| Title | : | The Tree of Man |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0099324512 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780099324515 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 480 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1955 |
| Awards | : | Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (1955), ALS Gold Medal (1955) |
The Tree of Man Reviews
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Patrick White’s style is a unique blend of roughness and literacy that can become quite absorbing, mesmerizing even, for its timelessness. The minor details of ordinary lives fuse with poetic vision and transform the common experience of man into the absolute essence that holds the power to make tangible the sheer mystery of existence.
The desolation of the Australian bush, with all its mythology and folklore, acquires an abstract dimension seen through the eyes of the Parkers.
Stan and Amy Parker build a farm and a family, not sure of their motivations but with steady hand, as they wonder whether the growing familiarity of their routines might be described as happiness.
The intense relationship between husband and wife, and its constant ebb and flow throughout the years, serves as the common thread to conduct this story full of delicate moments suspended in time.
The sound of tree leaves dancing at the tune of autumnal breeze.
The feeling of burying one’s hand in the fertile soil of a prosperous land.
The sweet smell of a room when there is a newborn baby.
The fear of losing a dear child, replaced by an unrecognizable man.
The irresistible pull of two souls meeting amidst the flames in a staircase on fire.
The lush of a hungry body screaming out shamelessly when it should have been contented with chaste affection.
The revelation of clasping a gaunt hand that has lost the warmth of life pulsating in it.
Decades go by, and the Parkers witness landscapes change, eroded by the inclemencies of weather, neighbors come and go, children grow up into strangers who disappoint, while their individualities remain still, intact, anchored to the early memories of fresh expectations, every soul an island afloat in the ocean of time and chance.
In White’s world, life is presented as this continuous flow of entangled facts and emotions that defies all plans and expectations, but at the same time he reveals that life’s innermost best-kept secret resides in the simplicity of things. The rugged bark of a silver poplar tree, a blank notebook, a silver nutmeg grater, a piece of broken glass. A pale boy.
All of them, traces of infinity. And life… a poem that never ends.
“There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ‘twas the Roman, now ‘tis I.”
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble by A. E. Housman -
“Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?
And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Ecclesiastes 4:11-12
This is the law humans abide by since the ancient time…
The Tree of Man is a life story of unrefined, down-to-earth people, a profound tale about the salt of the earth.The clearing was wide open. The two people and their important activities could not have been more exposed. About that importance there was no doubt, for the one had become two. The one was enriched. Their paths crossed, and diverged, and met, and knotted. Their voices spoke to each other across gulfs. Their mystery of purpose had found the solution to the mystery of silence.
Patrick White is a very subtle psychologist and he knows every little corner of human soul. The world is modern but primordial instincts and fears still rule human being…There would be thunder later that day. The sweat stood out above her lip. Already leaves moved in a little breeze. Clouds were swelling in the right direction. She pricked her finger in anticipation of some event, sucked it, rolled the socks into a nervous ball. All this time the big clouds, moving and swelling, pushed and shouldered each other. The little and, at first, subtle breeze became moister and more blatantly vicious. It was lifting the corners of things. The woman in the house got up and closed a door, in an attempt to secure for herself an illusion of safety, if only an illusion. Because the black clouds were bursting on her head. And the grey wool of torn clouds that the wind dragged across the sky raced quicker than her blood and began to rouse the terror in her.
And man boldly stands against thunderstorm, flood and fire… And bravely fights elements: earth, water, air and fire… And fights wars…When the years of mud and metal were over, Stan Parker would seldom talk about them. He would not be coaxed into telling the interminable boys’ adventure stories, as some men will after wars, for chaos was not his opportunity. At the height of violence, when even the seasons had been destroyed, his functions appeared to have gone from him, who had been happiest looking at the sky for signs of nature, listening to oats fall, picking up a wet calf that had just dropped from the womb, and showing it that its legs worked.
No one’s life is an idyll… But we keep walking down the Avenue of Hope and behind us there is the Memory Lane. -
One cannot fault this skillfully executed book. It has all the right ingredients: an excellent writing style that a friend stated “I feel I would only scratch the surface with Patrick White” and I certainly go along with that. He also said, “He sometimes reminds me of Virginia Woolf, when he veers off into a stream of consciousness.” Hundred per cent correct. I cannot disagree with that either.
Initially, this work would appear to be the “simple” story of a man called Stan Parker who receives an inheritance and goes to live in the Australian outback, the earlier frontier, “and what has developed into the township of Durilgai transforms into an outer suburb of Sydney”; taking his red dog along for company; a man who marries Amy, lives with the strains and confines that can come with marriage and a long intimate relationship; has children, grandchildren, lives and dies. He’s a survivor too regardless of what situation he comes up against; a trait that I’ve always admired in individuals. And in addition I was “fired with enthusiasm” by having read the best review that I’ve ever come across on Goodreads.
