White has long been interested in the multiplicity of possible selves. Such fragmentation within the person of Theodora Goodman motivated The Aunt’s Story. In Riders in the Chariot, the four contrasted zaddikim or visionaries might also be seen as making up one compound being, of enormous potential. And the Voss–Laura axis showed how division could be used to dramatise the age-old dream of the androgynous self: as in Plato’s parable they appeared as fallen male and female principles, each incomplete without-the other.

In his most recent books, White has pursued this theme of division further. Flaws in the Glass portrayed an autobiographical self-fragmented in time. The Twyborn Affair took androgyny to the point where the central character could live out successive male and female identities. Both these books point strongly towards White’s latest … dare I call it a novel? … Memoirs of Many in One.

The strategy of this new book is to present us with the memoirs of a doddering old woman, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, edited with an introduction and intrusions by her old friend Patrick White. The first sentence of the book, juxtaposing the five words, ‘Alex’, ‘morocco’, ‘arabesques’, ‘Turkish’ and ‘Constantinople’, hints sufficiently at the restless exoticism of her background. But she is not only an exotic Levantine. The first page is a litany or mosaic of proper names, ranging all the way to David Jones, Sydney, and it includes the signalling sentence, ‘Alex acquired names as other women encrust themselves with jewels and bower-birds collect fragments of coloured glass.’ As her Memoirs proceed, we find that she has in her time been Dolly Formosa, the travelling actress; Sister Benedict, an Australian nun who lies down in the smoky bush twilight with her fellow religious, Sister Bernadette; Cipriani, the blue-eyed nun on the island of Nisos, who was the lover of Onouphrios, the monk at Ayia Ekaterini; the so-called Empress Alexandra of Byzantium and Nicaea; and the miraculous dancer in the ballroom of the Adolf Hitler Hotel, Washington.

Or does she only think she has been all these characters? What difference does it make, now that she is approaching death? If she and the book think that she has been Cipriani and so on, then it is the same as if she really has. We cannot prove the bounds of the selves we have inhabited.

As in another novel, The Eye of the Storm, White focuses his drama on the consciousness of a decaying, indeed a dying, woman. But this new book is far more theatrical, moving on expressly to ‘Alex Gray’s Theatrical Tour of Outback Australia’ with its central quotation from an up-country Cleopatra role: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety’. Withering and staling have their point too, in a book so continually aware of physical frailty, bodily decay. From the bush tour, we pass on to Alex’s bit parts at the trendy Sand Pit theatre (‘The Chinese Emperors dropped to the possibilities of sand long before Beckett’), violence, madness and the end.

But the book has other characters. There is Hilda, the tense, troubled, tiresomely responsible daughter, doomed to be seen from other people’s viewpoints. More importantly, there is a writer called Patrick White, who is comically typed as pompous, prim, innocent, decent, and fussy. At one point, the crumbling Alex grandly muses that ‘Patrick will be the spirit guide at the great seance’, but within ten pages she recoils and protests, ‘Patrick guide! Patrick cannot guide himself, that’s why he’s taken to carrying a walking stick’. Early on, he seems mainly to be a device for ironising the narrative, a straight man (though not so straight as Hilda’s spinal column) to emphasise the inherent theatricality of Alex’s imagination, perhaps of all imagination.

But narratives are voracious, and this one catches up Patrick and drags him into the webs of story by the end. In the powerfully matrilineal Gray – not White – family, Alex quietly bequeaths him to Hilda. Just as the author arrogantly possesses his own text, evidences of self in the text may be trapped by ‘mere’ characters. The author is enmeshed; victor and victim, male and female, are parts of the one being for all that ‘the great creative ego’ has pretended to itself.

Along with the subtleties of Memoirs of Many in One, a reviewer should not fail to mention how much of its energy derives from a bold vulgarity. This is a narrative which is heartily interested in decay, puns, lurid slang, social falsity, sexual pretensions … and food. Yes, along with the Patrick White who has given us Alex Gray’s religious vision in the outback dawn and the one who claims to be ‘so bad at portraying the social emotions’, there is the writer who has, with a kind of horrified fascination, produced the sentence, ‘She could tell from a distance that he was preparing to write off her lobster mousse with its sieved sauce of sour cream and mango and garnish of truffles and oysters.’