The Tree of Man by Patrick White
Published 1955 · 484 pages · 225,000 words · about 17 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Tree of Man to read?
The Tree of Man scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- White poetic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 70 out of 100
- Dense, lyrical prose.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Life, God, nature.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Australian bush.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Third person, omniscient.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Tree, man, God.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Reverent distance.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- Life passes.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Generational span.
How The Tree of Man is regarded
The Tree of Man holds a literary regard score of 57 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.