The book flows with exquisite gems, and I could so easily include pages of the elegantly written, but simple and often poignant passages contained within it. The one thing that did strike me as different though were the odd turns of phrase, such as “read the lines in his face” when Amy was looking at her husband.
Whatever book I’ve read, there’s always a section that stays with me, and in this case it just reminded me of myself:
“ ‘All those letters we wrote, he said, ‘we shall be rid of all that. It’s a waste of time. But what can you do?”
I have them,” she said, picking at the cloth. ‘I like them’.
‘It doesn’t do to keep old letters, he said. ‘It’s morbid. You start reading back, and forget that you have moved on. Mother was great one for that. She had a drawerful of old letters. They had changed colour.’
I often wondered about Amy. I can see why a man would go and live in the outback but this particular girl, as she was at the time, seemed to be lacking in substance to be able to do that. She didn’t appear to be up for the challenge and yet she seemed to gain more confidence later in the book:
For example, Amy wanted a change of scene; she was bored with her daily existence and wanted a change by going on a picnic:
“So the days swelled, and rose out of each other, and were folded under, and her idea of the picnic became a silly whim, then a cause of resentment, that she hadn’t the will to achieve it, or achieve anything much. Resentment bred.”
And the essence of the book surely has to be in the following?
“In the end there are the trees……….And his poem mounted in him he could not bear it, or rather, what was still his impotence. And after a bit, not knowing what else to do but scribble on the already scribbled trees, he went back to the house in which his grandfather had died, taking with him his greatness, which was still a secret.”
However, after everything I’ve said, it didn’t “touch my heart strings” and will not remain in that hidden area of my mind where I know I can always reach out to search for the special parts of my favourite books. To also know that I can go and browse through them ad infinitum and get the same continuing pleasure. Perhaps I will revisit this book at some future time as I may have come across it at the wrong stage in my life?
I still, however, highly recommend it for its depressing-brilliance. -
The best thing about this book is the amazing way the author can conjure up the feel of the Australian outback in words. Not only that but he takes the reader back in time to when settlers were opening up new areas of the countryside and starting to develop the towns we know today. I enjoyed the way the story progressed slowly and steadily with just the small excitements of a quite normal life. Occasionally I found Amy a little annoying and I was irritated by the authors use of 'the man' and 'the woman' instead of using their names. There is probably some good literary reason why he did this but it escaped me. This is my first book by
Patrick White and I can understand now why he is held up as a major writer. I am very glad I read it. -
After many years of good intentions I have finally read a novel by that renowned Australian literary curmudgeon, Patrick White. My 1973 edition of The Tree of Man was given to me by a good friend, who once read out a paragraph to me during a visit on a searing hot summers day. I was captivated by White’s lyrical phrasing and his portrayal of the Australian experience, all from one paragraph. Patrick White is considered to be one of Australia’s great writers and one of the significant writers of twentieth century literature. The Tree of Man certainly presents a convincing case for literary genius, however it also caused me to wonder about White’s relevance in modern Australia.
The Tree of Man traces the life of Stan Parker who, along with his wife, Amy Parker, settle on a patch of land close to Sydney in the first few years of the twentieth century. One could say that it is a family saga, yet without the melodrama that usually inhabits such narratives, thanks largely to White’s modernist style. White’s style isn’t exactly the stream of consciousness of the modernists, rather he colours the narrative with the characters subjective thoughts and feelings; creating a kind of allusive narrative impressionism that imbues the mundane aspects of Stan and Amy’s everyday lives with a very Australian mysticism.
White’s dense modernist style makes the novel a reasonable challenge to read, but one that is well worth pursuing. The novel has strong existential themes which are explored through the lives of Stan and Amy, as they tend to their dairy farm, have children and deal with the vicissitudes of life. Their lives are made profound against the background of the elemental Australian landscape, yet White also tears away their certainty, referring to them as “ant man” and “ant woman,” reminding us that the control humans have over our destinies is limited; rendering us merely a small part of a far greater capricious whole. Within this existential context Amy and Stan live, like Adam and Eve, in their bush eden and create their own world. The isolation of their lives, with initially few neighbors in the semi wilderness area, gives an impression of what it was like for the first settlers in Australia. There are floods, bush-fires and thunderstorms that threaten their tenuous existence. Yet despite the challenges they preserver and remain together throughout their lives on the land, representing a triumph of will against a backdrop of uncertainty.
