The Solid Mandala by Patrick White

The Solid Mandala Reviews

• 
  George Ilsley

  June 2020 update: Recently saw an interview with Patrick White, and he said this was his favourite book. So I just read it again. We start and end with the community view of the twins, and the ideas of society are one manifestation of a “solid mandala” encountered in this challenging novel. Part 2 is the longest, and is from Waldo’s point of view; later, in Arthur’s section, we are forced to re-evaluate all our assumptions. Here is another big theme—the debate between the intellect and the physical. The twins represent both, and on one level the novel can be seen to portray the struggle to integrate a complete personality. Throw in the fact the twins, even as adults, continue to sleep together, and one can see that White tossed as much into the pot as he dared at the time. This book also foreshadows themes explored more fully in The Twyborn Affair.
  
  White has a confident masterful approach, and gets away with a lot. I still intend to reread all the rest, and then start all over again.
  
  //
  Previous review:
  White is writing here about two brothers who together form some kind of unit. I can't help but wonder if the two brothers are a kind of stand in for another kind of male pair bond. In any event, I'm going to re-read every book Patrick White wrote and figure out the answer to every question.
  Yes, that is what I shall do.
• 
  Neale

  This was apparently White's own favourite amongst his books. I love it. There isn't the sense of straining after huge themes that sometimes weighs down his better known novels. It's a simple story, presenting all White's strengths - his feeling for the darker corners of human nature, his marvellous evocation of old Australia - pretty much unadorned.
  
  Once you've given a minute's thought to the title you've done all of the 'thinking' that this book requires. The rest is pleasure.
  
  The presentation of the twins' dual nature is almost schematic: it's like a suburban Australian version of Hesse's 'Narziss & Goldmund'. Perhaps this is a flaw. I suspect that White felt too strongly about the Waldo in himself to allow the character to come fully to life...
• 
  WF

  This is an uncomfortable story to read, but which of Patrick White's stories isn't? If this novel was White's personal favourite, it must have been because he derived a grim satisfaction from exposing the dark and ineffectual aspects of the writer self, as exemplified by Waldo, as much as he enjoyed gradually revealing that the idiot savant, as represented by the "simple" twin Arthur, has hidden depths. I hate the ending, but acknowledge that it was inevitable.
• 
  Anneb

  true artistry in sentence construction. Sad, funny, clever and brutally honest. Master literature
• 
  Barbarroja

  Qué gran descubrimiento, Patrick White. Me ha gustado mucho esta novela sobre dos hermanos mellizos, sobre el dolor, sobre Australia. Una lectura muy interesante, posiblemente la mejor de este año, por el momento. Volveré a Patrick White, sin duda. Ha conseguido impresionarme.
• 
  Khosro

  There are few characters so representative of what sad and hopeless creatures we are. The Waldo in all of us...
• 
  Laura Rittenhouse

  This book tells the story of twins growing up and living their lives in a small town in Australia. One boy is clever but bitter. The other is slow but kind. The book is not about anything, nothing much happens, but it gives illumination to the workings of the minds - even the souls - of these 2 men. It does this in a claustrophobic style with few characters and little variety. Most of the book is spent telling the story through the eyes of the bright boy. The insight comes when many of the same scenes are retold through the eyes of the slow boy.
  
  My problem with the book was that not enough was going on, externally or internally, to hold my interest. It was a portrait of 2 men trying to carve our their own lives when they were so intertwined. Unfortunately, neither of them captivated me enough to make me keen to learn more. This book became difficult for me to read and I felt like I was dragging it along behind me to reach the ending. So much so that what began as skipping a few words became sentences missed and finally whole paragraphs bypassed as I skimmed, looking for some event to catch my attention.
  
  Patrick White is a Nobel Laureate and I am sure his writing is excellent, this book just didn't grab or hold me.
• 
  Lukasz Pruski

  "Waldo was leading his brother Arthur, as how many times, out of the brown gloom of the kitchen. The cold light, the kitchen smells, had set almost solid in it. Yet, here they were, the two human creatures, depending on habit for substance, as they drifted through. If habit lent them substance, it was more than habit, Waldo conceded bitterly, which made them one."
  
