Book description
The wild and beautiful birds of the title are the cockatoos who -
welcome trespassers in a surburban garden - transform the lives of
those they condescend to visit. The Davorens, who for seven years have
lived in total silence, are united suddenly in mutual worship of their
exotic guests. Miss Le Cornu, the lonely spinster for whom Davoren's
calls have become a needed ritual, regards the birds' descent on her
chimney-pot as a privilege little short of divine grace.
Savage but kind-eyed, tearing with fierce beak at his chosen victim,
the cockatoo appears in many disguises in this masterly collection of
short novels and stories. Essentially, the book's theme is intimacy,
that close relationship in which possessive love can invade and
cripple the spirit. In A Woman's Hand, and elderly man married
to a proud, manipulative woman perceives in another man's magnificent
isolation the stillness and contentment that he will never achieve.
Allegedly raped by a mystery intruder, the respectable daughter of
respectable and doting parents in The Night the Prowler sets
out to violate the social codes that chain her to an unreal identity.
In Sicilian Vespers, a doctor's wife on holiday attempts to
exorcise her childhood specters in what could be a blasphemous and
joyless act of adultery or, on the other hand, a surrender to
hysterical fantasy.
So complete and richly furnishes is the writing of Patrick White
that ideas and images within each story are as satisfying as the
whole; each story is as nourishing as the book itself. The
Cockatoos achieves a majesty to match the grandeur of his finest novels.
Patrick White was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature, 'for
an epic, psychological narrative art which has introduced a new
continent into literature.'
