Partick White: A Life by David Marr

Fine.

Patrick WHITE winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays – including Voss, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair – left behind him a reputation for intense privacy and sometimes savage temper. He was better known for long-held grudges and strained loyalties than for lasting friendships.
David Marr's brilliant biography is, under these circumstances, all the more remarkable. It draws not only on a wide range of original research but also on the single most difficult and important source of all: Patrick White himself, Marr had White's help throughout the six years the biography took to write. White asked for no right of veto and in the weeks before his death read the final manuscript which, for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.
Patrick White lived an extraordinary life. He was born into a family of rich Hunter River graziers and Marr wonderfully evokes this largely vanished society of grand Sydney houses and kingdoms in the bush. Lonely years followed as an expatriate schoolboy and university student in England, White returned to jackeroo on the edge of the bleak Snowy Mountains, an experience that laid the groundwork for his first fiction and gave him an indelible feeling, as much horror as love, for the landscape of Australia.
We see White in pre-war London, writing plays with little success. There are travels and love affairs in Europe and America. We see him as an unlikely RAF intelligence officer in the North African desert.