Peter Carey: A Literary Companion

Peter Carey

MCFARLAND LITERARY COMPANIONS BY MARY ELLEN SNODGRASS ¡. August Wilson (2004) 2. Barbara Kingsolver (2004) 3. Amy Tan (2004) 4. Walter Dean Myers (2006) 5. Kaye Gibbons (2007) 6. Jamaica Kincaid (2008) 8. Peter Carey (2010)

BY

PHYLLIS T. DIRCKS

7. Edward Albee (2010)

BY

ERIK HAGE

9. Cormac McCarthy (2010)

Peter Carey A Literary Companion MARY ELLEN SNODGRASS McFarland Literary Companions, 8

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Peter Carey : a literary companion / Mary Ellen Snodgrass. p. cm. — (McFarland literary companions ; 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4152-5 (softcover : 50# alkaline paper) 1. Carey, Peter, 1943 – — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Australia — In literature. I. Title. PR9619.3.C36Z85 2010 823'.914 — dc22 2009051317 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2010 Mary Ellen Snodgrass. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Peter Carey; background ©2009 Shutterstock Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

Acknowledgments I acknowledge the advice and research assistance of the following people and institutions: Mary Burazer, reference, Abbot Vincent Taylor Library Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, North Carolina

Tom Foley, Russell Latham, Liz MacKenzie, and Pat Stracey, reference, National Library of Australia, Canberra

Sophie Cunningham, editor, Meanjin, Carlton, Victoria

Gabriel Packard, coordinator, Creative Writing MFA Program, Hunter College, New York City

Arpita Deb, reference, Melbourne Library, Melbourne, Victoria

Rebecca Pearson, publicity, Faber & Faber, London, England

Jeremy Fisher, executive director, Australian Society of Authors, Strawberry Hills, New South Wales

Kimberley Walsh, editorial business manager, Vogue, Australia, Alexandria, New South Wales

I owe special thanks to local reference librarians Burl McCuiston of the Lenoir Rhyne University Library, Martin Otts and Mary Sizemore of the Patrick Beaver Library, and Wanda Rozzelle of the Catawba County Library. My work gets a collegial boost from the advice of my press agent, Joan Lail.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface

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Introduction

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Chronology of Carey’s Life and Works Carey Genealogy

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Peter Carey: A Literary Companion 33 Glossary

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Appendix A: Events in Carey’s History Appendix B: Writing and Research Topics Bibliography Index

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I’d like to write for as broad an audience as possible.... I really believe very, very firmly in the possibility of popular art that’s good in anybody’s terms. Peter Carey (1981)

You make all these choices about how you will thread these little lumps of things made up of 26 letters. Peter Carey (2008)

Preface For readers seeking a greater knowledge or understanding of Peter Carey’s contributions to humanist, Australian, and world literature, Peter Carey: A Literary Companion offers an introduction and guided overview. The text equips the reader, feminist, linguist, student, researcher, teacher, reviewer, and librarian with analysis of characters, plots, humor, symbols, and classic themes from the works of a bestselling, reader-pleasing author. The text opens with an annotated chronology of Carey’s life, Anglo-Australian heritage, early career in advertising, canon, and honoraria, followed by a family tree. The 87 A-toZ entries combine analysis from literary historians, book reviewers, and critics along with generous citations from primary and secondary sources and comparisons to classic and popular literature. Each entry concludes with selected source material on such subjects as vulnerability, siblings, music, order, reading, food, writing, and wisdom. Annotated charts elucidate the convoluted genealogies of eleven fictional and historical clans, particularly the varied paternities in the Kelly-Quinn clan. In addition to clearing up dates and events, the family trees account for the relationships between Maria Takis and Jack Catchprice, gay and straight alliances in the Chubb-McCorkle-Slater-Wode-Douglass genealogy, and the convoluted surrogate parenting of Che David Selkirk and Tristan Smith. Generous cross references point to divergent strands of thought and guide the reader into peripheral territory, e.g., from vengeance to violence, from powerlessness to vulnerability, from women to wisdom, and from belonging to self-esteem. Back matter is designed to aid the student, reviewer, and researcher. A glossary of terms enlightens readers to the significance of transportation by ute, the games of knuckles and conkers, the Japanese publication of manga and anime, and “wog,” a racial slur against non-white people. Appendix A: Events in Carey’s History orients the beginner with a time line of historical events and their intertextual importance to crises in the lives of fictional and historical figures, for example, the arrival of prison transportees to New South Wales, the formation of the Students for Democratic Society during the 1960s, introduction of rabbits to Australian ecology, and the hanging of Ned Kelly for thievery, murder, and bank robbery. The entries feature references to the works from which each event derives. A second appendix provides 44 topics for group or individual projects, composition, analysis, background material, enactment, and improvisation, notably, themes of problem solving and community spirit, contrasts of male and female parenting, evidence of the supernatural, and shifts in the family power structure.

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Back matter concludes with an exhaustive chronological listing of primary sources followed by general bibliography organized by each of the 18 Carey titles that the sources elucidate. Many entries derive from journal and periodical articles and reviews of Carey’s essays, novels, and short fiction in major newspapers from North America, Great Britain, and Australia. Secondary sources, particularly those by experienced reviewers, are useful for the study of works that have yet to merit thorough analysis in academic journals. A comprehensive index directs users of the literary companion to major and minor characters, events, historical eras and figures, movements, place names, Carey’s family and awards, published works, literary motifs, period terms, genres, and issues, e.g., Vance Joy and Yoshiyuki Tomino, Gallipoli and Tasmania’s Readers’ & Writers’ Festival, the Great Depression and Robert McNamara, “He Found Her in Late Summer” and “A Letter to Our Son,” Gothic and fable, education and dystopia, Cuchulainn and Bruder Mouse, and totalitarianism and World War II.

Introduction Peter Carey, a force for justice in world literature, directs the humanist’s crusade to uplift the humble and downtrodden. A native Australian, he fills his works with the perspective of an underappreciated South Pacific culture and its colonial history, from the threatened blackfellow Kumbaingiri Billy and his sexually abused aunt Mary to bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang of degraded Irish Catholic newcomers to New South Wales and the victims of a Queensland police raid on Crystal Community. Key to Carey’s canon are themes of industry, legitimacy, and achievement, the aims of the rejuvenated adman Harry Stanthorpe Joy, modernist painter Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone, survivalist Trevor Dobbs, and the stage actors at the Feu Follet Theatre. Carey fleshes out his casts of characters with the ambitious and prosperous alongside the naive, defeated, and underprivileged, a pairing that allies landlady Nancy Bowlby with six obese renters, journal editor Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass with poet Christopher Chubb, contestant Sam Kellow with chicken pox victim Wilfred Mifflin, and Vassar English professor Anna “Dial” Xenos with Che David Selkirk, the child of anarchists. Carey’s protagonists profit from education and opportunity to adapt and achieve in fast-paced and often corrupt socioeconomic milieus, the situations in the “Best Pet Shop in the World,” at Rankin Downs prison, in a Sydney tax office, during late-night gambling at a fan-tan parlor, and within Randwick parish, Sydney. Those characters who come of age with moral encouragement benefit their families and communities, including entrepreneur Charles Badgery, World War II survivor Mr. Yazaki, and Carey’s son Sam, a student of Japan’s graphic novels. The author writes realistically about the vulnerable who grow up rejected and belittled. Bound to negative emotions, they gravitate toward spite and violence, such as 16-year-old psychopath Benny Catchprice and the gangs of Franklin Heights, poisoner Kangaratnam “K. G.” Chomley, kidnapped boys exploited by Bishop Kiernan, ridiculers of teacher Turk Kershaw, and Bob McCorkle, the fabricated monster who stalks a hoaxer and abducts his infant daughter. Avoiding romanticism and sentimentality, Carey salutes the struggles of those who flounder against racism, orphaning, and tyranny, notably, ex-con Jack Maggs, chambermaid Mercy Larkin, Anglican minister Oscar Hopkins, student Tina, the jobless Alexander “Teddy” Finch, and herbalist Goon Tse Ying. From a feminist perspective, Carey’s dramatis personae favor stout-souled mothers, wives, and sisters. He honors women like fostering socialite Phoebe Daschle Selkirk, surrogate mother Roxanna Wonder Wilkinson, widows Mrs. Lim and Miriam Mason Chad-

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wick, abused housebreaker Sophina Smith, would-be country-western singer Cathy Catchprice McPherson, nurse Jacqui Lorraine, and Takashi’s grandmother for their maternal instincts. Other of his heroines shield the nuclear family from menace from without and dissension from within, the two-front battlefield surveyed by artist Vanessa Kellow, matriarch Rose Kaletsky, widow Molly McGrath, common-law wife Mary Hearn, and homebody Emma Badgery. His most admirable females possess the wisdom and agency to assert their aims, even in hopeless and corrupt milieus, such as art authenticator Marlene Cook Leibovitz, body swapper Carla, abortion technician Nile, and Mary Oates, wife of an adulterer and scoundrel. Carey’s tough women exert skills at healing and socialization and prepare the young through humor, example, and cautionary storytelling, a strength of widow Mrs. Gleason, housekeeper Mrs. Williams, and Ellen Quinn Kelly, a disseminator of Irish folklore and hero stories. Their contributions to dynasties invest society with perspective on past barbarity and hope for the powerless, the strengths of beekeeper Honey Barbara, tax auditor Maria Takis, self-martyred advertiser Bettina “Betty” McPhee Joy, proto-feminist Elizabeth Fisher Leplastrier, and her industrialist daughter Lucinda, a champion of laborers’ rights. Through altruism and sisterhood, women like actor-troupe manager Felicity “Flick” Smith, student Susan Selkirk, and self-starter Phoebe McGrath Badgery reclaim their birthright from a variety of assaults— imperialism, bondage, misogyny, and the male dominance for which Australia is noted. For these memorable creations, the response to Carey’s writings remains overwhelmingly positive. His penchant for irony and satire bemuses readers and stirs them to view the human situation as a kaleidoscopic series of misadventures and challenges, as with his glimpse of an abortive aircraft industry, the bankruptcy of the Prince Rupert Glassworks, the military guardianship of an American-Australian border, and the diminution of an Australian modernist painter. Carey’s promotion of integrity in the arts begins with his own respect for literature and extends to a range of creative endeavors, including Lilly Danko’s showcasing of an exotic bird, Felicity Smith’s run for public office, intercultural exchange in Tokyo, and Jack Maggs’ brick factory. Ambitious and imaginative, the author applies postmodern techniques and subtle nuance to expound on ordinary life, raising from ignominy the pathetic efforts of Tristan Smith to act, the fight of Oscar Hopkins for validation as an Anglican minister, the negotiations of Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass to save her literary journal, and the mystic comments of autistic observer Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone. From depictions of perverse situations, Carey instructs bibliophiles on farranging connections, from the pent-up rage of transported criminals and the frustrations of the learning disabled to the mad extremes of Harvard radicals during the Vietnam War era. For good reason, Carey has garnered extensive awards and honors for his unique surveys of humankind.

Chronology of Carey’s Life and Works Adept at fable, fantasy, satire, and irony, Peter Carey wields his scathing fiction against society’s ills, especially those that impact his homeland, Australia. In his words, “I have made a whole career out of making my anxieties get up and walk around” (Carey, 1994, 342). By subverting literary convention, he puts tone, atmosphere, image, diction, character, and action to new uses. Novelist John Updike lauded the expatriate writer for using his distance from Australia “to contemplate and reshape some notable legends of his homeland” (Harford, 2006, 118). For surrealism and post-colonial parody, Carey has earned comparison to Thomas Berger, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Charles Dickens, Gunter Grass, John Irving, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie.

