[In the following review, Hossain discusses how the stories in The Burnt Ones mirror themes in White's novels and act as commentary on Australian society and the human condition.]

Patrick White was introduced to me as one of the best Australian writers of today. On reading The Burnt Ones, a collection of his short stories, which led me to read two of his more recent novels, The Aunt's Story and Riders in the Chariot, it seemed evident that he is outstanding among contemporary fiction writers outside Australia as well.

As with most good writing it is possible to approach Patrick White's work on several levels. First for its regional connotations as having something to say about Australian society. Although one gets glimpses of the concerns and values of middle-class Australian society, such as a consciousness of money, class and status, and a striving to attain at least one if not all of these; an involvement with objects (also important symbolically) and a suggestion of intellectual emptiness—it would be presumptuous as a foreigner to appraise it on this level. His work, however, transcends this environment, as Patrick White's ultimate concern is the basic human condition as it unfolds in the portrayal of the inner lives and the tragic predicament of persons who just miss being “ordinary”. In this collection of short stories, published in different literary journals over a number of years, Patrick White is versatile, not only in his selection of the setting which moves from Australia to Greece, but there is also a distinct variation of mood. Nevertheless, there is an underlying link which fits into the larger pattern worked out in his novels, giving them a certain unity.

His incisive and penetrating characterization of the outsider depicts a contemporary tragedy, a theme that is relevant to our times. The repressions of modern man in an Anglo-Saxon world haunted by an efficient machine-like existence, and a fear of war and extinction make him emotionally dwarfed and he feels caged in by these pressures. A profound sense of isolation—mystical in Riders in the Chariot, and painfully compelling in The Aunt's Story, pervades his short stories. In most of them the author is also concerned with the inter-play of illusion and reality, of the past over-lapping the present.

Patrick White's “burnt ones” are charged by a futile knowledge of their differentness. If they had remained oblivious of this characteristic they would have merged into the world of normal, ordinary people. But, born with inward looking eyes, they bear the stamp of their alienation. They feel caged in by their fear of the condescending scorn and pity to which they feel doomed. Yearning for experience and yet shirking from it within themselves, there is a complete failure of communication between the inner world of ordinary conventionalities. They touch each other marginally but slip away before any meaningful contact is established.

Anthea Scudamore, around whom the story develops in “Dead Roses”, is dominated by her mother, tries but just stops short, almost frightened of any contact either with her mother, or her father, or even when she marries Mr. Mortlock, an ageing friend of her father's, “a substantial man”, but one who is not alive in any positive sense. We find her “opening the drawers of other people's lives”, but like Theodora Goodman, in The Aunt's Story unable to “discover the secret of unlocking other people for she herself had never opened”. Incommunicative, these painfully silent people withdraw from life—Anthea, eager to find “experience” in marriage is left only with the husk of a marital relationship; in “Clay”, the lonely “different” boy, dominated by his mother prolongs the apparent continuity of his life by marrying a girl very much like her even down to her prosaic concern for kitchen sinks, while he recedes further within himself. In The Letters this isolation is carried still further into the realm of insanity. Here the impact of a fast-moving competitive society is most poignantly shown in the predicament of the son, Charles, a shy, retiring and reserved person who is torn away from his idyllic, academic life by his father's sudden death. The demands of his father's business now devolve upon him, but he feels completely inadequate to cope with men or machines. His domineering mother then accepts his awkwardness as “insanity”. His godmother, the only person who understands him is far away and dying. Thus Charles withdraws. In the last powerful scene, he tries to go back in time to assert his childhood relationship of at least, physical communication with his mother. But she fails to understand him and in recoiling sets a seal on his withdrawal.

