Introduction

The Eye of the Storm, written by Australian author Patrick White, was published in 1973, just weeks after White was awarded the Nobel Prize. This award confirmed White’s status as Australia’s most important twentieth-century literary voice and established him among the most significant English-language novelists of the post-war era.

Experimenting with stream of consciousness, shifting narrative points of view, and fractured linearity, White’s formidable novels offered visionary parables and psychological narratives that explored a grim contemporary world of dust and lust. His signature characters, vulnerable isolates and tender idealists, struggle to sustain dignity and moral purpose even as they are betrayed by those they love and exploited by their own animal hunger.

White, however, never surrenders to the loveless emptiness of this contemporary world. In The Eye of the Storm, for instance, the dying Elizabeth Hunter, the indomitable matriarch of a wealthy, if dysfunctional family, looks back over her life and comes to terms with her considerable failures as a lover, wife, and mother. In death, however, Elizabeth gifts her night nurse with the fragile wisdom of the beauty/agony of the spirit, which has been White’s defining theme for more than half a century.

Plot Summary

A rich widow, near-blind and recovering from a stroke, eighty-something Elizabeth Hunter is dying, but on her schedule. “I don’t believe anybody dies who doesn’t want to.” She lives alone in a mansion near Centennial Park in suburban Sydney, where three nurses, all Eastern Orthodox nuns, attend her around the clock.

Her grown children—a daughter, Dorothy, a nervous woman now divorcing her French prince husband; a son, Basil, a knighted Shakespearean actor, an alcoholic, now facing the reality that his talents have waned—are heading home in anticipation of their mother’s death and, more importantly, of settling her estate.

Elizabeth, drifting among her “thoughts as if on a raft,” recalls a life of careless, selfish, sensual gratification. “I shan’t feel happy till I’ve tasted everything there is to taste.” She recalls numerous infidelities, among them with a scandal-ridden politician and the family attorney now handling her will.

Elizabeth finds herself disillusioned with love. “The worst thing about love between human beings,” she tells her nurse, “is when you are prepared to love, they don’t want it, and when they do, it’s you who cannot bear the idea.” Only when her much-cuckolded husband lay dying from cancer did Elizabeth realize how much she had loved him.

The plane dodges a massive cyclone during Dorothy’s long flight to Sydney. When she tells her mother, Elizabeth recalls nearly 15 years earlier when she and her daughter survived a cyclone on Brumby Island off the coast of Tasmania. That experience becomes a pivotal memory for the dying Elizabeth. Elizabeth was abandoned on the island after a reckless dalliance with Dorothy’s lover during that vacation. As the eye of the storm raked over the tiny island, Elizabeth understood the terror of vulnerability but also tapped into her resilient spirit.

Shortly after, his sister, Sir Basil, arrives. To jumpstart his flagging career, he needs an infusion of money to finance an avant-garde production, a “non-play,” in which actors play themselves, all unscripted. But he is not really sure who he is anymore. He regards the return home as not merely a chance to “bully an old woman into handing over a fortune” but to recover his identity after decades of playing roles. However, the awkward reunion with his mother “feels like a poorly rehearsed performance.”

Both children focus on the inheritance. Basil suggests moving Elizabeth to a care facility to control their inheritance better. For her part, Dorothy,...