May 7, 1943 Australian writer Peter Philip “Pete” Carey is a native of Bacchus Marsh, a working-class rural town of 4,000 located 33 miles west of Melbourne, Victoria, near the island continent’s southeastern shore. He describes his grandparents as central to his life and as important as birth parents. His paternal grandmother, Edith Carey, won a beach contest for the shortest woman; her husband taught the author about chutzpah and showmanship. Aviation innovator Robert Graham “R. G.” Carey of Warrnambool, was an old-school islander descended from Irish horse traders and married to a Cockney from London. In addition to owning a stable and operating a taxi in Port Melbourne, R. G. held Australia’s first commercial flying permit, delivered the nation’s first airmail, and owned the island’s first airfield. He piloted a Bleriot XI monoplane from Adelaide to Gawler on November 23, 1917. The plane survives on display in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Carey cherished coddling from his maternal grandparents. His grandmother, Ada Louisa Roberts Warriner of Warrnambool, was a rural schoolteacher of Welsh descent; his paternal grandfather, John Thomas Warriner, a teacher from Camperdown, thought of England as “home,” a sentiment shared with Lucinda Leplastrier, a co-protagonist of Carey’s neo-Victorian novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988, 168, 194) and the title figure in Jack Maggs (1997). Warriner disdained their daughter’s choice of a “bally little Irishman” for a husband (Blakeney, 2006). Of his grandfather’s affection, Carey remarked, “After school I’d spend a lot of time with him shooting rabbits and collecting cow shit to make fertiliser, getting kindling — and he loved me. Not that my parents didn’t, but there’s a really uncritical love that grandparents bestow,” a motif he creates in His Illegal Self (2008) (“Writer’s,” 2006). The author described his childhood in terms of opportunity: “The period that I grew up

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in was really culturally impoverished, very insular, threatened” (Gourevitch, 2007, 528). He recalled an uncomplicated town: “one main street with the shops, a lot of farmers, a coal mine, a brick works, and a lot of the people were laborers for a living” (Polito, 1996). He described laboring-class classmates whose “fathers drove trucks, or worked in the coal mine or the Darley Brick Kiln” (Munro, 1976, 4). After working as a chauffeur for a Chinese herbalist named Goon, the model for Goon Tse Ying in Illywhacker (1985), Carey’s father managed P. S. Carey Motors, a dealer for General Motors that the couple cobbled together in their backyard during the Great Depression. The author credits his father for being “a wonderful, wonderful man who was kind and funny with a lot of courage and humor” despite a limited education (Koval, 1997, 675). The family — including Peter’s 11-year-old sister Patricia “Trish” and 10-year-old brother Paul — lived upstairs over the spare parts inventory, which his mother managed. Because of the age differences in siblings, Peter remarked, “In a sense I’m like an only child” (Blakeney, 2006). Peter’s father, Percival Stanley “Percy” Carey, who quit school at age 14, had limited reading skills. The author recalled, “My father would stand at the window in his pyjamas at 3 A.M., looking out the window and worrying about the cars he had to sell” (Taylor, 2008). Carey’s mother, Helen Jean “Nell” Warriner Carey, who completed one year at a private academy, was a strong, aggressive mother and a touchstone for Carey’s characters Felicity “Flick” Smith, Maria Takis, and Anna “Dial” Xenos. The Careys employed Peter’s brother, sister, and brotherin-law in a business promoted during pub meetings and on house calls. They were obsessed with autos and discussed them constantly. Because of his work milieu, Percy Carey became an alcoholic, a colorful local whom the author reprised in Little Titch, a character in Illywhacker. Carey remembers Percy fondly for sharing the family’s limited shelf of books, which included Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1862), Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) and JustSo Stories (1902), and Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding (1918). The author reminisced, “One of the great pleasures when on holiday was that my father would read Biggles books too,” a reference to a fictional British pilot and air fighter created by W. E. Johns (Wroe, 2008).

Mid–1940s Carey lived among people who gathered around the pianola to drink to Broadway show tunes until 3:00 A.M. and who, in more cerebral setting, discussed Australian history and legend. As he described in Wrong about Japan (2004), he grew up playing with Japanese occupation currency left over from World War II. Of his national pride, he divulged, “We were brought up to believe that there was something inherently vulgar and second rate in the Australian accent” (Polito, 1996). The slur on the national language influenced his themes, characterizations, and voicing.

1948 At age five, Carey entered Bacchus Marsh State School #28, Victoria’s oldest state school. He reminisced, “I was the happy camper: a lot of energy and enthusiasm and getting on with it” (Koval, 1997, 674). Gripping his imagination, the Lady Alice Northcote Farm School at Glenmore, a branch of Dr. Thomas John Barnardo’s Homes founded in 1937 by a Dublin-born philanthropist and physician, sheltered orphaned and destitute children transported from English cities. After Barnardo’s death in 1905, the orphanages rescued a total of 60,000 urban waifs and remained in use until the late 1960s. In the novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988), the author reflected on Australia’s urchins and repined, “Our history is a history of orphans” (Carey, 1988, 329). In His Illegal Self (2008), he mentions Barnardo specifically in the reflections of orphaned hippie Trevor Dobbs, whom priests abduct from England to take to Dr. Barnardo’s Homes in Australia, a 20th-century kidnapping of children for press gangs on a par with the immuring of prisoners in Aussie penal colonies the previous century. Carey developed a local speech pattern that informed and cadenced his work, especially the outlaw dialogue from the 1870s in True History of the Kelly Gang. He came to admire the lore of outlaw Edward “Ned” Kelly (1854 –1880) along with the failed Gallipoli campaign from April 25, 1915, to January 9, 1916, and the death of race horse Phar Lap on April 5, 1932, as

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Australia’s classic trio of stories about loss. He recalled as a sign of local culture regular visits to a display of Phar Lap stuffed and posed in a glass case.

1949 Viewed in adulthood, school pictures returned Carey to his childhood milieu, where he once pumped gas for patrons of his father’s gas station. The portraiture reminded him of English children in the late 1940s: “Real working class kids: ill-fitting clothes, old, rumpled; but the faces, there are little men in there, staring out of children’s faces” (Polito, 1996). To reviewer Ken Brass, the author was “the ‘Noble Savage’ of Australian literature, a writer who “hadn’t read a book until he was eighteen” (Lamb, 1992, 3). 1952 –1953 In the post–World War II era, Carey developed peacetime notions of heroism. When he began reading on his own, he saved coins in a jar and accompanied his mother to Griffith’s Bookstore, a landmark on Ryrie Street in Geelong. He invested his savings in hardcover war stories such as Patrick Robert Reid’s The Colditz Story (1952) and Heinz Knoke’s I Flew for the Fuhrer (1953). 1954 At age 11, Carey boarded at Geelong Grammar School, a private co-educational academy 40 miles south of Bacchus Marsh where boys with hyphenated surnames read the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, and D. H. Lawrence and performed Handel’s Messiah each year. Known as “little Athens” and Australia’s Eton, the elite campus opened in 1855 as a Church of England bastion for boys. Although the tuition was £600 per year, Nell Carey insisted on giving Peter a boost in society. He described her urge as “just really wanting to give everything to your child, being a working woman” (“Writer’s,” 2006). However, according to critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, a reviewer for the Financial Times, “everything” turned out to be a will-o-the-wisp: “Geelong was a place where teachers and pupils spoke in pastiche English home-county accents, as if repressing their true Australian selves. Carey’s sudden gentrification amplified his feelings of dislocation,” a rootlessness that he captures in the character of sevenyear-old Che Selkirk, protagonist of His Illegal Self (2008) (Hunter-Tilney, 2008). The student body, aged five to twelve, consisted of the children of prominent Australians and promoted British accents. Of the starchy atmosphere, the author remembered, “In the seven years I was there, no one ever called me Peter” (Wroe, 2001, 6). Carey hung out with boys from small towns rather than with the sons of gentry, whom he satirized as the “squatocracy”— a ruling class that flaunted itself as the island nation’s privileged landowners (Ibid.). A point in his favor was his cracking voice, evidence of early maturity. He became self-conscious about his Australian accent after a schoolmate informed him, “Only Americans say ‘cassel,’ we says ‘car-sul’” (Munro, 1976, 4). On return home, he felt bored and alienated from home and retreated into comic books. He compared his forebears to the lower class, a trait he has in common with Philip “Pip” Pirrip, the protagonist of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). In retrospect, Carey gained a sense of island identity: “There was this weird sense of Australia’s place in the colonial pecking order. These Australians were acting like 19th century British snobs, looking down on Americans as vulgar colonials. It was grotesque” (Polito, 1996). From reflections on school trauma, the author outlined for his fiction a series of orphaned characters— Jack Maggs, Henry Phipps, Ned Kelly, Oscar Hopkins, Lucinda Leplastrier, Tristan Smith, Tina, Che David Selkirk — and a view of Australia as an orphaned country of convicts, indentured laborers, soldiers, and uprooted aborigines. He came to view his creation of parentless children as “a birthmark of a trauma,” a reference to the helter-skelter population of the island with British criminals and soldiers (Taylor, 2008). Initially, he chose not to seek psychotherapy “because it is better not to disturb the sediment that I feed on” (Wroe, 2001, 6). Later, he was more amenable to the subject of counseling to ease childhood hurts inflicted by snobs. 1959 To Carey’s claim that he failed English literature, his teacher, Michael Collins Perrse, attested that Peter was the only pupil who never received lower than an A during his junior

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year. The next year, he wrote for the school review and surprised his friends by composing a parody from the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady (1956). School dabblings stirred no urge to write professionally. He left a coming-of-age experience he dismissed as a “rotten love affair” (Nicklin, 1975, 3).

1960 Carey graduated from high school with a yen to become a chemist. He explained, “What interested me was not only the rational structure of things and how they are made, but also their mystery” (Wroe, 2001, 6). He identified his curiosity about enigmas as a love of science rather than an incipient humanism.

Summer 1960 Carey described himself “an enthusiast, a compulsive talker, a would-be cartoonist” (Carey, 1995, 54). In Theft: A Love Story, he depicted his lack of education in the arts— “being so far outside the world of art or even knowing those possibilities exist” (“Writer’s,” 2006). He began writing poetry and reading the Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), which featured late Victorian, Edwardian, and early modern poets W. H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. His favorite works were T. S. Eliot’s modernist classic The Wasteland (1922) and the first published sections of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1922–1945).

1961 Rather than follow friends to Melbourne University, the author studied organic chemistry and zoology at Monash University, a newly opened school accommodating 363 students in Clayton, a southeastern suburb of Melbourne. He pondered the uniqueness of the DNA double helix and “the sheer beautiful logic of the periodic table and the exceptions to its logic. That sense of structure determining behaviour was what I hoped to find in science and eventually did find in writing” (Wroe, 2008). While musing on a career as an organic chemist, he realized, “I didn’t understand anything about it and didn’t care” (Munro, 1976, 5). With pals from the zoology department, he “got pissed in the pub” and ventured into escapism through sex and alcohol (Ibid.) He faked physics experiments on gravitational force to give him more time with a girlfriend two years his senior — Leigh Weetman, a German and philosophy major from Dandenong, a community in southeastern Melbourne. She quit school to become a photographer’s assistant. An accident in Carey’s 1949 Armstrong Siddeley resulted in a torn scalp and broken front tooth and preceded his failure of all of his first term exams. The fiasco gave him an excuse for ending his schooling. He explained to Boris Kashka, interviewer for New York, “I was finished with college, and college was finished with me” (Kachka, 2005, 76). His father, a survivor of hard economic times, feared that his son would never earn a living. Influenced by Leigh’s brother, an advertiser, Carey abandoned plans for an education in zoology for a career in advertising, which critic Karen Lamb identified as “an industry of pseudo-creative and manipulative social strategists” (Lamb, 1992, 19). Along with news reportage, ads comprised most of the local contribution to Australian radio, television, and print media. He later identified innovative instincts and talents for compression from advertising that influenced his fiction. He described his specialty as the “sharp end of business” (Hassall, 1989, 637). At the time, Carey had “fuck-all political education, no reading, no nothing,” but the beginnings of self-invention (Munro, 1976, 11). He introduced himself at agencies with his portfolio of university newspaper articles, comic strips, and original verse. Although he left behind friends who disdained commerce, particularly tradesmen, he felt shame free: “I didn’t think there was any need to be guilty about selling anything to anyone” (Polito, 1996). Two decades later, he bandied with interviewer Philip Neilsen the public misperceptions of advertising as manipulation. Carey claimed that critics “overestimate its power and in doing this, mystify it” (Neilsen, 1981, 193). In a conservative era when “the bars closed at 6 P.M., there were three channels on TV, and the gas stations shut on Sunday,” Carey’s love life precipitated a choice that haunted him in adulthood (Carey, 2007). After four months of dating, Leigh realized she was two months pregnant. He consulted his family doctor for help and received a plain piece of paper with the

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name of an abortifacient on it. When Carey presented the paper to a pharmacist in a large city, the man threatened to call the police. Carey fled under compulsion from “the feeling of panic, of wrong, of impending disaster” (Carey, 1995, 60). In secret, Carey accompanied Leigh to Melbourne to obtain an abortion at an illegal abortion clinic. The procedure, costing £50 and requiring her mother’s consent, aborted the fetus at three months. Carey obtained the money from a sympathetic zoology professor. With his future mother-in-law, he sat on a park bench while Leigh was in surgery. When she returned to the waiting room, he realized, “She was strangely unchanged and yet also changed absolutely. She was pale and shaky, lost in her own pain” (Carey, 1994). He revisited the subject in Jack Maggs in the character Sophina Smith, whose five-month fetus lies discarded in a cess pit with a cut on its face.

