</i> 1931 novel by Agatha Christie

The Sittaford Mystery is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1931 under the title of The Murder at Hazelmoor and in UK by the Collins Crime Club on 7 September of the same year under Christie's original title. It is the first Christie novel to be given a different title for the US market. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Hammond</span> Australian operatic soprano, singing coach and champion golfer

Dame Joan Hilda Hood Hammond, was an Australian operatic soprano, singing coach and champion golfer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Meale</span> Australian composer

Richard Graham Meale, AM, MBE was an Australian composer of instrumental works and operas.

James David Sharman is an Australian director and writer for film and stage with more than 70 productions to his credit. He is renowned in Australia for his work as a theatre director since the 1960s, and is best known internationally as the director of the 1973 theatrical hit The Rocky Horror Show, its film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and the film's follow-up, Shock Treatment (1981).

<i>The Woman in White</i> (novel) 1860 novel by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins's fifth published novel, written in 1860 and set from 1849 to 1850. It started its publication on 26 November 1859 and its publication was completed on 25 August 1860. It is a mystery novel and falls under the genre of "sensation novels".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manoly Lascaris</span>

Emmanuel George "Manoly" Lascaris was the life partner of the Australian novelist and dramatist Patrick White. Lascaris met White while they both were servicemen in the Second World War. After the war, Lascaris and White lived together in Cairo, then moved to Sydney, Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Eyre (character)</span> Fictional character

Jane Eyre is the fictional heroine and the titular protagonist in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel of the same name. The story follows Jane's infancy and childhood as an orphan, her employment first as a teacher and then as a governess, and her romantic involvement with her employer, the mysterious and moody Edward Rochester. Jane is noted by critics for her dependability, strong mindedness, and individualism. The author deliberately created Jane as an unglamorous figure, in contrast to conventional heroines of fiction, and possibly part-autobiographical.

Moffatt Benjamin Oxenbould is a retired Australian opera director.

Voss is an opera by Australian composer Richard Meale with libretto by David Malouf. It is an adaptation of Patrick White's novel of the same name. The opera was commissioned by The Australian Opera, and premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 1986. It was reprised in Adelaide in 2022, in a co-production by State Opera South Australia and Victorian Opera.

<i>My Place</i> (TV series) Australian childrens television drama series

My Place is an Australian children's television drama series based on the award-winning picture book of the same name by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. The series first screened on ABC3 on weeknights at 8pm from 4 December 2009 and aired in the United States on Vibrant TV Network.

Tracey Moffatt is an Indigenous Australian artist who primarily uses photography and video.

Adaptations of <i>Jane Eyre</i>

Jane Eyre, the 1847 novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë, has frequently been adapted for film, radio, television, and theatre, and has also inspired a number of rewritings and reinterpretations.

Marilyn Richardson is an Australian operatic soprano. She sang Laura in the first performances of Richard Meale's opera, Voss.

References

  1. Nolan's Covers - aComment Retrieved on 2015-12-12.
  2. "Voss by Patrick White". Austlit. Retrieved 25 June 2023.
  3. "The 100 best novels written in English: the full list". The Guardian. August 17, 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 "At the Opera: Voss, 13 August 2006 introduction by Moffatt Oxenbould". ABC Classic FM. Retrieved 2007-08-12.
  5. Marr, David (10 September 2011). "Celluloid Dreams". The Age.
  6. "The Voss Journey". National Film and Sound Archive . 20 April 2009. Archived from the original on 23 May 2009. Retrieved 20 October 2022.