26 Fruits

The first exercise I ever devised for a writing workshop began with the question “What’s your favourite book?” The exercise remains absolutely fundamental to my workshops because I believe we need to read better if we are to write better. Often I’m asked what my favourite book might be and I usually reply The Great Gatsby. It is a wonderful book but it’s an answer given for convenience. People generally nod and understand whereas if I said my real favourite….

Now I have to name it. For a reason, it’s been forced on me by a piece of news. You might have seen that, forty years on, a shortlist of six novels has been published for the ‘lost’ Booker Prize of 1970. There was a mix-up at the time which meant that several months-worth of novels published that year were not even considered for the Booker. The chosen shortlist is a fine one: it includes Muriel Spark and Nina Bawden, and JG Farrell’s brilliant Troubles. It also includes my favourite book: The Vivisector by Patrick White.

Many of you will be asking Who? I’m used to that response even though Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. He was an Australian novelist and playwright, isolated geographically from the rest of the world, but isolated temperamentally too. He never sought fame. When he was offered it in the form of the Nobel Prize, he asked his friend, the painter Sydney Nolan, to collect it for him. And now the world seems to have shunned Patrick White as he once shunned the world. But we really should not. His novels are magnificent.

The prickliness of his own character comes through in his novels. All Patrick White’s characters are outsiders; they are outside society but inside life. He himself was uneasy as a social being. A gay man in a macho society, he had no affection for much of the life he observed around him. His characters become heroic simply by surviving, they have a life force that is the essence of humanity.

The books are now often described as unfashionable, perhaps because the characters have no small talk. They talk and small statements take on immense significance. Individual words have an enormous emotional charge. This gives each book a monumental, epic scale; they are big books, books of over-reaching ambition, but he despised life when it was lived meanly or pettily.

This made him an uncompromising character, and an uncompromising writer who made no concessions to popular taste. He championed the human instinct to survive against all the odds, while seeking and celebrating a majesty in that instinct. Sometimes the instinct showed itself as a single-minded obsession, sometimes as artistic creativity. Perhaps the character who embodies this most is Hurtle Duffield whose life story forms The Vivisector.

Hurtle rises above his human weaknesses through his own creativity. He is a painter (partly modelled on Sydney Nolan) and he expresses his feelings for the world through his paintings. There are extraordinary descriptions of those paintings, of the Australian landscape and of a gallery of strange, flawed characters. It’s a big book in every sense but when I first read it I couldn’t stop reading it, so powerful was its imaginative grip. I’ll be reading it again this summer.

It’s my favourite Patrick White book, perhaps because it was the first one I read. Since then I’ve read everything he wrote including his memoirs and letters. He was an obsessive man and he brought out an obsessiveness in me in a positive way. I’d say he was the greatest writer of the twentieth century, not just because of The Vivisector but also Riders in the Chariot, The Tree of Man, Voss, The Twyborn Affair, A Fringe of Leaves, The Eye of the Storm, The Solid Mandala…there are more. If you haven’t read any, I’d urge you to. We should all read big books not just easy-reads.

And I’ve voted for The Vivisector here http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1412. The public votes will decide the winner of the Lost Booker Prize of 1970.

But, that vote aside, what’s your favourite book?