  If I am having difficulties with completing my Goodreads challenge to read 100 books in 2018 it may be Patrick White's fault. After the phenomenal
  The Aunt's Story comes another great book by the Australian author, The Solid Mandala (1966). No five stars this time as I am very stingy with that rating but it is another novel that shows a master of the English language at work. Another novel in which I savored so many sentences and fragments on so many pages. It took me the entire week to read the 300-page novel. Sometimes I spent almost five minutes to read one page - so delightful the prose is. What amazing writing! Maybe only Nabokov could write such an utterly magnificent passage as:

  "As they lay in the vast bed time was swooping in waves of waves of yellow fluctuating light, or grass. The yellow friction finally revived their flesh. They seemed to flow together as they had, once or twice, in memory or sleep. They were promised a sticky morning, of yellow down, of old yellowed wormy quinces."

  Waldo and Arthur are twin brothers who spend their entire life together. Waldo is the "clever twin," and "the one who takes the lead;" Arthur is "the backward one," simple and slow. But while Waldo is interested in words, Arthur is the twin more interested in people. They are so different yet they are one.
  
  The pace of the novel is extremely slow: an impatient reader will be right to say that not much is going on. One does not read a book like this for the story; the depth of the psychological study, the richness of psychological detail, the amazing insights of the nature of Waldo and Arthur's "twinness" far outweigh the scarcity of plot events.
  
  I love the structure of the novel: the longer first part that focuses on Waldo is followed by much shorter second part where Arthur is the primary focus. The two "halves" are bracketed by short chapters ostensibly written about other participants of the story; they serve as prologue and epilogue for the plot. I love the passages describing the brothers walking along the Barranugli Road, while the events from their past move by like on an old newsreel. One of the climaxes of the novel is the unforgettable, stunning scene of Arthur "dancing the mandala":

  "He danced the sleep of people in a wooden house, groaning under the pressure of sleep, their secrets locked prudently up, safe, until their spoken thoughts, or farts, gave them away. He danced the moon, anaesthetized by bottled cestrum. He danced the disc of the orange sun above icebergs, which was in a sense his beginning, and should perhaps be his end."

  Magnificent! There is one thing I do not like in the novel: the author seems to be explaining the meaning of the title, writing (in italics! rather a lame affectation)

  "The Mandala is a symbol of totality. It is believed to be the 'dwelling of the god'. [...]"

  A beautiful, desperately sad, and difficult book that reveals many truths about what it is to be human.
  
  Four-and-a-half stars
  
• 
  Erik Smith

  This book has somehow kept with me years after reading. It pops up at random times and I am again overwhelmed by what it has done. Patrick White’s words and language in this book are magic. I felt like a kid watching sleight of hand tricks that even adults couldn’t explain.
• 
  J.D.

  Just visited Australia, and had to stop by Sydney's Writers Walk, where a plaque for White is present near the harbor. Patrick White (Nobel Prize winner, only Australian to win it) is one of my favorite writers, and this is one of my best loved books from years ago. It's in the bed table to be read again ... will see if I like it as much.
• 
  Kyle C

  This is one of the finest books of literature I have ever read. Two twin brothers, Waldo and Arthur, are light-and-day contrasts. Waldo is cerebral, an aspiring novelist, a cold and distant misanthrope with unexamined racist prejudices, and a repressed homosexual who never forms a romantic attachment. He is a voyeur who watches his neighbors have sex in the window. His closest sexual experience occurs when he unexpectedly climaxes in a library upon finding a homoerotic poem of Tennyson. When his Jewish friend, a woman he wants to court, plays piano before him, he obsesses over her nose and thinks, "it reminded him of the uncircumcised penis of an Anglican bishop he once noticed in a public lavatory". The moment epitomizes both his sexual repression and his unconscious antisemitism. In contrast, Arthur is the favorite, the more athletic, handsome and kind son. He is slow-witted, an innocent fool but, as the novel slowly reveals, a prophetic and uncomprehending intermediary between the human and the numinous. Arthur is not just the comic-relief sidekick to Waldo but a divine figure, a deliverer more than a murderer. He carries mandalas in his pocket, giving them to worthy friends in need of spiritual comfort, and he "dances the mandala" in a choral ritual of transcendence and harmony. Where his brother struggles to make friends, Arthur becomes a kind of simpleton chaplain in the outskirts of suburban Sydney. For their whole life, the two brothers share a bed, care for their mother and father, and live a queer-coded quasi-incestuous life. Together they form an intertwined and internecine pair.
  