The Tree of Man brilliantly portrays the cycles of life, taking Stan and Amy through youth and into middle age. White deals with the psychology of these changes subtly, through their relationships with their son and daughter and the land they live on. Stan and Amy’s relationship evolves through the struggle to understand each other, with Amy often pondering whether she’ll ever really “see into” Stan. As the novel takes them into old age they struggle to understand death and God. White uses old age as a litmus test for the concept of God, or the Christian God at least. Stan is perplexed, whilst Amy takes to the idea more readily. Stan sees God in a gob of spit he produces whilst he is being harassed by a born again evangelist and suddenly his life makes sense, but not the kind of sense that Christianity so earnestly tries to provide.
The last short chapter, only two pages long, beautifully sums up the themes of The Tree of Man and is one of the greatest I’ve ever read. Stan’s grandchild lingers in a wooded gully thinking about his grandfather’s life, feeling helpless and unformed. He decides to write a poem “of life”, a notion that overwhelms him. After a long intense novel filled with White’s allusive, poetic style (poetic realism, I thought to myself over a cup of tea) White is hinting that life itself is poetry; that each person writes their own poetry with their lives and that the essence of a life provides its own meaning, one that is separate to God and religion.
Although White is rightly considered to be one of literature’s greats, I realised that his writing is deeply unfashionable, in Australia at least. Looking around online I found that I wasn’t the only one to come to this conclusion. I mostly agree with the perception that White’s modernist style dates his writing, that it is perhaps too dark for most and that the fact that he was Australian makes him peripheral on the world stage. However the notion that ignoring his work has become a bad habit that persists is the most persuasive, and this was certainly true in my case. I ignored White for far too long, so I‘ll end by advising others to not perpetuate this trend, do yourself a literary favour and read Patrick White.
From my blog:
http://excelsiorforever.blogspot.com.au/ -
So. Here's the thing; how do you review the book that you consider may be *the* book? You know, the one that encapsulates your whole philosophical, spiritual, intellectual outlook on life? Whatever you end up saying about it will ruin the experience for anyone else. If you build high expectations then, of course, other people won't share those with you, or you will be overplaying it, or they will have a different outlook on life and all things 'spiritual' and therefore hate everything about it. Conundrum!?
I get Patrick White in a way that confounds me. I don't always know the why and how of it, but I get it. I get HIM. (Is it a shared queer thing?) His language fairly SHOUTS at me from the page. I am overwhelmed by the beauty of his lyrical constructions, his sentences, his wordy juxtapositions, his f@cking with grammar, the beauty, the power of it all. And I don't want to be just 'another one of those Aus Lit majors' with their head so far up their own arse that they fawn over PW because it is seen as 'the right thing to do.' I can't help it. Every novel of his I read, I love him a little bit more. After reading the sensational David Marr biography, I love him a little bit more. I love that PW was a grumpy, bitchy queen. More than that there is something in his spiritual outlook that resonates strongly with me. (And it can be found in the beautiful work of David Malouf and also in Randolph Stowe. Two other brilliant Aussie writers who are/were also gay. Is this a theme? Am I blindsided by my sexuality? I hope not, I don't think so. Is it a specifically Australian thing? A way of relating to land, to the interiority? To landscape, to uncertainty, to rejection, isolation, the unhinging space of the continent?)
This novel is the novel of life. On one hand it tells the story of Stan and Amy Parker, their life in the bush, a bush that, by the end of the novel, becomes an outer Sydney suburb. It is the story of nation building, it is a very white story and there is little in it that addresses other inhabitants of the land, and there is something to be said about that, and about that exact issue in PW's oeuvre, but that is to be said elsewhere. On the other hand it is story about yearning, about trying to find our own truths, about where they may be hidden, about the struggle of life. It has everything. And as the novel reaches the end, as the deaths pile up and the cycle goes on, he closes the novel with the most fitting sentence. Read the work. Get to the end... -
Epitome of early Australian life in the outback. The struggles against the elements and environment for daily survival. A lovely read for anyone who wishes to gain insight and understand Australian pioneering roots.
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Patrick White was an Australian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. My friend and I of the newly formed Literary Snobs reading group picked this book for our first meeting. Not many people write like this anymore. His prose is highly literary, filled with poetical passages and lyrical descriptions of place, weather, and characters.
The Tree of Man follows the life of one man in almost completely chronological order from childhood to death. All along the way, the author adds in pithy moments of truth about human life delivered both from the main characters' points of view as well as from his close third person narration. The pace is generally as leisurely as a sunrise or sunset in the Australian outback but there are occasional spurts of action which ramp up the reader's speed of turning the pages.
Stan Parker is a loner who had inherited a piece of land in the undeveloped hills outside of Sydney. The book opens as he arrives on the land at about the age of twenty. Sixty years or so later when he dies his humble home is one of the last original structures still standing in what has become the suburbs of Sydney. He had picked up an orphan from the nearest town and married her. Amy is another type of loner but together they evolved a love that brought them through parenthood and plenty of disappointments. They do not come through unscathed yet somehow maintain a tenacious grip on life through stoicism, continuous grueling hard work on their dairy farm, and a rather twitchy sort of loyalty to each other.