1962 At age 19, Carey lived at Oakleigh and began a five-year stint as office clerk and executive assistant for a Melbourne advertising agency, Walker Robertson Maguire. His first employer was a former Communist, who hired a stable of young leftist writers. As an apprentice copywriter, Carey wrote for 18 months before composing successful ads. Perhaps because of his father’s background in sales, Carey got a “certain sort of animal pleasure” out of formulating marketing jingles for Lindeman’s Winery and Volkswagen (Munro, 1976, 6). For the winery, he originated the slogan, “You make us smile, Dr. Lindeman,” a benign way to say “It gets you drunk” (Grimes, 1992, C11). The author began educating himself under the mentorship of comic novelist Morris Lurie and Barry Oakley, a 30-year-old English teacher and playwright who commuted to the office with Carey. The neophyte viewed the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman and a Melbourne exhibit of the landscapes of New Zealand painter Sidney Nolan at the Georges Gallery on Collins Street. For literary basics, the author, like the under-educated park gardener in his story “The Chance” (1974), gobbled up contemporary writers— Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, James Patrick Donleavy, Jean Genet, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka, and Jack Kerouac and the poetry of Ezra Pound. Contributing to his shelf were review copies of current literature. He also read the Jerilderie Letter, an historic text written by outlaw Ned Kelly that influenced the idiom and events of True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). The apologia so excited Carey that he archived it: “I typed out all 8,000 words and carried it around with me for years” (Bemrose, 2001, 2). Carey was awed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). He gushed, “I remember reading these authors and thinking of it as the first week of my life” (Meyer, 1997, 83). He found great beauty in modernism, particularly James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), an innovative family study that “burnt into” Carey (Gussow, 1998). He exulted, “To read Faulkner for the first time was for me like discovering another planet. The pleasure of that language, the politics of giving voice to the voiceless” (Wroe, 2001, 6). Book discussions began Carey’s readying for tackling the literary world one on one. He elaborated, “That’s the way it should be — you do it alone, you learn to endure loneliness.” He eventually made a pilgrimage to Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home at Oxford, Mississippi. He later admitted in “The Book That Changed My Life” his reliance on reading: “We don’t come to these things without a history and Faulkner’s part of my history” (Carey, 2006, 52).

1963 Carey discovered Bob Dylan at Melbourne Town Hall, where folksinger Pete Seeger introduced Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” The music became Carey’s morning rejuvenator for its inventive style. 1964 Under the influence of Lurie and Oakley’s publishing efforts, Carey concluded, “If those buggers are doing it then I can do it too” (Munro, 1976, 6). He created cold fictional settings and assumed that readers felt the same empathy for characters that the author did. He identified himself as a writer and earned a first rejection slip from Evergreen Review. He admitted to

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“something glorious and futile in attempting to make Australian literature when, as everybody in London knew, Australian literature did not exist” (Carey, 2007). He didn’t anticipate earning a living from royalties until after he won the first Booker Prize. He recalled, “People would say, ‘Have you published?’ and they’d look at me like one more scamming copywriter pretending I was going to do something that I’d never do, and it used to make me very angry. And finally the lie that I was telling came true” (“Writer’s,” 2006).

Spring–late fall 1964 Carey began living with Leigh. At the end of six months, his parents goaded him into a permanent commitment. He promised them that he would marry and begin writing a novel. He dismissed short fiction as insignificant: “A story wasn’t really a serious thing. A novel was” (Munro, 1976, 7). His earliest long works received critical identification as serialized novels or extended novellas.

November 7, 1964 At age 21, Carey wed Leigh and settled on three-quarters of an acre at Virginia Court in Montmorency. On the Olivetti Lettera 24 at his desk in the living room, he began his writing career with day, night, and weekend composition of short fiction and manuscripts three pages at a clip. The process required two or three revisions and no editing. The regimen was exhausting. He acknowledged the role of the subconscious mind in bursts of genius “that happened like that — quite intuitively.... No pre-planning at all” (Munro, 1976, 8). Of the choice of speculative fiction, the author characterized his concern for his own time period: “What you look at in the future is contained in the present” (Munro, 1976, 5). He approached the surreal by extending reality. For self-discipline, he drew on schoolboy work habits and chortled, “That’s the one great gift that I got from Geelong Grammar” (“Writer’s,” 2006). The stories tended toward contemporary science and followed Faulkner’s pattern of shifting points of view. Carey commented, “What interested me was not only the rational structure of things and how they are made, but also their mystery,” the focus that had originally drawn him to chemistry and zoology (Wroe, 2001, 6). Barry Oakley passed the stories to Australian Playboy, Granta, Manic Magazine, Meanjin, Nation Review, Overland, Stand, Sun News Pictorial, and Tabloid Story. 1965 –1968 Carey experienced a series of setbacks, including a failed competition for the Stanford Writing Scholarship. He began composing “Starts Here, Ends Here” and continued until 1967, when he published in Australian Letters a tense vignette, “She Wakes.” The shortshort portrait of exploitive romance derived from the unpublished manuscript Slides from a Magic Lantern Show. For three months, the author traveled Europe and the Middle East to escape Australia’s “self-hating environment” (Grimes, 1992, C15). 1966 Carey received rejections from Macmillan, Meanjin, Overland, and Paris Review. He contributed a sketch to director George Whaley’s anti–Vietnam War stage revue, and began writing The Futility Machine.

November 28, 1966 Undeterred, Carey submitted four short pieces to Paris Review. After two years’ work, he stowed Contacts, his apprentice novel, in a drawer. An extract, his first published story, reached print in Under Twenty-Five: An Anthology (1966).

1967 Australian arts maven Geoffrey Dutton considered publishing Carey’s second novel, The Futility Machine, but disappointed the author. Introduced to the vagaries of the print industry, Carey groused, “I was never, ever after that ever, ever excited, ever again, about being published” (Meyer, 1997, 83). He worked on undated stories “Separate,” “Shapes,” “Up and Down the Beach,” “A Man Needs His Dreams,” “One. Two,” and “Osmosis.” He issued a subtle short work, “She Wakes,” in the journal Australian Letters. He traveled France, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Italy, and Spain.

1969 The Careys expatriated to England, with what Peter described as “a certain degree of self-hatred” (Harford, 2006, 111). He returned to copywriting, first for the Design Group, then

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a half year later for Colman Prentis & Varley, Great Britain’s largest global advertising agency. He later described such work in My Life as a Fake (2003) as “a hateful job, nagging and whining, threatening and pushing, like a parking cop” (Carey, 2003, 249). Settled in London and enrolled for six months in an alternative film school at Notting Hill, he produced three disjointed novels influenced by the idealism of Federico Fellini’s film 8 1 ⁄2. The Gollancz office returned Carey’s first submission unpublished. The next novel, Wog, also got a post-negotiation turndown for being too avant garde (Lamb, 1992, 8). His agent, Deborah Rogers, was so bewildered by the manuscript that she declared it unliterary. Carey later referred to his inauspicious literary beginnings as his “grubby past” (Coe, 1996). To journalist Sonia Harford, he enlarged on ancestors “who were ripped out and sent away, and we were in the second-best place, the worst place.... These anxieties are based in a historical trauma and a deep belief in a second-rateness which of course no one will own to” (Harford, 2006, 112). Although the preliminary works never made it into print, he exulted in what he had learned from writing them: “As a novelist, I can see into the souls of others ... that’s a gift we have. I can just look at people and know what it is they are feeling, and thinking” (Wagner, 2008). He enjoyed the moment of longer fiction, which opened his mind to creative invention.

1970 Despair and exhaustion sent Carey home to Australia. Of his first novel, he admitted, “I’m never going to do anything like that again” (Munro, 1976, 7). He returned to Virginia Court, where he began writing “what if ” plots, beginning with “Room No. 5 (Escribo)” and including the stories “Crabs,” “Joe,” and “Structure.” While Leigh worked for the Red Cross, he fashioned short pieces in the style of Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths (1962) and Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959). He produced stories at a rapid pace, but slowed to establish his own rhythm. He justified his need to pace himself: “Short stories sap you, they are very demanding” (Munro, 1976, 7). Nonetheless, he felt that he “could go on forever” (Ibid.). Carey suffered a second rejection for the Stanford Writing Scholarship. He took advertising jobs in Melbourne at Masius Wynne-Williams, the nation’s third largest advertiser, and at Strauss, Palmer and Single, McAllan (Spasm) and Mooney-Grey in Sydney and issued avantgarde short works—“Eight Parts of a Whole,” “Interview with Yourself,” and “Structure” in the first edition of Manic Magazine. His father declined to read the stories; his mother stopped reading after sampling the opening paragraphs. Of his two siblings, only his sister Trish plunged wholeheartedly into his works. Autumn 1970 In her fifth month of pregnancy, Leigh Weetman Carey went into labor after midnight and lost her first child, a stillborn daughter. The premature birth alerted the couple to cervical damage caused by Leigh’s abortion a decade earlier. Later their twins— a boy and girl — died shortly after birth. At the mortuary, his mother-in-law urged him to name the infants, but he chose not to. He later admitted, “I wish only that we had honoured those children with a plaque. I will always wish that, forever” (Taylor, 2008). He ended work on a fourth novel, Adventures Aboard the Marie Celeste, an episodic utopian fantasy that he polished for submission in 1974. In mid–February 1974, the editor rejected the manuscript. Carey concurred that “it was not (and never could be) a good book” (O’Donohue, 1985, 107).

1972 During the Malaysian rainy season, Carey and Leigh visited Kuala Lumpur, the eventual setting for My Life as a Fake. According to “Take My Word” (2005), an article for Budget Travel, in Penang, the couple stayed at a blue-walled atrium house, the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, located in Georgetown. While he tried to get a job, they relaxed indoors amid palatial surroundings and 19th-century mosaics, tiling, objets d’art, and stained glass. The author reminisced about good food, likeable people, and a diverse, complex society and admitted, “It’s a place that I once wanted to live” (Murphy, 2003). Spring 1972 Peter sought a permit to work in Indonesia, but had to give up his ambition. He repatriated and returned to advertising. For Overland, he wrote “Crabs,” which he set in

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Clayton, a southeastern community of Melbourne. The narrative retaliated against cop corruption by depicting a security guard at a drive-in supplementing his income by stealing a bumper bar from a car. The fictional motif exhibits elements of what analyst Peter Pierce calls a “lost child narrative,” a subgenre that dominates Carey’s fiction (Pierce, 2001, 74).

March 1972 “Peeling,” a macabre gender study that appeared in Meanjin, was a two-stage project that Carey began the previous year and rushed to completion in a late-night intuitive flurry. Within months, editor Frank Moorhouse added the story to his collection, Coast to Coast (1973). December 1972 As a critique of the American military presence in Australia, Carey published “A Windmill in the West” in Meanjin. He based the story on a real account of a plane downed on a road in Central Australia, where an armed American sentry kept onlookers at bay.

December 29, 1972 “Room No. 5 (Escribo)” appeared in Tabloid Story. 1973 To avoid chronic unhappiness, Peter separated from Leigh, resided at Carlton in Melbourne, and twice traveled Indonesia, a source of his criticism of tourism in “American Dreams” (1974). He was bemused by seeing fat soldiers in uniform at the airport, the impetus to his first short fiction anthology. He realized, “I wasn’t trying to change the world, but my work was coming out of looking at the way things are and asking what if they were done differently” (Wroe, 2008). An imported copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), combined with a reading of avant-garde theories of French scenarist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, helped Carey sort out his apprehensions about plot and characters. He completed “Happy Story,” “The Mad Puzzle King,” “Around the Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Ran,” and “Joe,” which first appeared in Australian New Writing (1973).

