Patrick White is without a doubt the greatest writer in the English language.
His books are not meant to be read just once, there is no way to understand the richness of his prose, the deep psychological insights and the gorgeousness of his images in one take. He is not a page-turning quick read, something to fill up empty time between airports; His writing is like a balm for the soul; a soothing, enriching life-affirming act of transcendence. sometimes I have read a single page two or three times because the beauty is too overwhelming to merely glance at- I have frequently put one of his books down and said aloud "God, he's a genius!"

The Hanging Garden is a rare insight into the unfinished world of his talent. His writing is usually so precise and organic, (like something produced by nature like a spider's web or plumage on a peacock) that to read something that has its frayed edges still visible is a real joy- It brings him into focus as someone most human-

I would not recommend that the uninitiated to start here; but for the completist it is a heartbreaking love story that will haunt you. ( )

Oh, my goodness, why was this book ever published? I don't care that the author is dead, not that he is a two time Miles Franklin winner as well as having won the Nobel Prize for Literature, this was a woeful read. At the halfway mark I finally gave up. It's not often that a book beats me, but trying to struggle through the second half was more than I could endure. Life is just too short!! The writing was all over the place, the characters totally depressing and the plot . . . what plot? Ugh! ( )

Patrick White is a two time Miles Franklin award winner and has also won the Nobel prize for literature. His unfinished novel The Hanging Garden was recently published; it feels like an old novel in the sense that, while it’s nicely written; nothing ever happens in the book. This is very much a character driven book, focusing on the two and a wild garden. I think I’d be alright with reading a book like this if I didn’t have the feeling that the author hated every single one of his characters; he was mean and cruel to them all, not just the key characters. As a general rule I love dark and flawed characters but this just felt mean and even the attempts of trying to being erotic felt awkward. I spent the whole book waiting for something to happen and I was left disappointed. Also as this is an unfinished novel, I don’t know what the overall goal was with this book and I get the feeling that maybe Patrick White doesn’t either.

My review and thoughts on an unfinished novel can be found on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2012/05/28/the-hanging-garden-and-unfinished-nov... ( )

This book was an okay read. I knew before I started, that the book was unfinished due to the author's death. It is about 2 children that are taken in by a widow during WWII. While staying in Australia at this time, they develop a strong bond that they will maintain for many years, possibly always.

The story was a bit confusing and not easy to follow. The author would sometime refer to adults by The and then their last name. Then it would switch to "you" which I assumed was referring to Eirene. The writing is lyrical but just flips around so much from character to character. Overall the story seemed dark and sad. I just felt I had to finish reading it, since I had won a copy and was entitled to write a review. Otherwise, I may have left this book unfinished. ( )

It hardly seems fair to critique a novel that was unfinished, unedited, and therefore unpolished and probably unintended for publication at all in its present state. In one way, I suppose it can be looked at with the same eye one does Michelangelo's unfinished later sculptures that emerge from raw stone in embryonic form with admiration and in recognition of their nascent beauty.

But an unfinished novel needs more form than those statues by the time the reader gets past the first 100 pages. White, at the end of his life, chooses as his main characters two pubescent refugees, a girl and a boy, from WWII consigned to living with an elderly and sickly woman in her Australian home.

Irene's mother married a Greek Marxist, who is killed fighting against the Nazis. Widowed, she brings Irene to live with her aunt, then leaves her with the declared intention to return to fighting the war, this time from Cairo. But the novel is ambiguous about her true status -- woman warrior or wartime whore. Gil, the young boy, was sent away from London where he witnessed the death of his boyhood friend during a blitz attack. We know nothing about his parents, and are left hanging -- why didn't he go to a rural foster home or to relatives living in the countryside of England like most of London's children did?

The quality of the novel is dreamy ephemeral, and gauzy, only occasionally pierced with revelation, as if seen through a lace curtain from a darkened room into a blinding day. White enters, leaves, and re-enters the internal life of his characters, permitting us a multi-point-of-view of the same scene. But he does it in such a way that our knowledge of what happens remains clouded in mystery, never to be clarified.

So, what the reader is left with on the page is entirely an atmospheric impression but little grit to grind in the wheels of imagination. We are, as we look at this novel, seeing a watery impressionistic rendering of the conditions of deprivation in a dried up corner of Australia whose inhabitants are nothing out of the ordinary but slightly more sluggish than most.

I don't know where the novel was headed beyond being a simultaneous bildungsroman of Irene and Gil, who seem just as ordinary and sadly uninteresting as the background characters. And that may be the problem I had with this novel. It was like a painting that offers the viewer nothing more than a background landscape against which the artist was unable to create a foreground point of focus or interest. Lot's of artistry, lots of brushwork, but nothing to grasp, little to make a lasting impression.

And so, on the basis of this semi-completed work, this reader is left uninspired to pick up White's earlier finished work. The publishers did not do White's literary legacy a favor by publishing this book. ( )