In any life, the majority of days and nights comprise a tedious, boring repetitiveness enlivened by the usual momentous events, such as falling in love, births, extreme weather, wars, betrayals, and deaths. Thus, reading this book for me was not unlike living, though I have not experienced a pioneer life of backbreaking labor.
Life also contains periods of emotional and psychological upheaval that bring to the forefront the dark side of any personality. When Stan and particularly Amy experience such periods the writing plumbs that darkness with an unflinching gaze. At those points in the novel, I felt like Joyce Carol Oates had grabbed the pen.
It was a mixed reading experience made up of wonder, tedium, and moments of personal enlightenment. I am fairly eclectic and embracive in my reading so I let Patrick White determine my reading speed and my emotional balance for the many hours spent with his book. I will say that not once did I not believe him. In the next to last chapter, when Stan dies, I felt Amy's feelings. You expect death, you are powerless before it, and yet life goes on if not much longer in yourself, then in your offspring.
If his other novels are anything like this then he deserved his prize. The banality of human life is everywhere around us and he was able to describe that as well as clothe it with the beautiful and poetic essence that gets us through. -
I read this book very slowly. I wanted to take in its environment and atmosphere. I loved
Riders in the Chariot and now my Aussie roots have deepened into the soil of 'The Tree of Man'. I will miss my mornings with the Parkers. -
Contains truth, beauty and genius. Off-the-charts great writing lifts unprepossessing subject matter into the realm of pure art. Explores how each of us remains essentially alone, but indelibly connected. Will invigorate the reader and inspire the writer.
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9/10
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A poetic tribute to man and nature. The Tree of Man succeeds in capturing the opening of the frontier in Australia. It is reminiscent of O. E. Rolvaag or Conrad Richter who did the same for the American frontier. The story is a universal one, even so White succeeds in creating individual characters, particularly Stan Parker, for whom you develop feeling. He succeeds in demonstrating basic human values and the inherent drama of life in the raw. That combined with the poetic descriptions of nature gave the characters life. In the case of Stan Parker, who throughout his life span was inarticulate, awkward, and sensitive, his stoicism was impressive. Amy, the orphan girl he took as his wife, was a frustrated lusty woman he has made her, yet I found something appealing in her despite her yearnings and ultimate fall; the neighbors, except for the dissolute Irish O'Dowds, and the Quigleys,- Bub who was a child all his life, and his protective sister Doll, who killed him to save him the danger of being left, alone,- provide a convincing background -- a sort of Greek chorus.
The events move slowly across the stage, against flood and fire and drought, against poverty, relative security and disintegration. The outside world intrudes with war, but the center of the community is underscored by the strength of nature. Here is an example of the author's poetic limning of nature's rainstorm:
"The lightning, which could have struck open basalt, had, it seemed, the power to open souls. . . As the rain sluiced his lands, and the fork of the lightning entered the crests of his trees. The darkness was full of wonder. . . Soon a new gentleness had crept into the rain, because the storm was passing. Sound become indistinguishable from sound. The drops were separate on the iron roof, the last cold gusts rubbed leaf on leaf." (p 151)
With the next generation growing up, the focus is on the Parker children who emerge as individuals:- Thelma, who marries above her station, and returns at intervals, to hover over her parents, but never really to share; Ray, whose story is not one of success. It is a beautiful saga of man and nature. A man, redeemed by compassion, living in the stark simplicity of the world around him, the only world that he knows. But, in the end the book returns again to nature, to the trees.
"In the end there are the trees. They still stand in the gully behind the house, on a piece of poor land that nobody wants to use. . . On still mornings after frost these stand streaming with light and moisture, the white and the ashen, and some the colour of flesh." (p 479)
It is a poem of life and people and their lives that remains in your memory after you close the last page. -
just wrapped up a long haul with this thing. whoah. felt like we went to war together. this was my first patrick white novel (know a few of his plays) and im afraid im going to have to rip in to the rest of the CATALOGUE now. probably VOSS next as thats his most renowned bind. this book is pretty simple in premise. a couple meet, get married and head out to the country to build a life. they make a home, struggle for a couple of kids, and do their best to provide and nourish inside and outside the place. but what white does so beautifully is examine the quiet violence in relationships. the million moments between sips of milky tea, the big dreams that never leave small kitchens, the yearning to connect and stay connected in long love. once or twice a page one has to stop and re-read the wisdom pw can make in a short, simple jabbing sentence about everydayness. this book is dense, depressing (arent all the good ones?) and lyrical. it speaks of good-old australia and its good-old values. but mostly it speaks of men and women and the land between us. 5 starts pat.
