Age in year of publication: forty-two.
Patrick White 1912–1990
1961 Riders in the Chariot
A Jewish refugee scholar, Himmelfarb, the half-caste painter Alf Dubbo, a washerwoman from the English Fens, Ruth Godbold, and the spinster and innocent Miss Hare, alone in the abandoned wilderness of the mansion Xanadu, are Patrick White’s riders. Their stories become a study of love and hate, of good and evil; evil as epitomized by the Holocaust, but also the persecution everywhere of those who see a vision by those who don’t, of the publicly weak by the publicly strong. This is the most compassionate and the most beautiful of all Patrick White’s works; colours fly everywhere; his words, comic, ecstatic, are like the brushstrokes on a canvas by Nolan or Blake.
Each rider is a creator and misfit — outcasts all. Circling them, in contest, are the citizens of Sarsaparilla, Patrick White’s mythic Australian suburban town. Patrick White’s account of the Holocaust is an epic achievement; but Himmelfarb’s experiences are balanced by portraits of the female harridans of Sarsaparilla which are acute and farcical — a fierce battalion of Barry Humphries’ Edna Everages, taking the Holocaust from European isolation into neighbourhood life. Patrick White tells us in Riders in the Chariot ‘that all faiths … are in fact one’ — and so the greatness of the novel also rests on the fact that it remains thunderously relevant.
Patrick White, born in London of Australian parents, divided his time between England and Australia until 1948 when he settled in Sydney. Awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature, his other major novels include The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957) and The Twyborn Affair (1979).
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Jeanette Winterson 1959–
1985 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
There is something effortless about this novel; the tone is a mixture of almost innocent wonder at how richly strange things are and shrewd memories and sour observations. The narrator is both knowing and unknowing, and the play between the two makes the novel absorbing and fascinating.
Our heroine has been adopted by a most religious lady, and, it should be said, a most neurotic one, in the North of England. Prayer-meetings, stirring sermons and Bible-readings fill her childhood, as well as strange urges (and a fortune teller) which lead her to believe that she will never marry. Odd fairy tales are spliced into the narrative, which helps give this story of a charmed young girl a mythic quality. Everyone around her intrigues her, puzzles her and amuses her. She goes deaf, and the people in church think that she is full of the spirit. She goes to school, but fails to fit in, and the description of the failure contains some classic comic writing. She works in an undertaker’s. She then falls in love with her friend Melanie, much to the horror of the church. She suffers from a mixture of religious fervour and lesbian passion: it is clear that one of them will have to give. She cannot go on preaching by day and doing the other by night, although she sees no reason why not. And it is this seeing no reason, this pure (or impure) determination, that lends great drama to the narrative and makes this book fresh and original, one of the best English novels since the war.
Jeanette Winterson was born in Lancashire and now lives in Gloucestershire. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won the Whitbread First Novel Prize. Her other novels include The Passion (1987), Lighthousekeeping (2004) and The Stone Gods (2007).
Age in year of publication: twenty-six.
Tim Winton 1960–
1991 Cloudstreet
Cloudstreet is an Australian novel remarkable for its sense of the country, for the atmosphere of the streets and houses, the weather, the aboriginal people who are the ghosts in every city, and their companions at the bottom of the heap, the ordinary Australian women and men who live on the cities’ fringes.
Two families, the hardworking, God-fearing Lambs and the drinking and gambling Pickles, escape their diverse rural catastrophes and end up in Cloudstreet, making do, but uneasy in the midst of the city. With their children they settle into one of those vast ramshackle houses which have a life of their own, furnished with a pig outside that sings its head off ‘like a bacon choir’.
Winton has an excellent ear for the words and phrases Australians use. The Lambs and Pickles argue, fight and pass the time of day in an Australian idiom which is inventive, amusing and pithy, a perfect match for Winton’s natural skill at giving voice to the dreams and myths buried in everyday affairs.
Using sentiment with an exhilarating energy Winton carries each Pickle and each Lamb to magical or prosaic conclusions. It is rare to find a novel which so successfully combines family observation with unsugary charm and such easygoing cleverness, stirred into the entertainment and laughter of the people in the street.
Tim Winton was born in Perth, and lives near there, in Western Australia. His novels include That Eye, The Sky (1986), Shallows (1984), Cloudstreet (1990), The Riders (1994), Dirt Music (2002) and Breath (2008). He is also the author of a collection of stories, The Turning (2005). Shallows, Cloudstreet and Dirt Music all won the Miles Franklin Award.
Age in year of publication: thirty-one.
P. G. Wodehouse 1881–1975
1960 Jeeves in the Offing
(US: How Right You Are, Jeeves)
Jeeves is about to go on holiday (to Herne Bay for the shrimping), and Aunt Dahlia has invited our hero Bertie Wooster to her country seat at Brinkley Court, Market Snodsbury, near Droitwich, where Roberta Wickham, ‘the red-haired menace’, will be in residence, not to speak of Bertie’s former headmaster Aubrey Upjohn MA and his daughter Phyllis, and, to thicken the plot, Adela Cream, the mystery writer, and her son Willy. Very soon all is not welclass="underline" Roberta has announced her engagement to Bertie in The Times so that her mother, who hates Bertie, will not object to her attachment to Bertie’s friend ‘Kipper’ Herring. ‘Kipper’, in turn, has written a vicious review of Upjohn’s new book, he also being a former pupil of Upjohn.
Is Willy Cream mad? Should Phyllis become engaged to him? Aunt Dahlia has cleverly lured Sir Roderick Glossop, the brain surgeon, to pretend he is her butler Swordfish and thus observe young Cream. ‘Kipper’, in the meantime, is invited to distract Phyllis. He is in love with Roberta but enraged by her ad in The Times. Ma Cream, the mystery writer, is snooping around. Upjohn is suing the reviewer of his book for libel. ‘Kipper’ will be ruined. Where is Aunt Dahlia’s husband’s eighteenth-century silver cowcreamer? Luckily for everybody, Jeeves, who has been reading Spinoza’s Ethics, returns from his holiday, and the day is saved. The writing, as always, is sharply comic, and the plotting is as elaborate as ever. This is vintage Wodehouse.
P. G. Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey. He lived in Berlin for several years and eventually settled in the USA. He wrote vast numbers of books, including the Blandings series of novels, and the series of books about Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.