The difficulty in writing books about ideas, or problems, is usually in the delivery. How do you present your predicament–moral, spiritual, or otherwise–to the reader without coming off as dry or cowardly? How do you turn a riveting topic into more than just a proof? How do bring your ideas into fruition via an engaging narrative with characters whose liveliness you can trust or resent?
Australian Nobel Laureate Patrick White’s novel the Solid Mandala (Penguin 1966, 69) is a worthy attempt at the novel of ideas. Through its following of Waldo and Arthur Brown, dominance and sheeply minion personified, the book attempts to cover as many existential tracks as possible in its mere 316 pages. But ultimately it is no Magic Mountain or Death in Venice, no Crime and Punishment or Brothers Karamazov.
The book is divided into four main sections. The first section sets the scene’s social and cultural background. What is Australia like in the early 20th century? This is a world where misogyny runs rampant, women are trained to be afraid and care for little, and public transportation is more of a paradoxical necessity than a tool that is to be understood and loved. There is a hint throughout this short introductory block that the world White is painting for us, as realistic as Hemingway or Steinbeck, is also just as queasy in its farcical qualities. It’s a sad, haunting entrapment that ultimately leads to the demise at the end of the novel–but the astute enrapturing of, say, one of the Bronte sisters provides much more evidence that the book’s corners are worth the wait. White? He’s got a lot of cotton in his mouth and not necessarily anything he’s saying behind it is worth listening to.
In the second and third sections, White inspects the lives of two brothers, twins Waldo and Arthur Brown, who grow old together living in near-poverty on Terminus Road in some small town, Australia–the same town the women that are on the bus in the first section inhabit. Waldo is the logical, intellectual of the two; he knows philosophy and literature and the arts and is always in torment because of it or because of his brother’s attempt to follow the same path. Arthur, the bumbling half-wit, ultimately socializes better, lives better, and survives better than his struggling artist brother. Arthur is lead into honing his own creativity, which amounts to a significantly graceful presentation far more divine than any of Waldo’s essays, the novel reaches its height. But even when Arthur has succeeded in becoming the real treasure of the fraternal relationship, the novel is more disgusting and disheartening than any one really wants it to be. There is no magic, no pleasure. It is the Iceman Cometh without the alcoholism. It is a long train to nowhere that continues on in hopes of finding something that simply does not glitter by the end.
And the end? Back to Steinbeck. Back to Of Mice and Men. Ultimately the closer White gets to getting over the stone wall and finding the answers to his ideas, the higher the wall extends, revealing less about our tracked characters, showing us more about the cyclical nature of the world we live in. This is the problem of a book composed of problems. The narration is the greater focus but it is ultimately lacking, and thus the problems and all associated ideas get lost in the undercurrent as well.