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Its difficult to write about the simple things in life. That is if you are not Patrick White. White in "The Tree Of Man" leads you on a journey of events that are somewhat ordinary from the outside. Meeting your future wife, taking her home in the bush to commence a new life together, all the time surrounded by a slowly developing community. Surrounded by change.
Yet as is often the case in White's novels it is the change from within that renders his stories outstanding. Stan Parker, an ordinary man from the outside, but a complex character from within.
For mine this novel is about life and change in its purest format. A novel that reflects on our relationships with ourselves, with those with whom we live, to those with whom we interact. A novel that brings us the story of an ordinary man, in an extraordinary manner. White delivers here in spades. For lovers of Australia, Australian history, indeed the simple things in life, real life that is, this book is a must read. -
A great character based novel about Stan and Amy Parker and their lives on a property in rural Australia in the 1930s to early 1950s. Stan inherits land and builds a rudimentary house, clears the land and establishes a farm on the property. Stan and Amy struggle against the environment, enduring a flood and bushfires. They live an isolated life, getting on with their distant neighbours, raising two children, Ray and Thelma.
This was a reread for me. I am a Patrick White fan, having read all his novels. If you have not read any Patrick White novels, then this is a good place to start.
Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and is the only Australian to be awarded the prize.
This book was first published in 1955. -
Unforgettable in its compassionate portrayal of a good man brought to his knees by marriage and fatherhood. Superb writing in a class of its own. why is Patrick White so out of fashion?
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Labai graži knyga. Žodžio meistras. Ir nieko čia daugiau nepridursi.
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I first read this book when I was eighteen and remember being astonished at the final page by the power of fiction. And then a few months ago I found a beautiful first edition in an Op Shop - a bit tatty but gorgeous fifties cover - and dared myself to read it all these years later. This isn't a book you can tear through. It's a bit like eating the very rich fruit cake. It took me three weeks to read - sometimes I made myself put the book down so I could digest the profound and beautiful writing. It's an account of Stan and Amy's lives who were part of the contingent of early white settlers of the Australian bush. To an outsider, their lives would appear small and confined but White insists we share their loneliness, their sufferings and to quote from Alice Munro - 'their radiant, vanishing consolations'. If I had to cull my book collection to the size of ten, The Tree of Man would be included.
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This is the story of Stan and Amy Parker who built the universe starting with Stan clearing some trees in the Australian bush. This is the best book I've read. The prose is stunning and intelligent. The characters are so real, complex, and alive that I feel like they are people I know. The story of their marriage, their children, life in what started as sparsely populated bush and grew to be the outskirts of a suburb, their neighbors and friends, the hardship and hearrtbreaks they endure is engaging and compelling. The setting in the Australian bush gives the story a feeling of starting as a Garden of Eden with the first man and the first woman who built a world with their sweat and care.
The brilliance of White is his ability to make the banal interactions of any two people in an intimate relationship seem profound and beautiful.
I have more of an awareness and appreciation for the simple dance of my daily routines with my partner now. -
This was on my reading list for Year 12 and it provided that ahha moment in the line he found god in a gobble of spit - with that line I suddenly saw how writing can take you to places, ideas and thoughts that I never thought possible ...
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Some books are like that. Within the first 5 pages (in this case 2 pages) you know you are in the presence of a master writer, someone that has something to say and knows how to say it. For me Patrick White is in there with
J.M. Coetzee,
José Saramago,
Vasily Grossman, etc etc. Personal choices on those authors will differ but most people will know that feeling.
This was PW’s fourth novel published the year I was born in 1955, well before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. His entry into a career of writing was eased somewhat by a wealthy background and he lived for much of his early life outside of Australia being schooled in England and attending Cambridge. He joined the RAF through WWII as an intelligence officer. Openly gay, this novel is dedicated to his lifelong partner Manoly Lascaris.
The book itself is almost too simple in plot and concerns the lives of the couple Stan and Amy Parker – the complete unfolding of their lives from Stan’s settling in the outback, forging out a homestead and farm, his marriage to Amy, their children and their thoughts and lives to their deaths. The beauty of the language, the sonorousness of the sentences, the use here and there of a particular and unexpected adjective, the deep at times rosy and earthy romanticism hides an elusive insight into the character of life and the harmonies and discords present in a long-term partnership between a man and a wife. It is easy to overlook some of the insights that PW brings within this book and you have to hold yourself back and realise the depth of what he is saying in certain passages. At times it feels direct, rough-and-ready, like Parker himself – laying itself out to show that yes, ‘this is what it is; this is what it all amounts to’.
