The Tree of Man- Patrick White

[Amanda]

I thought this book was solid but I don’t think it’s going to stay with me in a deep way. I gave it 3 stars. It follows the Parker family (originally just Patriarch Stan with his dog and horse) as it grows over the years, and the rural Australian farm and town that grows around it. The title expresses a founder effect of Stan and how so much life and legacy grows from his original clearing the land- sometimes to his chargin- around this act.

White wanted there to be a story that applied the Western traditional founder and generational epics that came to Australia with the settlers to the Australian story itself, and wrote this book as a way of expressing how Australia could fit into the notion of the Western literary cannon. I respect this idea, and I think it is applied well to this work, but I wasn’t completely obsessed with the contents of the story itself.

[Gail]

The Tree of Man has a simple plot line and characters whose lives and thoughts are simple also. Yet, it slowly evolves into a book that is not that simple. White sets the lives of Stan and Amy Parker against the backdrop of the natural environment of Australia and the settling of the land outside of Sydney. White's writing style is very clean and at first I thought he actually was not using any adjectives, but he does, they just do not stand out as enhancers of the nouns but flow smoothly with his sentences. The book covers the full life cycle of our two protagonists and yet there is relatively little that stands out as dramatic moments. We are introduced to the epic floods and fires of Australia but see them through the eyes of a singular events in our characters lives. The couple do have children but fail to connect with them as unique people that they could come to understand. Both the children are "failures" of a sort although White would never judge them. The boy grows up to be a flash man and small time crook, the daughter a mannequin who has collected an appropriate husband, high class manners and a crocodile purse and truly not much else.
The man and woman are not educated enough or communicative enough to share in words any of the wonders that they have seen and they both betray each other in both big and subtle ways, yet they need each other and continue to love each other in the only way that they know how. They have tea together. They milk the cows together.
White ultimately takes us to a place where we are reading about how the core of life is simply living. He touches on faith and belief but none of his characters come to truly understand what that means until the very end of the book.
I found the timelessness of the book to be astonishing in the end as a meditation on our small lives set against a huge landscape.

Quotes: "Two people do not lose themselves at the identical moment, or else they might find each other, and be saved. It is not as simple as that"

"Who had gone up to Glastonbury on some such night, of inkiness and brass, to put him in that same box in which she would have kept, for safety's sake, all human love."

To an evangelist attempting to convert Stan Parker: "I'm not sure whether I am intended to be saved". I love this because it indicates some belief in a plan outside his own agency but one in which he has no say or control over.

[Diane]

Rating: 4 stars


The book centers on an Australian couple who are building a settlement in the bush. It follows their lives and changing fortunes over several decades. While far from perfect, I felt there were many interesting and redeeming qualities.

[Patrick]

***1/2

This novel chronicles the lives of Stan Parker, his wife Amy and their progeniture from the moment Stan, his horse and a stray dog decide to build a shack on land given by his dad at the turn of the 20th century. The story is rather close to my home, as the area (now a suburb) I live in used to be part of the bush that is described in White's book (in fact, "Durilgai" is one of the names that the Castle Hill area, NW of Sydney, had at its beginnings; apparently, White wrote this novel while living in Castle Hill). A good, but dour description of a very silent marriage and of how Australia took solid roots outside the main cities throughout the first part of the 20th century. For those who know a bit more about Australian literature, you can feel some of the inspiration that inhabits Tim Winton's writing, even though his novels focus generally more on Western Australia. This was not the most exciting read, but it still gave me a better idea of White's place in Australia's and world's literature.