Riders in the Chariot is the sixth novel by Australian author Patrick White. It was published in 1961 and won the Miles Franklin Award that year. It also won the 1965 Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society.
The novel is the story of the lives of four loosely connected people, whose common link is the mystic experience of the chariot of the title described in the Book of Ezekiel, and traces their lives towards the point where they realise they share the same vision.
The novel combines literature, mysticism and suburban life in 1950s Australia to show the ignorance and prejudice of the everyday people in reaction to the few who see the infinite, snowballing with catastrophic consequences
Plot summary
The book begins with an epigraph from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which William Blake imagines a conversation with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. Asked how he could dare to claim that God had spoken to him, Isaiah says he came to sense the infinite in everything and concluded that the voice of honest indignation was itself the voice of God. Ezekiel says that the work of a prophet is to raise other men into a perception of the infinite.
Part I
In the years after World War II, Mary Hare lives on the outskirts of suburban Sarsaparilla. While possessed with a deep love of nature and animals, she is socially awkward and ostracised from the community, who regard her as an eccentric. Flashbacks to her childhood show her abuse and torment at the hands of her father, a Sydney wine merchant who married above his station and arrogantly squandered his wife’s fortune on the construction of Xanadu, the crumbling estate where Mary now lives. Her distant cousin Eustace Cleugh, who once visited Xanadu but responded to Mary’s childhood infatuation with disdain, has recently resumed financially supporting her after a long absence during the war. She was once nursed back to health from a serious illness by Ruth Godbold, during which she had visions of a fiery chariot; Mary inwardly believes Ruth shares the same vision.
With her new means, Mary hires Mrs Jolley to keep house for her. Jolley is outwardly religious but is soon revealed to be a callous, judgemental woman. The pair quickly develop a mutual fear and hostility of one another as Jolley strikes up a friendship with Mrs Flack, a kindred spirit and the town gossip who lives on her own in Sarsaparilla. Seeking refuge from the poisonous atmosphere of Xanadu, Mary takes refuge in the scrubland around the estate and encounters the elderly Mordecai Himmelfarb.
Part II
Mordecai shares his life story with Mary as the pair bond under a tree. Born in the 1880s to a wealthy Jewish merchant family in Germany, Mordecai’s early childhood was tinged with the faint awareness of the pogroms underway in eastern Europe at the time. He grows into an exceptional scholar and studies at Oxford, where a brief affair with the daughter of an English nobleman leaves him heartbroken. Soon before returning home to fight for Germany in World War I, his mother sends a letter to tell him that her father has renounced Judaism; relatives later blame her death on this decision. Mordecai wins a medal for his wartime service, marries and is later appointed to an English professorship in a small town.
The rise of the Third Reich sees his expulsion from university and his wife is taken away during Kristallnacht, never to be seen by Mordecai again. When the liberal couple sheltering him are taken away, Mordecai presents himself at a police station and is taken to a concentration camp by train. Many of his fellow passengers die on the journey. Mordecai is spared immediate extermination on arrival and escapes after a camp uprising. He is later helped to Palestine, where after a brief reunion with his brother-in-law, he impulsively announces his intention to settle in Australia.
Part III
Soon after his arrival in Sydney, Mordecai takes a metalworking job at Brighta Bicycle Lamps in Barranugli. He recognises that his employer Harry Rosetree is also a German Jew, but his overtures are sternly rebuffed by the factory owner, whose family are shown to be doing their best to assimilate to middle-class Australian society. Mrs Flack begins to spread malicious and unfounded gossip about Mordecai which she relays to Blue, another worker at the factory who she introduces to Mrs Jolley as her nephew. Mordecai accidentally injures his hand with a drill while at work one day and is tended to by his next-door neighbour, Ruth Godbold.