There is quite a bit of meat on the bone in this novel. The Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White (1912-1990) presents four protagonists: millionaire's daughter Mary Mare, the wandering Jew Mordecai Himmelfarb, the aboriginal Alf Gubbo and housekeeper Ruth Godbold. They live in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, and have each had their own special life trajectory. They are nonconformist 'misfits', in a sense socially maladjusted people, and they are viewed as such by the bourgeois community (here mainly personified by the malicious Mrs Jolley and Mrs Falck). But appearances are deceiving.

White takes quite some time to outline their background and life story and delves deep into their psyche, which is quite battered for each of them: Mary has always been spit out by her parents as 'too ordinary', Mordecai survived the Holocaust, Alf was raped by a pastor and Ruth had to face an abusive husband. They see themselves as unworthy sinners, suffering to a greater or lesser extent from an inferiority syndrome. But White sheds quite a different light on them.

Through secondary characters and all kinds of developments, the novel takes on a truly Dickensian allure (sometimes just as elaborate), but White adds his own accents: his sarcasm and satire jump off the pages, and regularly the magical, the spiritual and even the mystical seem to take over the narrative. He almost constantly misleads us, as in this passage, where Himmelfarb walks back to his city which has just been bombed, after a traumatic experience with the Nazis: “The winter evening was drawing in as he approached the darker masses of the town, which had already begun to receive its nightly visitation. The knots and loops, the little, exquisite puffs of white hung on the deepening distances of the sky, all the way to its orange rim. The riot of fireworks was on. Ordinarily solid, black buildings were shown to have other, more transcendental qualities, in that they would open up, disclosing fountains of hidden fire. Much was inverted, that hitherto had been accepted as sound and immutable. Two silver fish were flaming downward, out of their cobalt sea, into the land.” So here, a bombing has been transformed by White into a poetic, pastoral scene.

And the Chariot? Well, it is briefly touched upon in each part, in such a way that you can sense it’s something important, crucial to the story. White consciously leaves it to the reader to discover and fill in the image and its meaning, but it’s another original find of his, the combination of an antique (The Chariot of Apollo) and a biblical (Ezekiel) image. White seems to suggest, no, clearly indicates that his four protagonists are the Riders of the Chariot, because they see more than ordinary people, they are Enlightened (shades of light, and especially that of white, play a prominent role in White's descriptions) , half or whole saints themselves, who transcend the banal, and are clearly on the right side, representing the pinnacle of humanity. The bourgeois, conventional, materialistic world is the opponent force, anti-human and downright evil. So, ultimately, this novel is a variation on the theme of the battle between good and evil, but in a very original form.

To the reader of today this novel may be quite demanding. Not only because of the sometimes very strange (mythical) passages, and because of the story structure that seems a bit too constructed. At times I found White laid it too thick how saintlike his 4 Riders of the Chariot are (especially Mrs Godbold). But the extraordinary style, the humor, and the spiritual imagery make this into an impressive novel. ( )