13 DECEMBER 1957, Page 28

New Novels

Voss. By Patrick White. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 16s.) AFTER gazing at Sidney Nolan's magnificent wrapper for Patrick White's novel Voss, and reading in the blurb that the story concerns an attempt in 1845 to cross the Australian continent and that Mr. White's previous book, The Tree of Man, was compared to Tolstoy and Lawrence by distinguished critics, one begins to hope: will this be the Australian novel, a prose interpretation of the rugged story behind the Nolan 'explorer' pic- tures? In fact, the book attempts to be more than this and fails, I think, to be as much. It is written in a surprisingly mannered style, at times subtly expressive but often too consciously sophisticated; it is very long, and the ambitious, unwieldy con- struction conceals a tough professional compe- tence which ensures its readability on the simple narrative plane. But it is no straightforward historical-adventure saga; Mr. White is trying to create an Australian myth, and he loads his characters with allegorical significance, imposing it on them instead of discovering it in them. When he descends from the mystical-philosophical heights where an Ahab or a Prospero may breathe, he is forced to fall back on pastiche, for realism has been left too far behind.

Voss, the German explorer, wants to prove that he is God; that is the purpose of his expedition, on which he is accompanied by eight men, two of whom are aboriginals. Their suicidal journey is a test of more than physical'endurance; the shift- ing relationships' of the explorers, the changing significance of the figure of the leader for each of them, are examined with fascinating complexity. The hostile country itself and the equivocal natives they encounter there are treated with an oddly formal simplicity, as if in a primitive pic- ture; emphasis is laid, probably with intention, on their spiritual development rather than on their physical experiences, so that the unspeakable hardships they sustain, although described in detail, are only faintly realised for the reader. Alternate chapters return to the conventionally bourgeois household of one of Voss's backers, with whose niece he has achieved, on slight acquaintance, a mystical union. She is the spiritual witness, interpreter and participant of the great drama between man, God and nature which Voss is supposed to personify; she survives to see it distorted and established as legend. This girl is an extraordinary character, a Victorian saint reminiscent of the young Florence Nightingale; to create her, the author has had to borrow and invent, and he does not entirely succeed. Sydney gentility is observed with the same unrelaxed intensity as the dangerous' splendour of the bush, and in these chapters he is guilty of over-writing. The final impression made by this book, remark- able for its grand design and intricate detail, is that Mr. White has fabricated a myth for his country instead of re-creating a true one, burying the immediate passion of the pioneer beneath a pretentious symbolism that has been added later. It is too literary, too talented perhaps, to be com- pletely genuine.

On a much less ambitious level, Jan de Hartog's short novel The Lost Sea is a complete success. This is a romantic boy's adventure story treated with adult sophistication, about competitive fish- ing boats on the Zuyder Zee and an orphan's escapade as 'sea-mouse' with the fabulous Black Skipper. It is written on three planes : as it actually happened, as the imaginative child interpreted it, and as he later recalls it, nostalgically fusing legend with fact. Whimsy is avoided (in spite of an interpolated mermaid story); so is heartiness, for the brutal joviality of the fishermen has almost the sinister quality of Breugher grotesques. Senti- mentality, a necessary ingredient, is rationed and the total effect is nearer to Kipling and Stevenson than to the recent, spurious exploiters of this genre—Paul Gallico and David Walker, for example.

The latest 'straight' Simenon to be translated, The Stowaway, is not one of his best; the writing tends to be slack and the mannerisms obtru- sive. The background, Tahiti, is established in the familiar manner by an insistent, selective, claustrophobic use of detail, and emerges as vividly two-dimensional as a poster; the plot is routine. Yet, of course, one reads on, absorbed, to the end; the mechanism of his technique may be exposed by use and even creak a little, but it still