Patrick White's “outsiders” burn inwardly with a patient endurance, for there is no redemption only an escape, often beyond the pale of reality into an illusory world of their own creation. Clay's childhood interest in his mother's wedding photograph, which develops into a strange fascination for her white wedding shoe becomes symbolical of the human need for love. Its denial leads to a withdrawal into a completely make-belief world where the imaginary Love answers his need for love and understanding, until even the reader is lost in these shifting sands. In “A Glass of Tea”, the old man's memory, as he recounts the story of his life to his visitor, seems to waver between the real and the unreal and to create a mystical aura around the Russian fortune-teller who gives him the glasses of his destiny, and the unfolding of his wife's personality, “a passionate, a difficult woman, but worth the suffering involved”. The mystical unfolding of the story builds up to an anticipation of a meeting with his wife. As the interest of the visitor, and, for that matter, of the reader, is aroused and the curiosity to see his wife reaches its peak, there is a sudden drop to reality, and we realize that we had been carried unknowingly on the waves of illusion.

Isolated as the outsider may seem, the “ordinary” people are not capable of anything more than a superficially conventional relationship. In their world which abounds with self-assured domineering women, overprotective towards cowed and quiet men there is an emphasis on the ghostly unreality of the human relationship. Marriage, even when it is not entered into for a purely selfish purpose, provides little meaningful contact; there is a clinging and dependence, but not out of love or understanding.

The contrast between these two worlds is brought out most successfully in “Down at the Dump”, undoubtedly the best story in this collection not only aesthetically but even more for its assertion of certain positive values. There is a brilliant depiction of opposite worlds, a meeting of opposing states of mind: the conventionally respectable and the social outcast; the old and the young; the inside and the outside of people; the encroachment of the past over the present. The world of the poor Walleys is bright with disordered abandon. Their neighbours, Councillor Hogben and his wife, tied as they are in conventional lifelessness, preside over the last formalities of her sister's death. Mr. Hogben, “whose shape suggested she had been made of several scones joined together in the baking”, grieves not so much for her sister's death as for the unconventional life she led. Grotesquely involved with the possession of objects, Mrs. Hogben's other nature—acquisitive, resentful, grasping and cruel—lurks not very far from her superficially conventional stance of the dutiful wife and mother and a responsible member of society. In contrast her dead sister Daisy Morrow, genuinely kind, warm and understanding is misunderstood and scorned only because she has defied social conventions. As such Daisy Morrow remains positive in life. And her death is an affirmation—a symbolic affirmation which gives to this story a deeply religious significance. For although the bored, apathetic mourners—the pall-bearers of life, get ready to bury Daisy, she evokes terror and hope as she by her very unconcern for society seems to proclaim:

Listen to me all you successful no-hopers, all you who wake in the night, jittery because something may be escaping you, or terrified to think that there may never have been anything to find. Come to me you sour women, public servants, anxious children and old scabby, desperate men. … Truly we needn't experience tortures, unless we build chambers in our minds to house instruments of hatred in. Don't you know, my darling creatures, that death isn't death until it is the death of love? Love should be the greatest explosion it is reasonable to expect which sends us whirling, spinning, creating millions of other worlds. Never destroying.

Daisy Morrow is indeed dumped, unheard and disbelieved. But when Meg Hogben and Lummy Walley the two teenage children can transcend their parents prejudices and their own fears, they reaffirm Daisy Morrow's symbolic resurrection.

Added to this is a profoundly comic vision, startling in “A Cheery Soul”, and in the ironic story of “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover”, which is reflected in all his stories: in the sad humour of “Being Kind to Titina”, and in the caricatured description of the affluent American Greek couple visiting their land or the intellectual, a Party member who makes good writing biographies of famous men, and moves up the social scale in “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats.”

None of Patrick White's characters are great, nor is the impact of their lives eloquent. Yet in weaving a meaning into the smouldering of lives seemingly detached and wasted, the author expresses a deep compassion for these introspective human beings. In describing the pathos of a slow crumbling of suburban souls, his stories evoke a sense of tragedy—a tragedy not so much of an individual, but of a civilization, of a whole way of life.