January 3, 1973 “Conversation with Unicorns” appeared in Sun News Pictorial, a morning daily tabloid in Melbourne issued from 1922 to 1990, and, three years later, in Damien Broderick’s collection The Zeitgeist Machine: A New Anthology of Science Fiction (1976). 1974 After Leigh and Peter Carey “just sort of grew slightly different ways,” they divorced (Coe, 1996). He resided at 9A Wharf Road in Balmain, an artsy waterfront suburb of West Sydney. He drove daily to North Sydney in his Jensen Healey. A quarter century later, he mused on the socio-economic makeup of “Le Ghetto de Balmain”—“vanilla slices in the bakers’ windows, bad restaurants, bleak beer-sour pubs patronised by dock workers, communists, crims, cops and the odd mythologiser” (Carey, 1989, 30). During his management of Grey’s Advertising Agency, he grumbled, “I worked like a maniac” (Blakeney, 2006). Carey supported the pacifist left and joined the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, a pacifist movement mentioned in his business satire “The Puzzling Nature of Blue” (1974). He later chuckled, “I was one of those idiots who thought the Cultural Revolution was a fantastic thing. It’s embarrassing” (Wroe, 2001, 6). In a period of anti-establishment angst, he published The Fat Man in History, a collection of 12 monochromatic conflict stories, which made him an immediate literary find. Fostering the project and other national ventures, the Australia Council promoted independent publishing and small presses. Critics wrangled over Carey’s vision and skill. Some found his stories sterile and passionless, his anger subverted, and his emotional energy repressed. In a critique for Overland, Rod McChonchie charged the author with a self-conscious trendiness. John Sutherland, a reviewer for TLS, described Carey as an angry, gloomy author who is “aggressively Australian” (Sutherland, 1976, 445). The ninth story, “American Dreams,” pictures the arrival of American tourists in an Australian hamlet. The story grazed fact so closely that Carey’s mother feared a public retaliation. In a public reading of the story in 2006 at a Barnes and Noble stage he shared with Colum McCann and Joyce Carol Oates, the author felt dissatisfied at word repetitions and

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wished he could repair the original text. He later identified the story as one of his favorites, along with “Crabs,” “Peeling,” and the title story. Within two years, his stories found a place in English curricula at Australian colleges.

February 1, 1974 Carey also wrote “Life and Death in the Southside Pavilion,” “Report on the Shadow Industry,” “Withdrawal,” “Kristu-Du,” and “American Dreams,” which he published in Nation Review on February 1 as “The Wall That Gleason Built.” The latter story showcases the author’s boyhood memories of Mason’s Lane, Bald Hill, and Eleven Mile Creek and of Grant and Gell streets, parallel north-south thoroughfares in Bacchus Marsh.

1975 “Do You Love Me?” appeared in Tabloid Story and, two years later, in editor Brian Kiernan’s The Most Beautiful Lies (1977), which also anthologized “American Dreams,” “Crabs,” and “Roses.” “I Know You Can Talk” and “The Last Days of a Famous Mime” featured in Stand. Four years later, the latter was collected in War Crimes. November 11, 1975 Carey viewed the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s leftliberal Social Democratic government as the result of an American intrusion on Australian government. Because Australia recognized China’s sovereignty and abandoned the Vietnam War, the nation began to achieve its promise as an independent state. Carey returned to the issue of national autonomy while writing The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. December 18, 1975 Living Daylights published “The Mad Puzzle King.” December 31, 1975 Carey issued “A Million Dollars’ Worth of Amphetamines” in Nation Review. He refined his skill at naturalism in “In Loving Memory of Luke McClosky” as a composition exercise. He explained, “If I’m going to write a novel, I want to use naturalistic dialogue and that sort of thing plus all the other fantasy, fantastic stuff, and weld them all together into one beautiful great huge novel” (Munro, 1976, 10). 1976 After co-scripting “Happy Story” as the screenplay Low Flying with director Ray Lawrence, Carey moved from Birchgrove to Starlight, a commune outside Coolum in Yandina, north of Brisbane, Queensland. The setting offered Carey time and leisure to develop his talents. He chose to abandon conventional society at the urging of painter Margot Hutcheson, who conceived the idea after admiring a photograph of hut life in a health-food store in Sydney. In a pair of shacks in a grove of fruit trees, Carey enjoyed a tropical environment free of telephones and open to Hindu meditation, a detachment he later captured in the pot smoking of Daphne and Eddie Rayner during an apocalyptic end-time in “Withdrawal” (1974). He loved the terrain: “It’s just gorgeous. You live in this rainforest, in the afternoon you go to the beach” (Wagner, 2008). While the community bathed naked, locals hid in the brush and snickered, a gap in social class that he describes in His Illegal Self (2008), in which hardware store clerks, “those good daddies,” fantasize about “the naked bottoms of hippie women at the swimming hole” (Carey, 2008, 142). He reminisced, “Apart from the horrendous Queensland police, who were corrupt and venal, it really was like living in paradise” (Wiener, 2008). In Bliss (1981), Carey restated the charge that police officers “bust poor people” and “beat the shitter out of ” suspects without legitimate cause (Carey, 1981, 259, 263). Another scenario in Illywhacker dramatizes intimidation of Communists, whom the police force out of Bendigo within the hour. Among Maoist hippies who supported themselves on unemployment checks and one American pot grower, Carey learned carpentry and roofing, skills that he satirizes in “The Uses of Williamson Wood” (1979). During the writing of Illywhacker, he shared with protagonist Herbert Badgery a pleasure in building houses. Following early morning gardening, for three hours a day, he recalled, “Margot would paint in the bedroom hut and I would write in the living room hut” (Blakeney, 2006). After giving up a steady job, he commuted by plane only once a month to work for five days at a time at Grey advertising in Sydney. Carolyn See, a

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reviewer for the Washington Post, joked, “He got flak for both those things—for being both a hippie and a capitalist” (See, 1995, F2). Along the highway, he saw hippie mothers and their protective sons trudging home from festivals: “They were tired. They didn’t have any money. There was something very touching about that” (Wiener, 2008). At age 65, he looked back on counterculture serenity: “People had simple needs. I used to write in the morning and read at night” (Freeman, 2008). He composed multi-dimensional short fiction for War Crimes and the novel Bliss, a masterwork of Juvenilian satire, 20th-century caricature, and haphazard escapism generated by the author’s involvement in anti–Vietnam radicalism. The effort left him dissatisfied and self-critical: “I can’t stand reading proofs. I can’t even stand reading a story after it’s been typed” (Munro, 1976, 11).

April 23, 1976 Carey’s “Roses” was issued in Nation Review, but later as “Fragrance of Roses” in War Crimes, a story of penance in the life of a torturer at Auschwitz. 1977 During a fertile period, Carey finished “The Chance,” which he began before 1970 and published in War Crimes. He later named “The Chance” and “War Crimes” as his favorites in the anthology.

September 8, 1977 Nation Review, a leftist weekly, issued “The Cosmic Pragmatist.” 1978 Carey published “War Crimes” and “Concerning the Greek Tyrant” in editor Michael Wilding’s anthology The Tabloid Story Pocket Book (1978). In a witty comment on the unnamed accountant in “War Crimes,” Carey joshed: “It’s important to draw the distinction between the psychotic personality of the narrator and the pleasantly neurotic character of the writer” (Neilsen, 181, 193).

1979 The anthology War Crimes earned Carey an initial critical regard for dark humor and for predicting global capitalism, the “me” generation, and the administrations of U. S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Among the featured stories were “American Dreams,” “The Chance,” “Do You Love Me?,” “Exotic Pleasures” “The Journey of a Lifetime,” “Kristu-Du,” “A Schoolboy Prank,” “Ultra-Violet Light,” “The Uses of Williamson Wood,” “War Crimes,” and “He Found Her in Late Summer,” which first appeared in Winter’s Tales (1979). Carey lauded expatriate Adelaide painter Jeffrey Smart for visualizing on the cover the author’s modernist intent. Carey and Lawrence wrote a screen version of “Happy Story” and adapted “Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion” into the film Dancing on the Water (1980).

September 1979 Australian Playboy published “Exotic Pleasures” as “The Pleasure Bird.” 1980 After Grey Advertising fired Carey and his partner Bani McSpedden, the two opened McSpedden Carey Advertising Consultants in Chippendale, a southern suburb of Sydney. Carey put in only two afternoons per week at the office and split the profits with McSpedden.

May 1980 The anthology War Crimes won Carey’s first New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award of $5,000. In an interview with Philip Neilsen, the author acknowledged his creation of a “[Monty] Python style of absurdist humour,” particularly the construction of pointless or ineffectual inventions and schemes (Nielsen, 1981, 191). In his self-deprecatory manner, Carey added that critical analysis tended to demote his writing to “a sort of ‘geewhiz,-isn’t-that-interesting’ state of idiocy” (Ibid.). The retort is typical of his reaction to academic deconstruction of his fiction. Summer 1980 Carey began his first novel, Bliss, a satire of consumerism originally titled Waiting for the Barbarians, then Knocking on Heaven’s Door and A Wonderful Fool. For background material, he drew on the practical, functional aspects of big business and deal making. In an interview with John Maddocks for Southerly, the author described his work as a naturalistic love story based on the blend of the real and the imaginary concocted by Gabriel

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García Márquez. Carey’s motivation was a pervasive unease: “The world suddenly seemed a very terrifying and unsafe place” (Blakeney, 2006). He planned to fill a 200,000-word satire of the advertising profession with round characters and “a lot more humour (one of my great undiscovered talents)” (Neilsen, 1981, 193). On July 23, 1980, Carey’s editor, Craig Munro, lauded the first two-thirds of the text, but expressed doubts about the upbeat conclusion.

1981 The author settled in the Bellingen Valley at Gleniffer in northern New South Wales half way between Brisbane and Sydney, a bucolic site he revisits three times a year as a stress reliever. He abandoned earlier manuscripts as failures and, on a grant, rid himself of the need to work in advertising. He rationalized, “As long as the sugar industry gets a subsidy I don’t see why writers shouldn’t” (Neilsen, 1981, 193). On a net income of about $100 a week, he discovered that the writer’s career is “a lonely insular occupation, that I hated the idea of being locked up in a room by myself all day” (Ibid.). Reviewer John Ryle charged that a British compendium of Carey’s stories appeared under the title Exotic Pleasures to exploit “the perversity market” for “darkness, madness, dope, odd sex and dire futurity” (Ryle, 1981, 1350). Australian Literary Studies published Carey’s “Authors’ Statements.”

January 20, 1981 About the time the Iranian hostage crisis ended, after only one year of work, Carey felt an urgency to complete Bliss. For its extravagant parody, Bliss won the first of Carey’s three Miles Franklin Awards of $42,000 for its perusal of bourgeois complacency and capitalism, themes that the author had introduced in “Report on the Shadow Industry” (1974) and “Exotic Pleasures” (1979). Jill Neville, reviewing for the Sydney Morning Herald (10 October 1981), proclaimed the novel a tour de force. 1982 Bliss earned Carey’s second New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award and his first National Book Council Banjo Award of $3,500. That year, Carey exulted that Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark won the Man Booker Prize. He had no inkling that Illywhacker, the book he began in 1980 under the title Pets, would be nominated for the same award and would boost his name recognition throughout the English-speaking world. In a flip comment to interviewers from Honi Soit, the University of Sydney magazine, he warned, “Be very careful about what you say you’re going to be because you’ll end up becoming it” (Castle & Butler, 1982, 8). 1984 At age 41, Carey was living with Margot Hutcheson in an artsy neighborhood in Bellingen. While working with performance artist Mike Mullins at the National Playwrights’ Conference in Canberra, Carey met Alison Margaret Summers, a 30-year-old writer and theater director who introduced Australian public school classes to little theater. While serving as the dramaturge at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney, she organized an eco-political free-form rock musical.

May 1984 After the couple fell in love, Carey went to sleep smiling at their beach house at Louisa Road on Snails Bay. Alison became his best friend and best reader. To interviewer Lisa Meyer of Chicago Review, he explained their working method: “She writes notes and puts them in a drawer and, when I want to look at them, I open them up” (Meyer, 1997, 84).

