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Title: The Hanging Garden
Author: Patrick White
Narrator: Humphrey Bower
Format: Unabridged
Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
Language: English
Release date: 12-16-16
Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
Two children negotiate the dangers of life as World War Two evacuees in this unfinished novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Patrick White.
Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy's mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison. In wartime Australia, these two children form an extraordinary bond as they negotiate the dangers of life as strangers abandoned on the far side of the world.
With the tenderness and rigour of an old, wise novelist, Patrick White explores the world of these children, the city of his childhood and the experience of war. The Hanging Garden ends as the news reaches Sydney of victory in Europe, and the children face their inevitable separation.
White put the novel aside at this point and how he planned to finish the work remains a mystery. But at his death he left behind a masterpiece in the making.
Critic Reviews:
"[A] coherent and polished read, shrewd and tender about its two protagonists.... Arresting." (The Spectator)
"What is instantly apparent is White's mastery of his art. He does what so many other writers ought to be able to do easily but often can't, which is set a scene economically and vividly." (The Herald)
"It is frustrating and tantalising that The Hanging Garden is left, well, hanging." (The Sunday Times)
Members Reviews:
One Star
I found the story a little boring and disjointed at times.
White Makes Right
Only a fragment, this is still a splendid story which, for those who know Sydney, conveys the tang of that very special place and its people. The seedy house, the feral garden behind it, the cliff overlooking the harbour upon which it sits, and the cubby ('tree-')house built in the branches of a huge moreton bay fig rooted at the rock face. But, like all Patrick White novels, it is a profoundly interior experience as well, not of one but two children brought for safety during the second war. Narrative, thought, dialogue converge in the heads, memories, lives, and dreams of each character. Not just the adults who revolve around them, but the wise children themselves, growing into awareness from exotic to australian, outcast to included, and from sexually polymorphous to sexually experienced, with each other and with those of all ages into whose ambit their lives put them. Also, like all Patrick White novels, this story begins at the start of a life and ends at its finish, but in the case of each child it is a life within a life, begun effectively as displaced nostalgic, and ending at a point of assimilation (by VE day) with a new Australian place as a new person with unspoken understanding that no matter what expectation may have been held upon arrival, and cherished over the years, there is now no going back. One amazon reviewer wrote that nothing happens in this book. Well, only if war, death, fight, flight, prostitution, nymphomania, orgasm, alcoholism, voyeurism, addiction, cancer, rape and near rape, sibling and marital conflicts are all nothing. All are present in unique language bewildering at first and then amazingly compact once awareness comes.
