He or She

Robert Taubman

  • The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White
    Cape, 432 pp, £5.95, ISBN 0 00 000097 3

One comes back so often to the question of what it means. The skill of the performance no less than the ambiguity of the material provokes such a response – a doubt about this novel. In other novels, Patrick White has offered the reader something more obvious to fix the attention, such as Voss’s intense and dominating will. In the absence of an obvious meaning nothing so fixes the attention in The Twyborn Affair. There is a good deal of absence in this book. Patrick White has been seen as sharing D.H. Lawrence’s interest in states of ‘pure existence’, but here it is questions of existence itself, and of the possibility of non-existence, that absorb him.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions