Towards the end of The Hanging Garden – Patrick White’s previously unpublished novel, which he abandoned in 1981 – I began actively looking for clichés. Not because I suspected I might find them, or because I’m a masochistic reader who takes pleasure in bad writing, but because about halfway through the book the outrageous possibility occurred to me that there might be none at all – I think that I may have been right.

This is more surprising than one might think; even most canonical novels, the true classics, have the odd cliché. (After all, Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984, is described as having, ‘ruggedly handsome features’, in the second paragraph of the book.) In the end, I drew the conclusion that even Patrick White’s abandoned projects are immaculate, without a single well-worn or commonplace turn of phrase. (The closest I found was a description of two boys, ‘munching popcorn’.)

The main characters are two children on the eve of adolescence, Eirene and Gilbert, who are sent to a house in Neutral Bay on Sydney Harbour so that they might be out of harm’s way during WWII. Eirene’s Australian mother has returned to Europe to honour the memory of her deceased Greek communist husband by doing her bit. Gilbert’s mother has died in the Blitz in London and his father is fighting in the British army. In the absence of any sort of reassurances from the wider world, Eirene and Gilbert turn to each other for sustenance and consolation. When Mrs. Bulpit, their custodian, dies, the two are separated. As the war comes to an end, Eirene wonders not only if she will ever be reunited with Gilbert, but also: ‘Is this where we belong then?’ (Although, as I understand it, this was part one of three for the novel, the unfinishedness doesn’t really show.)

White’s prose is incredibly trim. He has a way of isolating a single detail that can sustain a whole scene: ‘Eirene Sklavos sat very upright, her neck grown as thin as the stem of a flower.’ And yet, during the parts of the narration that verge on Joycean stream-of-consciousness, there are moments of weird, baroque, overpowering poetry: ‘The kookaburra is the counterpart of this counterpane, as silence is to lanoline.’

White uses more post-modern tactics in order to animate his characters, particularly Eirene, from all angles, switching at times from first, to third, and even to second-person: ‘If it wasn’t for your Greek skin and the spot you have rubbed too hard at on your chin, you might compete in the Australian Pretty Girl Stakes.’ To read the narration – composed as it is from a symphony of voices (even at times from the diary that Eirene keeps), each distinct yet seemingly inseparable from those with which it blends – is to feel as if one is watching a skilled juggler keep several uniquely dangerous objects in the air above his head at once.

The Hanging Garden is primo White.

[[willheyward]] Will Heyward works for Readings in Carlton and St Kilda. He has been published in the ABR and a few other publications. He helps edit