The way White describes and illustrates the way the characters attempt to grapple with their new environments was very captivating. However, despite that I did find it quite enjoyable: the absence of pure kinematic action was made up for with the mental conflict that is the main driver of the story. The writing is, as is stereotypical of White, dense to say the least. As the story progresses, their obsession grows through this adversity, as Voss loses the strength to continue to lie to himself about his metaphorical (or even literal) divinity and clings to the mental phantasm of his love, and as Laura goes through the physical torment that so frequently comes to those with great longing. The rest of the story splits in twain, with one side focusing on Voss’ journey into the country with all the adversity and doom that comes with it, while the other focuses on how Trevalyan maneuvers through a world hostile to herself while waiting hopelessly for her lover.
Meeting only twice in the beginning of the story, neither of the two think much of their encounters until Voss sets out upon his great odyssey upon which the two grow infatuated with each other. The novel centres around not only a physical adventure as one would expect, but also a romantic one between two characters: The titular German explorer Johann Ulrich Voss and the bookish orphan Laura Trevalyan. So describes just one aspect of Voss, the magnum opus of Australia’s only laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White. “Your country is of great subtlety’, a quote laced with irony: both an exaltation of the hidden beauty of the continent, and a metaphor for how the great nothingness of the vast outback swallows one up with hidden threats one would not expect.
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