  Patrick White's style is elliptical and poignantly restrained. The novel roams between different times in the brothers' life, sifting through and cross-examining their memories, seeing them in different perspectives (the neighbors', Waldo's, Arthur's). So much of the story is understated and unresolved. One day, when Waldo and Arthur are young boys, their father comes home and asks Waldo where his brother is. Waldo, understanding in that moment that he is the less favored son, pretends not to know while the father, realizing he has betrayed this secret to Waldo, awkwardly kisses Waldo; Waldo returns the kiss and they stand silently in front of one another as strangers. The moment is cryptically ambivalent, tragic, slightly erotic, and it's unclear what either one thinks or desires. In fact, as Waldo surmises, his father was teaching himself Norwegian simply so that he could think in a language that no one else could read. As with the whole novel, the inner lives and desires of each character is a secret, even to themselves.
  
  As a young boy, Waldo wanted to write a Greek tragedy about a man on a rock (a reference to Prometheus Bound); as an adult, he dedicates his life to writing a novel called Tiresias, the mythical prophet of Thebes who had been transformed into a woman and back into a man, a symbolic figure of shamanistic gender-transitioning. Like Prometheus, Waldo is alienated and ostracized, a lonely pariah on a street ominously called Terminal Road. Like Tiresias, both he and Arthur are queer figures, strange shamans in a suburban shanty. But the novel ultimately does not end with the two brothers; it ends with Mrs Poulter, preparing steak for her suspicious husband who refuses to love her. The novel is a sad tragedy about domesticity and unfulfilled desire.
• 
  Justin Evans

  I 'read' this at Uni, and it's fair to say it was a bit over my head. All I remember is generally not liking Waldo, and thinking for many, many years that this novel was in fact the movie Rain Man, or vice versa. As my wife pointed out, if it was, every Patrick White book ever would have had 'From the mind behind Rain Man!' stickers on it, so even fifteen years ago, and having never read any Patrick White, she could have told me that there was no connection. Touche.
  
  I was rather disappointed by it to begin with, and now, a day after finishing it, I'm disappointed again, but as I read the last chapter, I was lifted into a higher reality. So there's that.
  
  I was disappointed, first of all, because we're pushed so strongly to love Arthur and to hate Waldo; well, it worked when I was younger, but not this time, since I over-identify with Waldo (self-conceived intellectual, artistic pretensions, always blaming something other than himself for his failures), and think that holy innocents are more likely to destroy the world than give out feeling-infused marbles. I was disappointed, part two, because Arthur, despite being a holy innocent, is also prone to some pretty witty and intellectual statements. In fact, I can't help thinking that Arthur is 'dull,' not because of anything natural in him, but simply because everyone treated him as such. That would make this a very different book, and I'm pretty sure that's not what White intended; instead, it's a failure of art. Intelligent people like to think they can write unintelligent people, without being condescending. By and large, I don't think they can. As soon as you like the character, the intelligence slips into his or her mouth.
  
  There was also a lot of dialogue, which limited the amount of fantastically dense, weird White writing, and really I come to his work for the prose, and the satire, and not the ideas. The satire here, by the way, is great.
• 
  Descending Angel

  Voss was my first book this year and probably the best book I've read this year so far. This, my second White novel gave me mixed feelings to start with, I wasn't sure I was enjoying it or where it was going, it also highlights White's strange writing style and voice which was in Voss as well but Voss is a much grander novel and is easier to get swept away with. But it did win me over in the end, it clicked, I did enjoy it, but it still is a strange novel.
• 
  Niamh Gallagher

  cried on a bus because of how White can write about a bunch of flowers - he makes mundanity glistening, abject, sweet.
• 
  Kevin Tole

  Published in 1966, this was Patrick White’s seventh published novel, therefore the work of an established author who already had shown that he had a voice and the technical ability to get it across in a way to captivate the reader and take them ‘beyond’. This book, like all great books is simple in form but deeply complex on a conceptual level requiring engagement by the reader above and beyond the text. White writes of the intertwined lives and character of the twins, Waldo and Arthur Brown and structurally this is done through four chapters, two top-and-tailing the central pair of firstly actions through Waldo’s eyes and then the same events through Arthur’s. The top-and-tail are the voices of the neighbours like a preface and an afterword.
  