We see Parker initially as the ‘blank’ man – Prelapsarian almost – unformed – a kind of profane Adam forging out what amounts to his own Garden of Eden, his own Destiny, master of his future as simple as he can make it. He marries because he can. There is a mystery to Stan. He never appears to seek for the deeper ‘beyond’. If he tries then it is beyond him. It is as if he knows that it is there but he does not have the map of the way and what he has seen of the way suggests that it is tough and formidable and without reward. So he is to a degree inbound and elusive as shown both in his relationship with Amy and his children and his search for a god. Whether he truly believes we are not sure but he will attend the rituals of belief fully in the hope of enlightenment. And Amy too embarks on marriage to Stan in the same manner. Unformed yet knowing something and ready to know more, ready to learn, a lack of pride but a certain sense of self-knowledge and the way of the simple world that they exist in. There is a deep romanticism in the beginning for the hard outback settler life facing adversity with grit and determination and winning against the elements whether they be fire or flood. And through this comes the unlooked for and almost unacknowledged love between a woman and a man. It is not a sickly sweet or simply rose-tinted romanticism. We are given to know the hardness of their life and the harshness of the environment but by force of will they overcome this. The act of togetherness along with their almost grudging acceptance of the Church and belief along with the existentialism of themselves alone brings them both each to himself and herself. It is not lust, but acceptance and familiarity and through that, a love of partnership.
It is interesting to read White’s own reminiscences of writing the book.“I wanted to suggest in this book every possible aspect of life, through the lives of an ordinary man and woman. But at the same time, I wanted to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of such people, and incidentally my own life since my return”
This he does by illuminating what happens through ordinary life, how adversity is overcome. In the description of the flood he becomes colloquial. He loses any distance through the writing putting us right in with the parishioners. We experience the flood through their eyes via White’s writing. The forces of life affect the people in the landscape but they themselves have little effect on anything. The signs of affection are slight. The processes are everyday.In all that district the names of things were not so very important. One lived. Almost no one questioned the purpose of living. One was born. One lived. The strings of runny-nosed, black Irish children, and the sandier, scabbier Scotch that spilled out of the bush onto the thin tracks that struggled up to meet the greater roads, were soon becoming elongated youths and girls, that hung around, and avoided each other, and met, and locked hands magnetically and mingled their breath together on hot evenings. New patterns of life, of paddock and yard and orchard would be traced on the sides of the hills and gullies. But not yet. In time. In slow time too, of hot summer days.
White is truly canny in what he leads us towards with his juxtaposition of relationships. At the heart is the untold, unstated love between Stan and Amy, and against that is described the sterility of the lives and relationships of particularly Madeleine, set to be the local chatelaine and of Stan and Amy’s daughter Thelma, who is asthmatic (as White was himself as a youngster) and seems and sees herself as too precious, eventually marrying a city solicitor and rising above this rural backwater existence but with a marriage based on little. The contrast between the Parkers and between Thelma and Fosdyke and Madeleine and young Armstrong could not be starker. The novel could not in any way really be said to be about class but there are elements of class consciousness and depiction throughout it. Amy may have all the same self doubts and dissatisfactions as Madeleine but she has very little choice and is far too busy to have the luxury of choice. The fire which burns down the Armstrong’s demesne should be the leveller but against the parishioners the Armstrong’s and their class have the resources to rise again. White shows us the vanity of wealth in the face of natural disaster as well as showing the emptiness of depth of feeling within these nouveau riche – the glossy starlet impression against the animal sense of Stan Parker. Stan wants to be part of all men but he lacks the composure and he does not have it within him to be able to give it up, so that when the war comes he doesn’t know what to do at first whilst the blow-hards immediately enlist.
Stan does join up and the war scenes through the trenches and conflict of WWI are perhaps thinner other than in how the change between the Parkers catches them almost unawares. It is the “mysticism of evasion and self-destruction “ that Stan cannot verbalise and Amy cannot appreciate. Through this Amy becomes the only thing of certainty in his life that he has. White knows how to write pathos cinematographically. The helping hand Fritz realises that he must leave the district through the patriotism and jingoism of war fever, and the parting when Amy takes him to town is just full of emptiness and the depth of the unsaid. In fact this is a crucial part of White’s writing – the mystery of the unspoken, the unwritten, what we as readers are left to feel and imagine.
It is the world of a man’s man and a woman’s woman and each to their own world – pre-modern, things that would not / could not be accepted now. When Stan returns from the war he is even more avoidant than when he left. He does not actively push away but he clearly lets it be known that he does not want too close an approach. In fact he is deeply troubled by his experiences, close almost to breakdown but because Stan is who he is there is absolutely no possibility of that happening.
With the appearance of their children the novel takes another turn. Ray and Thelma despite that honesty and work ethic driven by their parents develop quite differently . Thelma becomes the ‘nice’ girl. Ray disappears searching for something, wanting it all but not wanting to work for it leading to petty villainy and his eventual death in a shooting in a bar brawl which he may or may not have brought on himself. Ray represents the chancer; Thelma the dilettante. The city becomes corrupt and the corruption, and by extension that it is not Ray or Thelma’s fault that they have turned out the way they have. Stan and Amy are the untrammelled countryside and the past. The city and corruption and descent are the future.