July 1984 Carey and Alison Summers traveled Tokyo. March 16, 1985 Following Carey’s marriage to Alison, she encouraged his development of public speaking. Her flair for drama influenced his subsequent works with stage dynamics and costuming. The author crafted a retrospect on Australian lore in Illywhacker, a neo-historical fiction that features his absorption in architecture. He originally entitled it Pets and laced it with sight gags, fantasy structures, and exuberant Laurel-and-Hardy send-ups of the national psyche. While sitting in a doctor’s office awaiting treatment for bronchitis, he came up with a storytelling gimmick that allowed him access to both first and third person narrative. The novel featured the adventures of his grandfather, the island’s first air mail carrier. The pseudomemoir of Herbert Badgery, a reputedly 139-year-old con artist, merges Australian lore with

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cultural themes to produce a passionate narrative filled with the ethnic diversity of Europeans, Chinese, and Jews. Carey narrowed his workday from 9:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. and spent weekends at home. As a family man, he had difficulty depicting pedophilia and rape in Illywhacker. Despite the subject matter, the primary editor, Robert McCrum of Faber and Faber, was open to Carey’s innovative phrasing. Carey had his own opinion: “Illywhacker is the type of book you only write once. It’s a big, reckless sort of thing” (Wroe, 2001, 6). Howard Jacobson of the New York Times Book Review called Illywhacker garrulous, grumpy farce. Laurie Clancy, a critic for the Australian Book Review, proclaimed Carey Australia’s mythographer. In 2008, the author reflected, “Everything about the book — it’s 600 pages— is sheer cheek. Its mad ambition, everything good about it, is the work of a forty-year-old ... teetering on a parapet” (Bennett, 2008). It won a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award of $15,000.

May 8 –20, 1985 The Australian entry in the Cannes Film Festival was Bliss, a screenplay co-adapted by Carey and cinema director Ray Lawrence and shot by New South Wales Film Corporation at Iron Cove Bridge, Sydney. The movie varies from the print version by supplying protagonist Harry Joy with a voice-over that makes him “a bit ironic, and a bit superior to the characters” (Tausky, 1990, 30). Critic Margarete Rubik of the University of Vienna compared the challenges of representing visually the author’s surreal metaphors with playwright Harold Pinter’s framing of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) for the 1981 cinema version. Told through Harry’s flashback, the 135-minute black comedy premiered in North America at the New York Film Festival on October 4, 1985, and also won the peerassessed Award for Excellence and a purse of $10,000 from the Australian Writers’ Guild (A. W. G. I. E.), and three Australian Film Institute (AFI) trophies, including best adapted screenplay and best feature. The published film script earned critical regard in academic studies. Nonetheless, Carey was disappointed in the moral and political misdirection of his original intent. He explained, “I shouldn’t have written it, I was so cavalier with it and finally there is nothing in that screenplay that says, You’re in Hell” (Coe, 1996). Ray Willbanks quotes the author’s complaint that the videography lacks poison: “There should have been crap pouring into the sky” (Willbanks, 1988, 48). September 30, 1985 When Illywhacker was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize along with novels by Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch, Carey’s novel was a long shot. In good company, he faced his first public reading, held at the London Guildhall, the city’s ceremonial center.

1986 At the World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island, Illywhacker was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. The work also achieved his first The Age Book of the Year Award of $20,000, a Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction Victorian Premier’s Award of $30,000, nomination for a Booker Prize, a Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) Barbara Ramsden Award of $500, and a National Science Fiction Convention Ditmar Trophy for Best Australian Science Fiction. After he received $6,000 from a second National Book Council Banjo Award for Australian Literature, he issued a formal two-page statement in National Book Council Newsletter. He summarized the layering of song, story, myth, and memory into Australian dialect as “insufficient for the celebration of a culture. We still do not have enough songs to sustain us in the difficult times ahead” (“Peter Carey,” 1986, 2). April 4, 1986 National Times published Carey’s essay “Of Coventry and Caring: Some Thoughts on Australian Publishing.” August 2, 1986 Film Director Brian Trenchard-Smith premiered the low-budget Australian thriller Dead-End Drive-in starring Ned Manning in the title role as a punk body builder. Writer Peter Smalley based the screenplay on Carey’s “Crabs” (1972), which he sets in post-apocalyp-

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tic Australia among street toughs, corrupt cops, and Asian immigrants unwelcome to white racists in the park-prison. Filmed in a defunct Sydney drive-in, the set required graffiti by Australian artists and a fast-foot diner as backdrop. The director made a visual comment on Carey’s story by displaying on the drive-in screen his own violent movie Turkey Shoot (1981), set in a prison. The film debuted at the Melbourne International Film Festival to repetitive comparison to Mad Max (1979), starring Aussie actor Mel Gibson.

September 13, 1986 During the Careys’ residency at 118 Louisa Road, Birchgrove Park, Alison Carey wrote and directed for the Off Broadway stage. At the King George V Hospital at Camperdown, she gave birth by hypnotherapy to Samuel Summers “Sam” Carey. The author reprised the setting in Oscar and Lucinda (1988) in the 1860s by having Lucinda Leplastrier reside at a two-story stone house at Longnose Point north of Sydney and overlooking the Parramatta River. He dedicated the novel to Alison “with all my love.” It was Alison who urged Carey to change Lucinda’s name from the original “Hermione.” 1987 The airing of the cinema version of Bliss on ABC-TV incited viewer protests of decadence and terror. A 55-minute video, The Most Beautiful Lies, co-written by Don Featherstone and Joanne Penglase and produced by the Australia Council, summarized Carey’s mounting success at surrealistic glimpses of his native land.

September 15, 1987 The Melbourne Herald issued “Our Love Affair with Losers,” Carey’s retrospect on the Australian self-image generated by England’s transportation of convicts to the island. In describing his debt to the nation’s history, he described himself as a “professional dream,” a term linked to the aboriginal conception of the past as altjeringa (dreamtime), a sacred link with creation (Carey, 1987, 11). 1988 Carey published in Granta “A Letter to Our Son,” originally titled “Sam’s Birth” and “Sam’s Birthday,” and, with Bill Bennett, began scripting War Crimes for film.

January 17, 1988 Carey issued “Sydney Side Up,” a paean to home, in the Sunday Times Magazine. An excerpt appeared in New York Magazine on October 12. January 26, 1988 In Sydney, Aussies celebrated a bicentenary with fireworks to welcome the arrival of tall ships. Carey pondered how citizens could rejoice at ships bringing convicts in chains. More insidious, corrupt soldiers tortured inmates and undermined 40,000 years of aboriginal culture.

March 7, 1988 In the twelfth year of the Adelaide Writers’ Week, a major Australian arts festival, Carey drew 1,500 to his presentation. The speech was a first-time sellout by an Australian author. August, 1988 Vogue Australia published Carey’s essay “Am I Safe? Carey Takes a Walk on the Dark Side of the Street.” October 17, 1988 Against competition from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, Carey won a Miles Franklin Award of $42,000, a Torgi Talking Book of the Year citation from the Royal Blind Society, election to the Royal Society of Literature, a National Book Council Banjo Award, Townsville Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Colin Roderick Award of $2,000, a Time magazine “best book,” an honorary Ph. D. from the University of Queensland, and his first Booker Prize of $32,000 for Oscar and Lucinda, an historical allegory he originally titled Holy Ghosts. It was a unanimous selection arrived at in record time for the Booker committee. He built the narrative around a visual image of a floating glass church. Although an unbeliever, he valued churches as spiritual and cultural landmarks. He mused, “If white Australia had a ‘culture’ it was predominantly a Christian one — it had destroyed 40,000 years of Aboriginal culture to establish itself ” (Brown, 1995, 135). Writing in the expansive, digressive style of Dickensian fiction, the author turns the 111

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chapters into tesserae to form a socio-religious mosaic. He had been “full of anxiety” about the project, fearing that a book about the Church of England would be of no interest to North American readers (Tausky, 1990, 29). His risk taking extends in chapter 68 to a skewer at the media. In accounting for the naming of the “Wednesday murders,” the author digresses with the observation that the killer struck on a Sunday and a Tuesday, but “Let this be a lesson to anyone dealing with the press— the name stuck” (Carey, 1988, 261). Published amid the nostalgia and self-affirmation that flourished during Australia’s bicentennial, the text ponders the Christianization of 19th-century Australia through an iconic folly, a glass church, a pinnacle of Carey’s fantasy structures. A controlling metaphor of parentlessness derives from Carey’s belief that “our history is a history of orphans” (Fitzgerald, 1997, 82). The author’s mother was only vaguely aware of the significance of her son’s views on Australia’s past, which had reporters pounding on his parents’ door. At a formal gathering, historian and judging chairman Michael Foot presented the author $26,250. Carey later found out a hard truth of notoriety: “A prize really does do something, and guarantees nothing” (Mudge, 2003). One result was a charge by critic C. Karl Stead that Carey violated history by focusing his retrospective on blacks and women, two mistreated populations whose championing appears out of chronological place. Stead maintained that questions of racism and sexism “destroy the credence on which the fiction depends” (Stead, 1989, 185). In March 2009, Carey explained why he chose not to speak for black Australians: “The indigenous people would prefer that I did not represent them” (Hyman, 2009). While collaborating with Wim Wenders on the screenplay Until the End of the World, Carey began collecting political, ethical, and personal angles for writing. With actor Willem Defoe, the author studied dramatic art from a practical perspective —“that notion of conflict; of this person wanting this and that person wanting that. This has certainly affected my work as a way of looking at transactions, a way of seeing dialogue as what springs up as a result of the pressure of the tectonic plates underneath, that dialogue is the thing that just flips up” (Blakeney, 2006). Carey liquidated his share of the McSpedden Carey agency and emigrated to New York City to swap residences with dramatist Israel Horowitz. Upon arriving at a townhouse he purchased in 1989 on Eighth Street in West Greenwich Village, Carey enjoyed relative anonymity. Already a Booker laureate, he exulted that he didn’t have to prove himself: “I arrived in the Village as if by C-section, having escaped the long birth trauma” (Carey, 2007). He noted a sense of displacement in the new land: “How strange and not me it is” (Woodward, 1995, 59). The oddness spurred him to view his own homeland as “uncharted, unmapped, unknown to itself, unknown to me” (Ibid.). He explained to interviewer Sonia Harford, “You don’t lose forty-five years of life just because you shift your bum somewhere else” (Harford, 2006, 118). Carey became a homebody by burrowing into an area the size of his hometown for its sense of community. In terms of family, Carey learned a truism about living in a foreign country: “What I hadn’t anticipated was how having children makes this move more permanent” (Polito, 1996). After selling his water-view home in Balmain, he gloried in anonymity that accompanied his escape from celebrity: “I don’t have to be a spokesperson for anything. No one knows who I am” (Tausky, 1990, 28). He denied that he expatriated for the sake of career or royalties. To interviewer Helen Dudar, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, he explained the logic of immigration to North America: “It’s interesting. If it’s interesting, it must be enriching. And if it’s enriching, then it must be good for my work” (Dudar, 1992, A10). To secure a green card and to pay his sons’ tuition to private school, he signed on as a creative writing teacher at New York University one night a week. He focused on the writer’s need to see characters as a body involved in dialogue.

1989 Carey’s acceptance speech of the Miles Franklin Award appeared in Australian Author as “The Thin Man Makes History, Biting the Imperial Hand.” With genuine gratitude before

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an audience at Brisbane’s Fryer Library, he declared it “good to have one’s work celebrated in one’s own country” (Carey, 1989, 17). In defense of a “split-screen life,” he repudiated charges that he was too Americanized to write about his homeland (Harford, 2006, 113). In his words, his first 47 years produced “many, many years of sediment lying on the bed of my river.... You don’t lose forty-five years of life just because you shift your bum somewhere else” (Harford, 2006, 118). In support of fellow Australian writers, Carey delivered a diatribe against a change in laws governing importation of books. On October 30, the Sydney Morning Herald published his complaint that British publishers “get Australia on the cheap” (Ibid.).

