Cirrus@Austlit

'Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a book that has remained an enigma since it was first published in a heavily censored form in 1947. Not only was it censored, but its publication was delayed due to wartime paper shortages, and one of the early uncensored manuscripts was lost between Adelaide and Melbourne. Even after the publication of an uncensored edition by Virago in 1983, the book continues to elude critics, and this elusive quality has only increased in the 21st century. with the book no longer in print. Nonetheless, it remains something of a cult classic among connoisseurs of Australian literary obscurities, with Patrick White as its most famous advocate. It is a book in which social realism is displaced by science fiction as the form best suited to combating Australian capitalism. Needless to say, it is a book that is very ambitious and very strange.' (Introduction)
 

'To flip through the thick, matte pages of Theory of Colours is to wander around an abandoned theme park at dusk. Dimly, you can make out certain structures in the falling light: a hotel, a museum, a swimming pool, and various attractions harnessing the vertiginous interplay of height and depth, including mountains, valleys, towers and gaping chasms. Picking through the brittle skeletons of these forms, testing your weight along beams of decaying wood and surveying barren microclimates, you sense the 'certain feverish appeal that this carnival once held. This has faded now to reveal a kind of 'peculiar and suspended charm', both timeless and utterly defined by its vulnerability to the ravages of time. The colours are cracked, consumed by grey, peeling to reveal blank, bone-white surfaces or blooming like weeds and spreading over paths, walls and boulders. The theme park is on an island, or on the waterfront like Luna Park. You can smell old salt in flicker at the air. Petals glow neon in the dimming light and shad the edges of your vision.' (Introduction)