Stan becomes respected and part of the district, a name, neither rich nor ambitious but respectable and reliable. But at heart he is still a man assailed by doubt. By habit almost he falls out of really talking with his wife beyond the everyday. Do they fall apart? White shows them dealing with the measure of existence in the face of the everyday. Stan’s affection is still kind and habitual but it makes Amy feel fretful. She indulges in a short meaningless affair. It is the high point of this crisis of ‘ordinariness’ in her life of which she never felt as if she had any control over. And each of the Parker’s in their own sense of separation begin to find each other again as if recognising the need for each other by seeing that each of them simply has what the other needs. When Stan haphazardly becomes aware of the affair he goes AWOL, gets drunk and assaults a woman before realising what he is doing and returns to himself with a new sense of beyond which is never spoken about.’I have never known what to do,’ he said wincingly. ‘I am to blame. I try to find the answers, but I have not succeeded yet. I do not understand myself or other people. That is all.’
Habit comforted them, like warm drinks and slippers, and even went disguised as love.
White manages to juxtapose the ugly things which we would most like to forget about - the abattoirs against the polite villas, the garden full of roses against the decomposing smell of mildew and at the same time makes us realise that we can all forget in Amy’s desire to see only the good things, the best in her offspring. The bad things she knows are there are painted over in better colours than they really are. Even she, however gives up on Ray. She can accept the first grandchild born in wedlock of an uninspired marriage but cannot accept the second born to someone Ray turns to live with and she turns them away.
It is in the end about transcendence. Amy and Stan transcend the everyday as an experience in and of life. That transcendence leads to a love of each other beyond statement contrasted to the sterility of Thelma and Madeleine and the Armstrong’s. The new life, the future is not just or should not be just about the ease of new things, labour saving gadgets; that there is meaning and essence in the life of toil; that things and understanding – and love – have to be worked for. That it requires a sense of commitment beyond a statement of commitment but something that is visceral and almost unstated.
As death approaches as readers we begin to realise the motettes of insightful meaning within the framework of this narrative journey. The approach to death is not staring at the sun but is the quiet seeping away of Mrs O'Dowd despite the watchful eyes of all around her. Death in a fulfilled life is a passing moment and its importance diminishes in the fullness of the life well and fully lived. It is Amy’s garden – not pre-planned just a shrub dropped here and there, with the trees standing proud, which spread to be jungle-like proportions, but at the heart of which lies a clearing in which the old man sat at ease.
This is a very fine novel.
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A stunning, stunning book. I have never read anything quite like Patrick White. Tree of Man was a novel that encapsulated life itself; its highs, its lows, its moments of startling connection and heartbreaking betrayal, and sought to delve the depths of the human consciousness with the most success I have ever seen. A truly deserving Nobel, if I have ever seen one. An Australian Book of Genesis, speaking of something so simple as the life of a small family, but encompassing so much more than that.
Dense and beautiful prose with sentences that took my breath away. -
The simplicity of true grandeur found in tree transcends in the human being who live their life in the proximity of nature. The act of adultery by Amy, not only once by twice reflects that it is not impulsive but a deliberate act to overcome the boredom or an act of rebellion against a husband who had become unromantic. Their marriage was not a consequence of a decision, but an outcome of a certainty. They had a highly romantic honeymoon.
The writer says “the whole night had become a poem of moonlight…. Flesh is heroic by moonlight. The man took the body of the woman and taught it fearlessness.” Mystery and poetry of real life are revealed in an extraordinary within the ordinary. The Author has rationalized Amy’s act of adultery by concluding “Sometimes her simplicity would blaze electrically.”
Stan also makes a brief encounter with passion when he rescues Madeleine from fire. Flavor of the incident is romantic, but passions are sublimated by conviction and values. Moreover, simple deserves forgiveness. Madeline once admires the crude furniture in the house of Stan for it had reality.
For anything that is grand and simple, even the end is a new beginning. The grandson of Stan wants to write a poem of life, of what he did not know, but knew. So that in the end there were trees.
Read more at
http://vipinbeharigoyal.blogspot.in/2... -
This is literally the most perfectly written book I have ever read. The prose is entirely flawless and the imagery is so evocative it's sharp. you could cut yourself on one of Stan's countless axe swings. But when I put it down I felt...very little. The plodding, journeying pace of the prose is intentional, a metaphor for life in australia in the early 20th century, but intentional or not, and no matter how well written a book is (and again I must reiterate, this is perfect) storytelling is not a component that can be forgotten. The characters are far from caricatures, and both the experiences that shape them and the people they eventually become for these experiences are uncomfortably familiar. This is where White excels, especially when it comes to Stan and Amy. Two lives that never seem to touch, both yearning for something, from the very start to the end, lives underpinned by religion and the doomed pursuit of some meaning to their lives. But when it comes down to it, I just didn't care about what happened to them. Through the fires, storms and all of it, the monotonous perfection of the literature couldn't compensate for characters that although were lived in, never felt alive.