1990 Carey wrote Exotic Pleasures and finished the last six of twelve drafts of The Tax Inspector, a bleak comic novel that seems like an alien invader of his canon. The motivation for a surreal exploration of tax evasion gripped Carey at a party in Sydney, where Sir Johannes BjelkePetersen, Queensland’s premier, expounded on his intent to cut taxes on the upper class. The author denounced “the complete ease with which [Australians] have accepted corruption since (and perhaps because of ) the first white settlement in Sydney Cove” (Stewart, 2003, 21). He divulged to writer Peter Craven that the plot grew out of his characterization of a heroic civil servant, Maria Takis. Carey confided to interviewer Helen Ifeka, a writer for Hermes, that he regretted not releasing an earthy smell after the gelignite explosion that removes concrete from Frieda Catchprice’s thwarted flower farm. Australians bridled at the implications of The Tax Inspector; Carey’s sister was embarrassed at slurs directed at the Carey family business. The author was chagrined at critics who impugned his patriotism: “They thought I didn’t like my country, because I said some things about Sydney being continually corrupt from its beginnings. It’s an edgy, unsettling sort of book” (Gourevitch, 2007, 528). One reviewer, Richard B. Woodward in a review for the Village Voice, called the novel “a lump of shit on a well-crafted plate” (Woodward, 1995, 59). The dramatic child abuse in the text spurred literary sleuths to investigate the author’s childhood for parallels. To Doug Aiton, a reviewer for The Age, the author declared himself a novelist for life: “I’m trapped in my own fantasy. That’s what I wanted” (Lamb, 1992, 1). After Charley Carey, his second son, was born, the author realized that the theme of incest was “a horrible whirlpool I was making for myself.... The investigation was not in any sense therapeutic” (Meyer, 1997, 86 –87). As though envisioning a vampire, he realized that a violent family coup d’état was the only force that could quell a self-perpetuating perversion. After replacing Thomas Keneally as writing teacher at Hunter College in Manhattan, Carey began teaching a dozen students around a table in Room 1243 every Tuesday night. His method was Socratic: “We talk about their work, or the sentences of Bruno Schulz or Henry James, and we try to figure out how it all works, not the business of the business, but the business of this sentence, this story, in language I do not doubt I would have once judged pretentious” (Carey, 2007). He decided to offer the city’s best MFA program. He found the project demanding: “It takes a great faculty, enormous energy, and a crazy belief that you can build the best program in the country.... Today it is clear that something great is happening on the corner of Lex and 68th” (Jarvis, 2008). Carey paired with an aggressive faculty and ambitious students who came from varied backgrounds. He joked, “What a crazy, courageous, harebrained thing for them to be doing — and they’re here” (Jarvis, 2008). He took classroom work seriously and noted its effect on his self-perception: “There is a particular immigrant experience that an Australian has that really applies very fruitfully to the lives and work of many of the students at Hunter College. That is, as an Australian writing in English, the first thing you go to do is discover your own country and present your own country in a way that it’s not been presented before to your people” (Birnbaum, 2003).

April 7, 1990 During an annual conference of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies, Carey took three-year-old Sam to Disney World to see Pirates of the Caribbean,

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which the author compared to the “death, destruction, rape, murder, torture” of Vietnam, which he labeled “totally amoral thrill-seeking” (Tausky, 1990, 27).

1991 With the publication of the nihilistic Gothic saga The Tax Inspector, Carey incurred heavy criticism from Australians for composing so grim a dystopia about his homeland’s working class. Some accused him of being an anti–Australian Jeremiah. Bill Marx, in a review for The Nation, found the text dreary, “like an apocalypse on cruise control ... an overwrought daydream” (Marx, 1992, 348). Malcolm Jones, Jr., a critic for Newsweek, declared the novel a “shambles” that the author blows up just to be rid of it (Jones, 1992, 60). The uproar constituted what Nicholas Hasluck called “Bouquets abroad; brickbats at home” (Hasluck, 1993, 114). The following year, in an interview with Ray Willbanks, the author restated his intent to temper realism with compassion: “The writer has a responsibility to tell the truth, not to shy away from the world as it is; and at the same time the writer has a responsibility to celebrate the potential of the human spirit” (Willbanks, 1992, 51 –52). The editor of the Sydney Morning Herald declared Carey an offshore “national conscience” (“Literary,” 1992). Analyst Karen Lamb remarked on a growing ambiguity reflected in Australian resentment and acclaim — an “anti-intellectualism and reverence for a successful public figure” (Lamb, 1992, 3). In 1994, Helen Daniel, a reviewer for The Age, declared the novel “at once vintage Carey and yet new Carey, a fabulous venture into new territories” (Daniel, 1994, 7). Edmund White, in a review for the Times Literary Supplement, saw the novel as a breakthrough “destined to make him one of the most widely read and admired writers working in English” (White, 1991, 21).

December 25, 1991 For Warner Brothers, over a two-year period, Carey and German director Wim Wenders co-authored the futuristic CIA chase film Until the End of the World. The story of global destruction in 1991 by Solveig Dommartin and Wenders stars Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill, Max von Sydow, and Jeanne Moreau.

1993 Carey entertained his sons by making up a pseudo-autobiographical child’s book, Wart, Fart, and Bathroom Man. Before writing The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Carey conceived the plot while attending the American Association for the Study of Australian Literature in Orlando, Florida. True to family commitments, he toured Disney World with Alison and Sam. Upon viewing Mickey and Minnie Mouse as animated royalty, he saw them as imitation royalty, “like Ron and Nancy,” a reference to the Reagans (Woodward, 1995, 59). From interpreting Mickey and Minnie as holy icons, he developed an historical irony: “I started to imagine a country where figures like Mickey and Minnie were the decadent flowering of a heretical Protestant sect” (Polito, 1996). The writing progressed when he stayed at a Jamaican resort with his family. He based the fictional Feu Follet Theatre at Chemin Rouge, Efica, on a radical Melbourne collective called the Pram Factory. For background, he read Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said, who described Abel Magwitch, the convict from Great Expectations, as an Australian prototype. A transportee to New South Wales, Abel served seven years, then chose to return to England, the country that had exiled him. To Canadian interviewer Eleanor Watchel, the author confided, “I seem incapable of ever creating a happy ending” (Watchel, 1993, 103). Carey’s friend author Michael Heyward published a nonfiction account of a hoax, The Ern Malley Affair, an overview that Carey advised. At the same time, he maintained that fiction could give a better history than fact by making the character come alive in the imagination. After two years of reworking his initial manuscript, Carey discovered a way to compose the hoax as fiction on a par with the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). He worked at a visual image: “Once I had three or four pages I knew I had something. I have three or four people telling the story so it is constructed like a Russian doll” (Wyndham, 2003).

February 15, 1993 Carey issued “Dear Salman” in the London Sunday Times, an epistolary essay consoling Salman Rushdie, a hunted writer. Carey admired Rushdie’s courage in

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breaking house arrest to appear in New York City at Columbia University despite a death warrant from Islamic fanatics.

Fall 1993 Carey published “From an Alien to His Second Son” in HQ Magazine. 1994 With the issuance of the ambitious novel The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Carey illustrated the split consciousness of life in contrasting cultures, the satellite Efica and Voorstand, its Machiavellian colonizer. Analyst David Griffin, in a review for the New York Review of Science Fiction, dismisses the efforts as “a lecture disguised as the lab sequence of a Frankenstein sequel” (Griffin, 1996, 15). In the critique of Marie Maclean, a reviewer for Australian Book Review, the book emulates the chutzpah of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy (1759): “He entertains, he shocks, and he makes enormous demands ... [jumping] from mind to mind and from the seemingly real to the frankly incredible” (Maclean, 1994, 10). Jonathan Coe, in a critique for the London Review of Books, interpreted Carey’s whimsical parallel worlds as an attempt “to resolve his own very contradictory feelings about America” (Coe, 1994, 5). Critic Carolyn See identifies the novel as homage to Alison Summer. He tapped his American experiences to describe false consciousness, his term for a lack of true self-perception. A mix of critical commentary described the work as perplexing, brutal, and abhorrent. A naysayer, reviewer Melissa Bellanta, dismissed the novel as Carey’s “least successful endeavour” (Bellanta, 2003). Sean Buffington envisions a double-sided stunt —“A high pastiche — a Frankenstein of stitched-together tones, figurations, themes and style. And at the end of it all, some unseen mischief-maker pulls the loose thread that sends it falling to the floor, a crumpled mess of skin and parts” (Buffington, 1995). From a more positive perspective, Analyst Carol Shields asserted, “[Carey] is at heart an old-fashioned utopian trapped in a dystopian universe. The elaborate phantasmagoria of his narrative chess game clears again and again to reveal the hard emotional truth that neither the weak nor the strong have been able to make themselves a safe home in the world” (Shields, 1995). Claire Messud, in a review for the Independent, connected the novel to the author’s entire canon, which “has always been both inventive and about invention, at once a manifestation of imaginative power and a comment upon it” (Messud, 1994). Although the novel was his least comprehensible fantasy, it won Carey’s third Miles Franklin Award of $42,000, short-listing for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, an Australian Book Seller’s Association Book of the Year, and a second The Age Book of the Year Award of $20,000. Rejection for a Booker Prize may have resulted because of the fantasy settings, which fail to identify Efica with Australia. Carey followed with A Letter to Our Son and Collected Stories, an expanded edition of War Crimes.

September 10, 1994 Carey’s essay “Home” appeared in the Courier-Mail. October 14, 1994 In the article “My Lasting Wish” for The Australian Magazine, Carey regretted that only two of his six children survived: “Those other children I have spent a long time trying to forget. These are the children from my first marriage, children a long time dead” (Carey, 1994). His grief found favor with anti-choice forces, who published his misgivings as testimonials to post-abortion trauma in fathers. September 25, 1995 Carey made changes in his writing style by abandoning the short story, even though Bill Burford, editor of the New Yorker, tempted him with a cash commission for more short works. The author realized, “I had become addicted to the dangers and pleasures of the novel.” Instead, for the magazine’s September 25 edition, Carey wrote “A Small Memorial: To the Children the Author Tried to Forget,” a memoir about his first wife’s abortion and two subsequent miscarriages, one of twins. The cause was an incompetent cervix, which resulted in premature deliveries. At his unnamed twins’ cremation, he declared himself an atheist, but he acknowledged that his lifeless babes were human lives. He admitted that “Emotionally it is wrenching to write, but technically it is so much easier than writing fiction,” but

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he took pride in a week’s work that produced a confessional essay from a grieving father (Polito, 1996). Carey served in the writing department of Princeton University. He entered the children’s market with The Big Bazoohley, a comic fantasy based on Sam Carey’s sleepwalking experience at a Toronto hotel. In what reviewer Susan L. Rogers calls a “breezy contemporary adventure” of gambler Earl Kellow and his artist wife Vanessa, Carey expressed his risk-taking by moving the family from Australia to New York. The author reflects the mindset of a former advertiser by examining the term “Perfecto Kiddo” and declaring it a typical slogan for a “nonsensible situation” (Carey, 1995, 23). The book was named a Young Readers Honor Book by the Children’s Book Council of Australia and appeared on the Publishers Weekly list of the year’s best children’s fiction. More important to the author was his son Sam’s response. After hovering over the boy during his read, Carey received a top award from a child’s perspective: “Not bad” (Koval, 1997, 679).

1996 The author left Princeton to teach writing at Columbia University’s M. F. A. Program. He laughed at his donation as a tax deduction of old manuscripts to the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland. Among the collections were undated stories: “The Dream of the World’s Greatest Architect,” “A Fear of High Places,” “Feet,” “Fire Dreams,” “The Last Great Optimist,” “Learn to Grow Roses,” “In Loving Memory of Luke McClosky,” “A Man Needs His Dreams,” “Marvin Gnash Is Really Weird,” “Mayfair,” “Rousseau Set Upon by His Tigers,” “Saturday,” “Ten to Twelve Something Like This,” and “Winnegan’s Fake.”

October 1996 Carey enjoyed the stir that Australian scenarist and novelist Frank Moorhouse created at a literary luncheon by lambasting expatriate Aussies as cultural traitors. During a visit to the 92nd Street Y in West Greenwich Village, Carey showed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro around the neighborhood. In a reflection on literary taste, Carey declared that he preferred recklessness in classic fiction, such as Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767), and Charles Dickens’s novels. His maturity as a writer inspired reviewer David Griffin, a critic for the New York Review of Science Fiction, to remark, “If Peter Carey isn’t the most gifted writer Australia has produced in some time, he may yet be the most energetic,” a reference to the success of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (Griffin, 1996, 14). Griffin extolled the epic quality of Carey’s canon and applauded “a loose-limbed fragmentary anticism ... pinwheeling pace and frantic chatter” that fuels them (Ibid.).

