20 Dec 2012 16:29:18
White was a natural gnostic – he believed people were divided between, on the one hand, those who know, and perceive the world with a tentative, costly but exacting sharpness and delicacy; and on the other, the mass of chancers and doltish worthies who seem to flourish in it. In White, the meek certainly don't inherit the earth, nor is the earth worthy of them. It is a fallen place in tune spiritually with the novel's Mr Belper, bank manager and unreliable financial prophet, and with Furlow, the pastoralist whom the acreages of Happy Valley have made rich and numb and mindless.
White's main characters, such as physician Dr Oliver Halliday, see the "aura round the figure of empirical reality". Happy Valley begins in a bitter landscape, where Halliday is attending a stillbirth; the atmospheric scene in a snowbound pub reeks not so much of the woman's pain as of the byre. Even grief is a blunt instrument in this torpid place. While giving an adrenalin injection to Happy Valley's asthmatic and tragic headmaster, Moriarty, Halliday thinks: "You began to feel you had made some onslaught on the battalions cased up in rock and Earth with which Happy Valley bludgeoned a hitherto feeble human opposition." Attending Alys Browne, the music teacher, Halliday drinks tea and listens to Chopin and Schumann and, above all, is able to converse with her elliptically, in the manner of stream-of-consciousness. For they can read each other beyond "the inarticulation of words".
Some of the other questing figures of the book move with obvious doom written on their foreheads – Sidney, the off-tune daughter of local grandees, and Moriarty the schoolteacher. For them as for Halliday, Happy Valley is harsh Australian upland, a netherworld. It is the essence of all that made White, throughout his life, doubly alienated, as a European soul in a philistine place, and as a homosexual in a wilderness of assertive heterosexuality. Happy Valley resembles the country that White rode across as a handsome young jackeroo, an unsalaried apprenticed drover. "A second Egypt," says Sidney Furlow of this land, "only not as full of allegory." When a murder occurs, it does so almost as a creation of the place. "Oliver Halliday saw from his window the desolate line of hills, jagged in the higher reaches, then falling to a slow curve, describing the course of a fever." Here one could "sense the tick, tick of the brain, visualise the shadow bending down that the hand resisted, passed through, became a scream or the fixed cavern of a mouth".
Let me rush to say that White's skill is to make these characters, anguished as they are, engrossing. The book has a refined trap of a plot, by which the venal are cast down and the noble thwarted in their escape attempts, and cast back on a different kind of nobility.
The novel stands up well in the high company of its later brethren. It prefigures the greatness to come, and is a more adventurously wrought than many of our own age. White is a mesmerising narrator whose prose illuminates the most ordinary object and event in new and gripping ways. The stream-of-consciousness passages sometimes seem a little striving, not as certain as in his later work. "Got to tell like a child that said nothing she made him feel when Aunt Jane and of those apples feeling sick was reversed he said this Alys a girl or child part of the convent got to tell was reversed … " But that's more an indication of daring than a flaw.
White writes of childhood very well in Happy Valley; its unanswerable bewilderment and its unthinking cruelties. Children don't play much part in the books that won him the Nobel prize, though, and it is interesting that in his last book, Hanging Garden, unfinished at his death, he returns to them. Hanging Garden (Jonathan Cape, £14,99) introduces us to two children brought to Sydney by the second world war, the boy an orphan of the blitz, the girl the daughter of an Australian mother and Greek father. The Sydney family of the girl's mother are divided about her having married a Greek who was also a red. The two children are attracted and held apart by their different experience of the world conflict. The prose is extremely direct, but with the usual White grace notes, and if he had not pitched the manuscript aside to attend to the revival of his plays, the book might have proven to be highly accessible and – something he would probably have despised – charming.
