the hanging garden

The Hanging Garden by Patrick White (Picador, 2013)

White’s last, unfinished novel is an impressionistic rendering of the lives of two teenage refugees in Sydney during WWII.  The boy comes from London and the girl from Greece, where her Australian mother married a Greek.  They are taken in by the elderly Mrs. Bulpit, a woman at the end of her meager financial and physical resources, who cares for them lackadaisically at best in her cluttered villa, which features a  wild garden hanging above the harbor.  Gilbert and Eirene, left on their own, form a tentative friendship with erotic overtones, but when Mrs. Bulpit dies they are separated and unlikely to ever meet again.  White’s writing is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and brilliant in evoking both the interior and exterior worlds of the book in astounding three-dimensional detail.  His ability to depict the inner mind of a young girl is uncanny to the point of unnerving; there’s something organic — deeply organic; muddy, bloody — about this book.  White seems to see through everyone and everything, and so the world on the page is incandescent, and reading is a kind of rapturous experience.