The Shaman of Sarsaparilla

THE SOLID MANDALA by Patrick White. 309 pages. Viking. $5.

Only someone able to define to a child what a spiral is without moving his right index finger can properly admire Patrick White's latest novel.

Only someone confident of his ability to demonstrate both a right-hand and left-hand spiral at the same time would have written The Solid Mandala.

Patrick White is such a confident contortionist. His double-spiraled mandala is the Hindu symbol of totality embedded in a glass marble, and his vast pretension is to spin out this bauble to encompass all human life in the person of its owner--an Australian half-wit half-man living in a suburb of Sydney.

The character who loses all his marbles but one is Arthur Brown, a shambling, boneless, orange-haired simpleton who works for 50 years as a grocer's boy in Sarsaparilla (a coyly satirical name for the Sydney district of Parramatta). Arthur is seen by his neighbors at the end of Terminus Road as a "dill," a "no-hoper," a "loopy," a "nut," a "mophret" (hermaphrodite), and "a dirty old man." The reader sympathizes with these brisk Aussie judgments; Arthur is indeed hard to follow as he mumbles about the place goggling at the dreary scenery or polishing that glass marble with the two spirals inside.

His mystery is compounded rather than made clear by the fact that he has a nonidentical twin brother--Waldo, a thin, superior fellow who spends 50 years working in public libraries around Sydney. Waldo is the intellectual type, so superior in fact that he does not deign to confide his thoughts to anyone, least of all to his dim twin. The thoughts, anyhow, are nothing much, but when Waldo retires, he will maybe get around to collating notes for his novel--Tiresias as a Youngish Man--which he keeps in mum's old dress box. Tiresias was the shaman of Thebes, who had a prophetic gift as well as the characteristics of both sexes. Waldo gets into the spirit of the thing by putting on his dead mum's old ball dress.

Terrible Twins. One day Waldo dies "of spite like a boil burst at last with pus." Arthur flees the house, returns after three days, and is mercifully committed to the local asylum. It remains for the twins' twin dogs to prove that Waldo, if slightly incredible, is edible. Hungry dogs will swallow anything.

What to make of these terrible twins --"those two poofteroos," as the contemptuous inhabitants of Sarsaparilla see them? At first sight, it would seem that the old Confederate camp had moved to a last site in the real Deep South--Down Under; that the old Spanish-mosstroopers of Southern decadence ride again in New South Wales. White's celebrated style, in its sidelong, suggestive, subjunctive way, might nudge a reader to the conclusion that this is like early Capote or Tennessee Williams. And, somehow, White has contrived to convert a scrubby Australian suburb into standard Old South gothic. Moldering mansions are in short supply Down Under, but White does what he can with "gothic" grass around the Brown house, wormy quince trees, and the house itself, which is a sort of Greek Revival temple done in clapboard. It is amazing what can be done with mutton fat, bad drains, and skeins from bowls of bread and milk to convey the squalor of life and the hatred of it that is proper to fiction of this genre.

Which Myth? However, something more is meant in The Solid Mandala: White intends to pluck a theological plum from the prunes of his style. For 20 years prestigious critics in both Britain and the U.S. have found in White the stuff of literary greatness. Dutifully following the critics' advice, the reader will find hints of great profundities behind the gothic facade. In the first place, the mandala does not simply demonstrate the exclusiveness of one consciousness from another's--even in twin brothers. Mandala does that brilliantly --the same events being seen in succession through the eyes of Waldo and Arthur. This literary flourish, however, is intended to reveal magical happenings and the workings of myth. But which myth? White may have drawn upon Australian aboriginal legend, which invests the possessor of rock crystals with divine power. Waldo and Arthur may also be seen as living out some version of the Greek myth of Tiresias. White finally is content with nothing less than to present some enactment of the central mysteries of Christianity. Arthur is "hermaphroditic Adam," father--and mother--of mankind, also divine child, also martyred divinity. In these terms, Mandala becomes not a dense literary puzzle but an obscenity. Arthur, the shaman of Sarsaparilla, is too monstrous to think upon: quack religion and genuine psychopathology are mixed up. White has written a mystery play in drag.

The conclusion must be that under pretense of creating a freak show, White is actually a receiver of stolen religious goods.

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