1997 At the Perch Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Noble Rot Theatre Company, directed by David George, premiered an adaptation of two stories from The Fat Man in History: “Do You Love Me?” and “Peeling.” Overland published “An Abandoned Chapter.” January 1, 1997 Contemporary with Prime Minister John Howard’s Reconciliation Convention, an attempt to make amends with Australia’s aboriginal population, Carey wrote Jack Maggs, a myth of origin about a British outcast. After reading Edward Said’s critique of Great Expectations in Culture and Imperialism, Carey described Charles Dickens’s classic as “an Aussie story” (Koval, 1997, 669). He seized on Dickens’s orphan stories and extended the original themes with late 20th-century contemplations of justice, patriotism, respectability, poverty, welfare, and female reproduction rights. He confided to journalist Bron Sibree of the Canberra Times his composition of a “complicated homesickness,” perhaps a parallel to his own (Sibree, 1997, 22). Karl Miller, in an article for New Republic, declared the author’s impetus was “a nostalgia for the primitive virtue of his ancestors, bless their broad beams” (Miller, 1998, 40). Another reason was more visceral — a rage “at Dickens for giving my imaginary ancestor a bad rap” (Gussow, 1998). Carey’s success with Jack Maggs resulted from what reviewer D. J. Taylor called “[weaving] all manner of devious patterns from the fog of early Victorian London” (Taylor, 2001). Through what novelist John Updike termed “hectic fullness and fond cruelty,” Carey achieved

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his intent to shift Australian identity from flogger to floggee (Updike, 2007, 354). For the sake of the title character’s salvation, the text demands an about-face of colonial loyalties from the poseurs of the motherland to the foster country frontiersmen. As justification for abandoning England, Carey explained to interviewer Susan Wyndham that Jack Maggs was “the first Australian to go back to London and not be wanted” (Wyndham, 1994, 45). Suzie McKenzie, a writer for the London Guardian, captured the author’s determination to retrieve Maggs from ignominy. Claiming the transported convict as an ancestor, the author rhapsodized, “I wanted to reinvent him, to possess him” (McKenzie, 1997, T33). Composing for a broad audience of Australians and British, Carey based the neo-Victorian pastiche on Abel Magwitch, the convict and stockman in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). The parallel novel coincides with a period when natives negotiated rights to ancestral lands. The author focused on the fictional character on the assumption that Charles Dickens knew a real felon like Abel Magwitch. Carey took his cue from missing information about the convict: “I thought it would be interesting to give this convict character some of the care and sympathy that Dickens gives to Pip,” Magwitch’s imaginary foster son (Gussow, 1998). To commiserate more thoroughly with the transported criminal, Carey recasts Pip as Henry Phipps, a self-absorbed rounder and social climber. The narrative navigates the same London social settings described in the popular works of William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. For historical accuracy and a sense of authority, Carey read travelogues by outsiders who visited London in 1837.

December 31, 1997 Laura Jones, scenarist for The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and Angela’s Ashes (1999), completed the screen adaptation of Oscar and Lucinda, filmed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles. Shot in Cornwall, Sydney, and Hobart, Tasmania, the heavily plotted story captures a series of paradoxes, “new opportunities and a wasteland of exile” and “great passion, mistaken and displaced” (Mayer and Beattie, 2007, 167). The film won American Film Institute Awards for cinematography, costume, production, sound, and music. Laura Jones was nominated for screen adaptation; Cate Blanchett, for best actor. Janet Patterson received an Oscar nod for costume. Additional awards accrued for dialogue editing and sound mixing.

1998 In partnership with Frederick Alan Schepisi, a Melbourne-born scenarist, Carey adapted Jack Maggs for film to be aired in 1999. February 1998 After winning a third The Age Book of the Year Award of $20,000, a nomination for the W. H. Smith Award, and a third Miles Franklin Award of $42,000, Carey declined an audience with Queen Elizabeth II to receive the first of his two Commonwealth Writers Prizes of £10,000 for Jack Maggs. Critics interpreted the insult as evidence of his promotion of Australian statehood. A decade later, the author substantiated that claim by complaining, “We have much less independence than we imagine, and it’s a damned shame” (Lord, 2008). He visited with other postcolonial Commonwealth authors and experienced kinship: “What surprised me was how strongly connected we all felt ... to experience a sense of cultural connection” (Maver, 2006, 156). He won an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from New School University, New York. August 1998 Jack Maggs earned a nomination for Scotland’s prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize of £10,000. December 16, 1998 When the U. S. military bombed Iraq, Carey regretted the public distrust of fiction in a time when journalistic reports on the Clinton administration contained less truth than the novelist’s imagination. His son’s response to the invasion surprised his father: “I said, hang on a minute —‘they’ bombed Iraq, not us. But it made me think. I have two American kids” (Wroe, 2001, 6).

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1999 At the Melbourne Public Library archives, Carey researched the background of the Kelly Gang through letters and historic photographs. He previously acknowledged his discomfort with primary documents: “I hate being in libraries, because I always feel there’s something I’m missing” (Grimes, 1992, C11). During a month-long horseback tour of Victoria, he funneled money into his work while scrimping on home finances. He refused to follow Alison to Brisbane, where she sought the artistic directorship of the Queensland Theatre Company. Mid-January 1999 At the Seymour Centre, director Kim Carpenter led Sydney’s Theatre of Image in a dance-cinema-puppet montage of Exotic Pleasures, an innovative stage adaptation of stories by Peter Carey and David Malouf.

January 2000 With True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey rewrote crime history for Australians. After telling and retelling the story of outlaw Ned Kelly to American friends viewing exhibits of works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Australian artist Sidney Nolan, Carey remarked, “In a city where the art world is so full of theory and bullshit and statue, these paintings looked like things that just had to be made” (Bemrose, 2001, 49). He resolved to inform the world of a national hero. He determined to write it in novel form: “And there was only one way that I really wanted to approach it — to write it in his voice” (Bond & Sheedy, 235). He admitted that the plan was a long shot: “The minute you start messing with a national story you know you are doing something a little risky” (O’Reilly, 2002, 164). Carey reprised the picaresque legend from the perspective of contemporary psychology of the roots of criminality. His wife Alison suggested he enlarge on compassion for characters and that he remove punctuation. The result was semiliterate prose that reads like visceral poetry. Like Captain Moonlight and Ben Hall, Kelly satisfied the public’s yen to read bushranger fiction. Carey muttered, “There was some bullshit controversy about me glorifying a murderer. But it is bullshit. Most people don’t feel that.... Only official Australia has always hated him” (Wroe, 2001, 6). For the author’s bold defense of homelanders, he was nominated for Australian of the Year 2001. June 30, 2000 Carey issued “Come Back” in the Courier-Mail. September 15, 2000 Flying from Los Angeles to the Sydney Olympic Games, Carey discovered an inordinate fondness for “that vulgar crooked convict town” (Carey, 1989, 28). During the opening ceremony, he regretted the adulation for Ned Kelly, a gallows bird and Australia’s legendary icon still idolized in Ireland and England. Already involved in research on Kelly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the author was startled by the brash Olympic showing. Critic Robert Ross described the “strange spectacle” of myth —“a dance troupe wearing costumes inspired by his armor and waving sparklers to represent gunfire” (Ross, 2001, 251). Carey bemoaned, “What is it about us Australians, eh? What is wrong with us? Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might not we find someone better to admire? ... But I then saw the real point. So many Australians were pleased to see him there as part of the story” (Wroe, 2001, 6). With Ned-ophilia on the rise, Carey chose to abandon a novel about the United States and mythologize about Kelly, a cultural antihero on a par with the American bank robber Jesse James. As he assembled historical episodes, he jokingly referred to them as “stations of the cross,” a salute to the enduring folk tradition honoring an underclass martyr (Seaman, 2005, 55). Critic Barry Oakley validated the novel’s glamour, which “snaps shut like a handcuff ” (Oakley, 2000, 5). D. J. Taylor, a reviewer for the New Statesman went one better, declaring, “Few English language novelists of the past 20 years have played such dramatic and energetic games with history” (Taylor, 2001, 42). November 28, 2000 The author mesmerized listeners at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival by reading sections of Kelly’s postcolonial myth, which earned the publisher a record $350,000 profit. He admitted the toil of piecing together his outback chronicle, for which he “almost

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drowned in the research” (Morgan, 2001, 71). The energized glimpses of Aussie history sold 2,000,000 copies in five years, 250,000 of those in Australia. The narrative won Carey an Economist, Courier-Mail, and a Time Magazine Book of the Year as well as comparisons to Kenyan mythographer Chinua Achebe, American realist Cormac McCarthy, innovative Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, and West Indian epicist Derek Walcott.

January 10, 2001 Kelly business continued to monopolize Carey’s time. Irish film director Neil Jordan of Scala Productions optioned the book for cinema and offered the writer an opportunity to write the screenplay, which Carey declined. At the time, the novel stood at position eight on the New York Times bestseller roster. August 6, 2001 Carey issued 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, a personal description of his home turf that aroused the ire of Australian critics and readers. At the height of the vigorous, subjective study of Australia’s port is an eyewitness account of the 54th annual Sydney-to-Hobart Yacht Race in 1998, when a cyclone capsized six boats and drowned five racers. September 11, 2001 Carey sensed pride in his adopted home and felt like a native: “I have a lot of friends here who I would sorely miss if I went back to Australia. And at the same time, I miss Australia” (Mudge, 2003). The demands of two loyalties created a tension that informed his writing with both immediacy and distancing. He heard the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and was glad that his sons attended schools in Brooklyn. He learned of his wife’s escape from Century 21, a discount clothing store across from the North Tower, where she was accessing a cash machine. That night, he and his son Charley walked around Union Square to observe the reactions of New Yorkers and to cheer the firefighters and volunteers. The scene — “that perilous pile of deadly pick-up sticks”— reminded the author of Dunkirk (Carey, 2001, 24). The loss to New Yorkers aroused deep waves of belonging in Carey, who snarled, “I want to strike back, pulverise, kill, obliterate anyone who has caused this harm to my city” (Carey, 2001, 24). He observed, “People have realised, I think, what deep, deep shit this country is in” (Balogh, 2007).

September 18, 2001 True History of the Kelly Gang was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award of $180,000, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction of $30,000, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, The Age Fiction Book of the Year of $10,000, and a second Commonwealth Booker Prize of £21,000. For the first time, he enjoyed success: “I learned to celebrate the moment. And I did. It was great” (Birnbaum, 2003). Although Alison advised him for three years on the narrative, Carey credited his editor, Gary Fisketjon, for supporting the work.

September 23, 2001 In a letter to editor Robert McCrum at the Observer, published the previous day in The Age as “I Still Love New York,” Carey detailed his panic while trying to assemble his family as the World Trade Center crumbled and burned. In the streets, he studied eyewitnesses fleeing along Bedford Street, “the stark, seared horror in their eyes, the blankness, but also sometimes the frank appeals for human contact” (Carey, 2001, 24). He admired Alison’s memory of the disaster: “Only when I read her own account do I appreciate the extraordinary escape she has made, how lucky we are to have her alive” (Carey, 2001, 24). Late September 2001 After dedicating the Ned Kelly novel to his wife “whose clear literary intelligence and flawless dramatic instinct illuminated and clarified a work that at times threatened to swamp and drown me,” Carey separated from her and sought marriage counseling (Wyndham, 2006). She charged that he allowed his career to overshadow concern for her and their boys. Resettled in Tribeca, he saw himself as “a refugee from a marriage” (Harford, 2006, 114).

October 23, 2001 In Melbourne, the auction of Carey’s notebooks, correspondence, and manuscripts from 1969 to 1988 netted $80,000. Because the State Library of Victoria bought

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the author’s unpublished manuscripts, literary historians were pleased that the works remained in country.

2002 Carey’s impressions of 9/11 appeared in “Union Square,” a short story collected in 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11. That same year, 3,000 members of the Australian Society of Authors selected True History of the Kelly Gang for inclusion on the roster of Australia’s top 40 books of all time.

January 25, 2002 Carey delivered the John Batman Australia Day oration at a luncheon in the Melbourne Exhibition Centre.