  This is not an easy novel and though at the time being as lauded as
  Voss, the novel that marked Patrick White as not only an Australian writer of stature but an international great, it is far harder to get to grips with because much of the meaning within the text is to a degree occluded to us the readers. The two twin brothers would both be considered ‘on the spectrum’ now – the spectrum of autism. The elder, Arthur, is seemingly the simpleton, prone to drooling, intellectually lazy (again seemingly) but a mathematical wizard at school, the half-wit, the ‘dill’. Waldo, the younger twin wants to be, DESIRES to be an intellectual and a writer but because he cannot commit seems to regard his status as a librarian the height of his aspirations, keeping his surreptitious notes and papers for ‘later’ when he can concentrate on his great oeuvre,, a masterwork that will change everyone’s opinion of him. He is also deeply embarrassed by and ashamed of Arthur.
  
  It is impossible to use a filmic ‘split screen’ technique in a novel (though I am sure someone has tried with two texts of the same scenes on opposite pages – but I personally don’t know of any) so White constructs the same scenes viewed through the eyes of Waldo and in the next chapter through the eyes of Arthur. Waldo is the coherent, anally-retentive. Arthur the idiot savant holy fool. The fact that they are twins, the fact that we deal with the same events through two different sets of eyes might suggest that we are dealing with the dichotomous nature of the same character. In fact White himself has suggested that both Waldo AND Arthur are both sides of him.

  The Solid Mandala where I'd been forced to interrupt it, wondering whether I should be able to join the threads where they had been broken. My first attempts at doing so in the deserted house were pure, if fearful, bliss.
  If you read my books, those are all bits of myself. Some of the characters may start as people I've known, but they're all dressed up out of my unconscious.
  But in general I only choose characters that I think I can understand through something in myself as well as my experience of life and those people of that kind.

  There seems to be quite a bit of divergent opinion among readers and critics as to which one of the two is the most retarded and which one leads the other; the anal-but-in-control Waldo, or the in-touch-with-his-feelings Arthur? Arthur is most definitely more in the background to Waldo yet he is easier to like and therefore gets on more with people than Waldo. Arthur sees himself as part of and needing to protect Waldo. Waldo is embarrassed, guilty and thus shamed by Arthur and wants him away, does not want his twin brother but has to live with him. By the time we have got through 200 odd pages of Waldo, with his prickly priggishness, it is a breath of fresh air to proceed to Arthur’s view. Waldo is never going to be normal with the attitudes he comes across with. He will never attain love, marriage, wholeness to life, an at-one-ness with the world. He will always be the outsider from what has been told us through his section. Arthur is immediately more likeable with his instinctive reactions and ‘natural’ if totally un-self-contained emotions. He is far more intelligent than people and Waldo in particular give him credit for. Those that recognise that fact become eligible for induction to the Mandala. And the whole concept of the Mandala within this book is thoroughly binding and interesting. It is the tool for establishing the Wholeness of Space and Time, the Unity of all things. So along with the theme of duality represented by the twins we also have a definite theme of unity through the solid Mandala represented for Arthur in his glass marbles. He gives one to each of those that understand this unity – to Dulcie, to Mrs Poulter and he retains one for Waldo and one for himself. Not only this but when taken, he dances the Mandala for Mrs Poulter.
  
  Waldo can never obtain the wholeness he desires because of his caught tight nature. Arthur is outside of the bounds of considered normal behaviour except for those few that see is essential goodness, simplicity and wholeness. At one point Mrs Poulter recognises him as a saint and because of the sub-theme of religiosity associated through her sections it is maybe pertinent to make the association between the Christ and Arthur and eternal suffering and pain with Waldo.
  With all of this we see White treating the subject of the Outsider again. He does it with Alf Dubbs in
  Riders in the Chariot, the extreme outsider as an artist in Hurtle Duffield in
  The Vivisector and throughout various passages in
  The Tree of Man. But the outsider as such has a wholeness, a Unity, signified by both the twins in their exposition of themes from different positions and in the role of the Mandala. And then we have White’s own identification with both parts writing as an outsider and a homosexual in confirmed ocker Australia. White is presenting us with the Outsider as a Duality AND as a Unity. And he does so with great skill. Waldo, the
  Larkin-esque character writing surreptitiously. Arthur the deeper internalised one cared for by the seemingly more practical twin, yet caring for and recognising the vulnerability of his brother Waldo. Waldo’s semblance is of duty and manners; Arthur’s is of immediacy and passion.
  
