I re-read The Eye of the Storm (1973) recently in the light of my own experience with elderly parents, and understood for the first time just how overwhelming the experience of reading a Patrick White novel could be. Partly this results from the range of emotion suffered by his characters (and the reader); partly it has to do with the fineness of discrimination with which these emotions are charted. Moods of exaltation or joy alternate rapidly with those of anger or anxiety. On the other hand, his characters never allow themselves to remain in a depressed state for long: repair is undertaken, relationships mended or restored, tentatively, for the moment. The result is an extraordinary dynamism and efflorescence of response around what is, in itself, a static and attenuated situation. Nothing could be more static than the last period of life of an old bedridden parent, nothing more fluctuating and unstable than the expectations and emotions which jostle around that persistent reality in the minds of its witnesses – or fluctuate within the elderly one, unknowable to those in attendance.

The contrast between the storm and its eye, between the far-ranging play of emotion and the old woman who is its still, blind, barely articulate cause, gives the work an epic quality. Because of the way that emotion in White's novels overflows the physical boundaries of its human agents, animates objects and landscapes and creates atmospheres, its expression has the scale of a meteorological phenomenon. The reader is immersed, overwhelmed. Nothing is final, nothing resolved – death brings finality but not to those who observe it. The Eye of the Storm works by repetition, accumulation – scenes build, gather, swell and release their tension, but never completely. There is always a residue, an irritant, which generates the scenes to come. It is in this sense that nothing is ever done with, or settled. The horizon seems endless, the experience of being within this proliferating drama complete and exhausting.

It is difficult to be true to this experience and at the same time to respond in the manner thought suitable to a critic without being reductive. What the novel seems to require is careful navigation rather than criticism.