Book of a lifetime: Voss by Patrick White

From The Independent archive: Lindsay Clarke gets lost in a metaphysical drama

We follow Voss and his motley party out of the complacent world of colonial New South Wales into the aboriginal desert (Getty)

Writing about books that were important to him, Patrick White once said that one seems to “go on living in them forever, possibly because they give glimpses of a heart-breaking perfection one will never achieve”. Such was the case when, as a young aspiring novelist, I first read Voss 50 years ago and watched its pages open like a vast geological fissure in the domesticated landscape of English fiction.

Not that the book is perfect – its scale is too grand for that – and its terrain is Australian, not English. But just as that continent’s early explorers found its native species so strange they hardly knew how to see them, so White’s account of a venture to the deep interior of both land and soul speaks to dimensions of experience so rarely examined that he felt hardly anybody would “understand what I am on about”.