  The writing is intense in a quietly dispassionate way. Patrick White finds entirely the right balance and characterisation for each of the personae within this great novel. He is taking great themes of existence and psyche and melding them into novel form whereby he says more than he writes.
  This novel grew on me as I read it and thought about what I was reading. I have always felt that The Vivisector was THE book for me by White, but every successive novel of his that I read opens up further a great writer and a true Nobel laureate. And I haven't even mentioned or discussed the themes of Tiresias and
  The Brothers Karamazov that occur!
  
• 
  Jonathan

  A story about twins Waldo and Arthur in Australia who go on a walk and are seen by some neighbours on a bus but we learn about their lives before as they are now old men and Waldo doesn't get on with his brother who is a bit simple but understands more than people think and has marbles which he calls mandalas while Waldo is seen as the clever one and works in a library for most of his life and they both meet Dulcie Feinstein and both love her in their own way although neither are destined to be with her only each other and some dogs after their parents die and they carry on living in the same house they grew up in at the end of Terminus Road.
  
  Patrick White is an amazing writer. His books are unusual and individual, passages occasionally drift into stream of conciousness, which I love, and it is easy to identify with even the strangest of his characters. The Solid Mandala is now one of my favourite of his books.
  
  
• 
  Rue Baldry

  This is a quiet, slow-moving book which doesn't really contain any surprises, but I found it absorbing and convincingly written. There was some uncharacteristic melodrama towards the end, and a few passages in Waldo's chapter were repetitive and long-winded, but apart from those things it was a very good read. It's beautifully written. The characters, times and place are all conjured very completely and convincingly and subtly. It's a great study in perception and ageing and in how we are shaped by our unavoidable family connections and the roles they force us into. It's also a very good example of how to write a story covering a long time period in a non-chronological way without ever being confusing.
• 
  abhishek Chakraborty

  Full of symbols and 99.99% of 'Mandala motif'! Everything is so damn symbolic! Even the characters are outnumbered by the battery of symbols! This is not a great book, not at all and the worst part is not funny either. Nothing happens, nothing develops, except the symbols as the whole book in the end becomes a 'Mandala' Apparently Patrick White is not Samuel Beckett and so does when he aim for the theme of 'Nothingness', he misses it by miles and like other writers from pseudo-postcolonial genre White adds more mass to the postcolonial literature.
• 
  Jack

  A very fulfulling read if you have the luxury of a prof / tutorial full of studious types to steer you in the right direction.
  
  My fav bit of half remembered text, a 1950s housewife agrees to be horrified at an outrage:
  
  "Yairs," said Doris, then, for never let it be said that Doris had nothing to contribute on such topics, "Yairs."
  
  [Doris may not have been the character's actual name. But you get the picture.]
• 
  Trina

  This book is a rather hard slog. White's prose is tightly related to poetry in places and makes interpretation a task to be done. It is entirely poignant, insightful, and meaningful, but it is not easy and it is anything but fast moving. I'm glad to have read it but will not be rushing to read any of his other works.
• 
  mimo

  There's a lot about mysticism and about Australian suburbia that I can just tell is flying over my head.
  
  I'll admit I'm a little disappointed the prose isn't as gorgeous as that in The Aunt's Story. I can however appreciate the formal intricacies: retelling the story from Arthur's point of view after Waldo's, bookending with Mrs Poulter.
• 
  Cheryl

  I found this an extremely difficult book to get into and to follow. White focuses much more on psychology and the minds of people than on telling a story, and that made it very difficult to follow so much of the time.
• 
  Tango

  This was a hard read. The characters were not very likeable, but flawed and human, and their relationships were strange. I found parts of this quite confusing. Although the writing was good this was not my favourite White novel.
• 
  Gregory

  Not my favorite Patrick While novel by a long shot. All the characters seems so paralyzed by their relationships and by what they are coveting within their hearts. Twin brothers with opposing characters but whom share a bed together their entire lives. Codependency at its worst.
• 
  Nerissa

  OK, but i won't be rushing to read another Patrick White book.
• 
  Keryn

  I became more interested in this novel the more I read. Arthur is certainly an intriguing character.
• 
  George

  
  
  A well written novel. I found the characters not very interesting and quite sad individuals. I certainly prefer The Tree of Man, The Vivisector and Riders in the Chariot.