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Many readers have found Patrick White's second published novel, the very English 'The Living and the Dead' (1941:rpt. 1962), to be peculiarly unsatisfactory. There are several reasons for this, including its perhaps excessive debts to French literature, the particular period of its gestation - the years between Munich and the Second World War - and the strong politico-social conscience of that time. Another is the often ignored fact that so much in the text is strongly echoic if not actually parodic of both T. S. Eliot's highly influential early poems, in particular of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1910, 1916) and of 'The Waste Land' (1922), the one essential poetic document of post-war Europe in decay. |
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