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Patrick White là một tác giả có phần khó đọc, không chỉ vì những ý tưởng và vấn đề độc đáo của ông mà có lẽ còn vì sự kết hợp khác thường giữa phẩm chất sử thi với phẩm chất thơ ca ở ông. Trong nghệ thuật tự sự lớn lao của mình ông sử dụng một ngôn ngữ cực kỳ súc tích, một nghệ thuật ngôn từ được chăm chút đến từng chi tiết và thường xuyên nhắm tới hiệu quả biểu đạt tối đa, ngày càng mãnh liệt không ngừng nghỉ hoặc thấu suốt một cách tinh tế. Ở đây cái đẹp và chân lý liên hợp với nhau khắng khít hoặc hoàn toàn hợp nhất vào nhau: một cái đẹp toát ra ánh sáng và sự sống, gợi nên chất thơ vốn có trong vạn vật, trong thiên nhiên và trong mọi hiện tượng, và một chân lý hiển lộ và giải phóng, mặc dù thoạt đầu cái chân lý đó có vẻ như phản cảm hay đáng sợ.
_trích Tuyên dương của Viện Hàn lâm Thụy Điển_ -
Phải rồi, đa cảm là nguồn gốc của lắm rắc rối nhưng đàn ông không có tính nữ thì không viết văn hay được, thế mà phụ nữ thì chẳng mấy ai vừa đủ tính nam để viết được hay.
Đoạn đầu khiến mường tượng một cuộc phiêu lưu cô độc nhưng say mê kiểu Lorca, hóa ra tất cả lại lún vào nội tâm, vào cái bí ẩn sâu kín của mỗi người, mà lại quá thơ thẩn, sau lại quá trần trụi. Mấy tác phẩm Nobel hoặc quá thơ thẩn, hoặc quá trần trụi, hoặc quá cả hai.
Bải hoải quá. -
i don't know how patrick white knows all the things he knows, but i keep finding myself looking at things in the world and thinking i do not know but someone does, and it is white. even if it's just the names of the trees and the birds. although there is definitely more. the inner-life of human beings, for instance, and the way music works inside of some of them - how does he guess at all that? or am i confusing the beauty of his sentences - the secrets of which i spent the whole time reading trying to uncover - with god itself? i don't know. but this is beautiful, and i can't help but thinking it's true.
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the part where a guy who killed himself is revealed to have secretly been an oil painter and a woman looks at the paintings and says 'so he was mad then' is the part where i became certain that patrick white really loathes australia
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The Tree of Man, first published in 1956, is the story of Stan Parker and his wife Amy, who married and settled on a rural property in New South Wales in the early part of the 20th century.
Stan Parker is a dour, practical man, whose verbal communications are limited, but who is steadfast and dependable.
Amy, his wife, adapts to a life of relative isolation and loneliness on the land, and does her best to provide useful support for her husband in tasks on the farm, as well as undertaking all of the expected domestic duties.
The story spans several decades, until death comes, and relates a series of events in the ordinary lives of these stoic pioneers.
There are the inevitable floods, droughts, bushfires and disasters associated with rural life, interspersed with periods of relative prosperity and harmony. The Parkers survive, but never really prosper as farmers.
Stan and Amy have two children; a son, Ray and a daughter, Thelma.
Ray is a disturbed child, with an inbuilt violence and meanness, who defies his mother's desperate attempts to love him, and his father's sporadic attempts to teach him. A restless individual, Ray leaves the family home and descends into a life of crime until he meets a violent and untimely death.
Thelma is somewhat ambivalent towards her parents, selfish and limited in her capacity for love and affection. She moves to the city to take a secretarial course and finds success in her job in a law firm. She ultimately makes a stable if loveless marriage to a solicitor, but remains a hollow and lonely woman.
In telling the tale of the Parkers, White delves into the nature of love and marriage, loneliness and friendship and the ordinariness of most people's existence. Juxtaposed with these ordinary external lives, White explores the internal and spiritual ruminations of Stan and Amy about the meaning of life, love and God.
Amy at one point concludes that she is at least fond of Stan and this, perhaps, is better than love.
The tone of the writing, although carefully crafted, is subdued and semi-formal. White never becomes intimate with or passionate about his characters.
The Tree of Man is a very fine example of classical Australian fiction by one of its most significant authors, in which the rural landscape of Australia is as important a character as Stan and Amy Parker.
