The Eye of the Storm

About

Not a necklace. Not before luncheon.  

Elizabeth Hunter, a woman who used to be the pivotal point of her little universe, lives a solitary life in a suburban house in Sydney. Once a stunning and spirited beauty controlling others with her iron will, she now faces the ills of old age and the ghosts of her own past. The former star and patron, celebrated for her sarcasm, is left with the entourage of nurses, a housekeeper and a lawyer, sitting as a silent queen in a beehive and desperately scheming to control and torment her relatives even at her deathbed.

Her “ungrateful” children return from Europe to eventually claim their place, which the manipulative mother refused to give them. They are her son Basil, an ageing actor, once a London star but now a solitary man haunted by fears and unsatisfied ambitions, and daughter Dorothy, an unhappily married and impoverished aristocrat, who has tried in vain to escape her mother’s shadow. Both need money and both know that the only way to get it is through the woman who has never been able to truly love them.

Australian writer Patrick White wrote his novel The Eye of the Storm in 1973, when he was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His extraordinarily accurate analysis of power and dependence presents a contemporary take on the King Lear theme. The timeless drama clearly shows that selfishness is a tragic mistake in life, and the worst storms often unfold in the midst of a single family and within a single person.