My Best Books

Writing about books that were important to him, Patrick White once said that one seems to “go on living in them for ever, possibly because they give glimpses of a heartbreaking perfection one will never achieve”. Such was the case when, as a young aspiring novelist, I first read ‘Voss’ 50 years ago and watched its pages open like a vast geological fissure in the domesticated landscape of English fiction. Not that the book is perfect – its scale is too grand for that – and its terrain is Australian not English. But just as that continent’s early explorers found its native species so strange they hardly knew how to see them, so White’saccount of a venture to the deep interior of both land and soul speaks to dimensions of experience so rarely examined that he felt hardly anybody would “understand what I am on about”.