August 2002 Carey accepted the title of Honorary Ambassador for Queensland for introducing the world to Ned Kelly and for promoting Australia’s literary traditions. At 32 libraries, the Brisbane City Council launched a ten-week community read of True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey traveled from New York to read at the city writers’ festival and to address issues of Australian genealogy and socio-economic identity. October 2002 Another prize awaited Carey for True History of the Kelly Gang, the International Ennio Flaiano Prize for Literature and a purse of 5,000 Euros. The author anticipated that an Italian prize for La Ballata di Ned Kelly might increase his share of the fiction market in Italy. December 6, 2002 When long-time editor Laurie Muller retired from the University of Queensland Press, after 28 years, Carey followed marketing director Carol Davidson to Random House and signed a three-book deal with a $2 million advance. Ironically, about this time, he gained dual Australian-United States citizenship. January 1, 2003 On an advance of $350,000, Carey published My Life As a Fake, a fiction version of the Ern Malley hoax and literary scandal in Australia in the 1940s. Nick Groom, a reviewer for the Independent, found the galloping quest story “precise and beautifully intense” (Groom, 2003, 32). Of his background work for “opportunistic storytelling,” Carey joked, “I am an appalling researcher with a very short attention span. So I read a lot” (Birnbaum, 2003). He focused on a Malaysian setting in Penang, which he had visited several times, and received tips on details from Malaysian journalist Rehman Rashid, author of Malaysian Journey (1993). Autobiographical details link the author to his characters, particularly fashion copywriter Bob McCorkle, who chooses advertising as “a perfect hiding place for such a High Art character” (Carey, 2003, 85). For the female protagonist, editor Sarah Wode-Douglas, the novelist modeled her after Dublin-born actor-director Maria Aitken. He chuckled, “One of the scariest moments when I’d finished the book was showing it to her. She read it and she really loved it” (Wyndham, 2003). Carey received mixed responses to his novel. Philip Hensher of the London Times thought the novelist as boldly excursive as the work of Robert Louis Stevenson; John Updike gushed in the New Yorker review over Carey’s brilliance, his economy of language, and the startling turns of plot. Helen Brown, in a review for the Daily Telegraph, elevated the “addictively gnarled tale” to a reminder that “all creations stagger uncertain from their clinging creators, to burn on in the brains of strangers” (Brown, 2003, 8). Ron Charles, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, proclaimed Carey “a literary Robin Hood, stealing from rich moments of history or literature and giving to poor readers” (Charles, 2003, 14). Hollywood film agents were puzzled how to turn the narrative into cinema. Carey was amused that Terrence Rafferty, a reviewer for the New York Times, overrated the narrative: “He attributes to me great, complicated artistry, which I don’t have, and making allusions which would never even occur to me to make” (Birnbaum, 2003). Carey acknowledged, “There’s readers who have relaxed into it and enjoyed it and then there are readers who have just fretted at it” (Ibid.). He suggested that readers should absorb the storytelling without too much analysis.

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March 2003 Carey joined authors Richard Flanagan and Tim Winton in opting out of Tasmania’s annual Readers’ & Writers’ Festival because the sponsor, the Gund lumber company, despoiled ancient forests for wood chips. The withdrawal cost Carey a literary prize, but, he beamed, “It gave the real workers in the front line a little bit of strength” (Birnbaum, 2003).

May 7, 2003 Carey acknowledged to John Freeman, an interviewer for The Australian, the qualms of facing his 60th birthday: “I was miserable for a long time. I just thought, the kids will grow up and I will die. Then I turned 60 and I was suddenly amazingly happy.”

June 1, 2003 Following 15 years of wedlock, Carey’s separation from his second wife produced “the most horrible time in my life” (Wagner, 2008). In court, Alison charged him with non-support over the previous nine months in a year when he earned $840,000. He lost custody of sons Charley and Sam, who settled with their mother at a one-bedroom flat near Ground Zero. January 2004 The author became the program director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, a position that he described as keeping him out of pool rooms. He bolstered the literary reading series with works he wanted to hear and selected 12 students for coaching from a field of 100 applicants. His methodology involved analyzing classic works and current fiction and peer-editing student fiction. Key to his pedagogy lay a balance between teaching the wisdom of writing and the tricks of narrative without damaging their natural voice and flow. His students characterize Carey’s classroom quips as “random and sardonic and not at all what you expected” (Jarvis, 2008).

March 26, 2004 Filmed on location in Victoria, Neil Jordan’s biopic Ned Kelly stirred controversy by retelling the story from Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine (1999) rather than from Carey’s book. The film featured Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom alongside Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts. Critics referred to the efforts of Working Title Films as an Aussie equivalent of Braveheart (1995), Mel Gibson’s tribute to 13th-century Scots outlaw William Wallace. Ned Kelly won AFI awards for costume and production and nominations for best actor, supporting actor, cinematography, direction, edition, adapted screenplay, and sound. July 23, 2004 The Canberra Times named Carey among its 40 “movers and shakers” and specified him as the only “opposing voice” among entertainment figures.

November 15, 2004 For the National Geographic Society, Carey negotiated to write a book on a drug rehab program for felons in the Australian desert. Instead, he published Wrong about Japan, a metafictional father-son travelogue about his 2003 tour of Tokyo with Charley, a 12year-old immersed in light and animation shows, video arcades, and manga comics. Critics charged the author with stereotyping islanders as deliberately obtuse. Carey replied, “The Japanese are particularly dedicated to the idea that outsiders can’t understand them” (Bethune, 2005, 52). Because the author created conflict by inventing a teenaged character named Takashi, National Geographic refused to print the narrative. Random House picked up the contract. February 2005 Except for the Weather Channel and Friends, Carey retreated from television. For camaraderie with Sam, the author listened to his son’s band, Corporate Burnings, and to the political music of Anti-Flag and Rancid. June 2005 After a four-year separation, Carey’s divorce became final. Alison, declaring herself a victim of emotional terrorism, described her ex-husband as a narcissist — a vampire feeding off her life. She began writing Mrs. Jekyll, a novel spotlighting the theme of deception. October 2005 Carey sold his 1,400 square-foot brownstone duplex on Bedford Street for $2.45 million. Abandoning three bedrooms, a fireplace, home office with a Macintosh on the desk, and a rooftop getaway, he remained in Greenwich Village at a spare two-room walk-up.

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2006 The author told interviewer Sally Blakeney, “The last six years of my life have been completely in all sorts of misery, turmoil, and conflict” (Blakeney, 2006). At an upturn, he established a relationship with Frances Coady, the British-born publisher of Granta and Picador USA whom he met in 1985. He chuckled, “It took me two years to call her. She was always so full of life and energy, and with somebody. And then she wasn’t” (Freeman, 2008). They moved to a SoHo loft on Broadway. Of their relationship, he admired her skill at reviewing his work: “She can echo things back to me that are tremendous. And she’ll tell me when things aren’t working” (Freeman, 2008).

April 30, 2006 Theft: A Love Story, one of his less toilsome projects, took two years to write. Lionel Shriver, a reviewer for the London Telegraph acclaimed the work “a big, brave bastard of a book, its characters so outsized that they should barely have been able to button their shirts” (Shriver, 2008). As in earlier works, the author focuses on what critic Donna Seaman terms “the demonic side of creativity and questions of authenticity and fakery” (Seaman, 2006, 5). He takes a swipe at his first career by consigning the “German Bachelor” to a job teaching “ADVERTISING GRAPHICS at the Tech” in Footscray (Carey, 2006, 122). The novel received a four-city book tour and earned nomination for the Commonwealth Writers Prize of $1,000, short-listing for the Miles Franklin Award, a best of 2006 listing from the Rocky Mountain News, the Vance Palmer Prize of $180,000, and the New South Wales Premier’s Christina Stead Prize for Fiction purse of $20,000 for its command of milieu. Of its success, he admitted, “I had much better memory for place than I thought. And part of writing this book was about writing that place in Queensland” (Wroe, 2008). The semi-autobiographical plot prompted a public squabble between Carey and Summers, who claimed that he settled old scores by airing marital grievances and by referring to a greedy ex-wife as an “alimony whore”— a term that Alison characterized as a “nasty stereotype of a gold-digging, shoe-obsessed bimbo” (“ExWife,” 2006).

2007 At age 64, Carey advanced to executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College. From classroom experience, he refuted claims of the death of fiction: “We are living in the middle of a roar of literature” (Carey, 2007). The author began to ponder returning to Australia, which he had revisited the previous year to experience the atmosphere of Morton Bay on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. He characterized the draw of the mother country as a force of nature: “Salmon return to the rivers they were born in, you know, it is that feel of place, it’s the strongest thing” (Balogh, 2007). He expounded on his yearning for a sense of belonging: “There is a basic thing which is just called home which all of your musculature and everything in you feels when you get off an aeroplane and there’s a certain sort of air, a certain sort of light, humidity, and you feel different because you are in your place” (Ibid.).

January 28, 2008 For his dedication to classroom work, Carey earned the title of CUNY Distinguished Professor by unanimous vote. His honoraria included three honorary doctorates and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Contributing to his notoriety was the selection of his writing program as the best master of fine arts in New York City by Village Voice.

February 29, 2008 For the writing of the road novel His Illegal Self, the author drew on inner understandings of childhood for voicing. The thriller/love story, which sets its action in the protest movement of radical Harvard Students for a Democratic Society members in the 1960s and ’70s, debuted at the biennial Adelaide Writers Week Festival. John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, noted a change in the author and “the beginnings of a new stage in Carey’s career, marked by momentum and tidier, snappier sentences” (Freeman, 2008). In a review for the Sydney Morning Herald, critic Andrew Riemer acclaimed the author’s storytelling wizardry: “His narrative twists and turns are spectacular, often outra-

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geous and shameless— but that seems to be the point: a dazzling display of sleight-of-hand with a devil-may-care disregard for what some might regard as literary good manners” (Riemer, 2008). In this era, Carey took pride in his son Sam’s extensive reading and Charley’s poetry and sculpture and his performance in three bands.

November 18, 2008 At the demise of government funding for the Australian National Academy of Music in South Melbourne town, Carey joined 759 artists in sending a letter of complaint simultaneously with a petition signed by 10,000 disgruntled citizens. He and others accused federal arts minister Peter Garrett of being anti-art and anti-performer. As of December, the academy continued to offer its 2009 slate of events. December 1, 2008 Composer Brett Dean began orchestrating the opera version of Carey’s Bliss, to be staged in March 2010 by Opera Australia.

December 31, 2008 His Illegal Self won a New York Times Notable Book of the Year citation and a Providence (Rhode Island) Journal Best Book of 2008. January 7, 2009 David Fennessy and Nicholas Bone readied the opera Happy Story for presentation by the Scottish Opera in February. March 18, 2009 Novelist Jane Smiley, chair of judges for the Booker Prize, announced Carey’s short-listing for His Illegal Self. At stake was a purse of £60,000.

May 2009 After contracting with Penguin Australia, Carey announced that his next novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, would appear in November.

July 14, 2009 Peter Carey joined Thomas Kenneally in protesting loss of Australian control of copyrighted books, the source of the nation’s literary culture. • Sources Baker, John F. “PW Interviews: Peter Carey,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 54 (13 December 1991): 37–38. Balogh, Stefanie. “Peter Carey Yearns for Oz,” Courier-Mail (28 October 2007). Bellanta, Melissa. “Review: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” Australian Public Intellectual Network (April 2003). Bemrose, John. “Dialogue with a Desperado,” MacLean’s 114, no. 13 (26 March 2001): 48 –49. Bennett, Ronni. “His Illegal Self by Peter Carey,” As Time Goes By, www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2008/ 02/peter-carey.html, accessed on November 26, 2008. Bethune, Brian. “Father and Son Take on Tokyo,” Maclean’s 118, no. 5 (31 January 2005): 52. Birnbaum, Robert. “Birnbaum v. Peter Carey,” Morning News, December 16, 2003, www.themorning news.org/archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_peter_carey.php, accessed on November 20, 2008. Blakeney, Sally. “A Writer’s Life: Peter Carey,” Bulletin (15 April 2006). Bone, Jenny, and Chris Sheedy. Who the Hell is Pansy O’Hara? The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World’s Best-Loved Books. New York: Penguin, 2008. Boswell. “Interview: Peter Carey,” www.powells.com/authors/carey.html, accessed on November 25, 2008. Brown, Helen. “The Tangled Tale of a Bloodthirsty Bard and His Dr. Frankenstein,” Daily Telegraph (8 September 2003): 8. Brown, Ruth. “English Heritage and Australian Culture: The Church and Literature of England in Oscar and Lucinda,” Australian Literary Studies 17 (1995): 135 –140. Carey, Peter. The Big Bazoohley. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995. _____. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. _____. “The Book That Changed My Life,” Best Life 3, no. 5 (June 2006): 52. _____. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. _____. His Illegal Self. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2008. _____. “Letter to Robert McCrum,” Observer (23 September 2001): 24. _____. “My Lasting Wish,” The Australian Magazine (14 –15 October 1994): 10, 13 –14, 16 –18. _____. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003. _____. “A New York Writer’s Catch-22,” New York Magazine (28 May 2007). _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988.

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_____. “Our Love Affair with Losers,” (Melbourne) Herald (15 September 1987): 11. _____. “Peter Carey Accepts NBC Award,” National Book Council Newsletter 13, no. 2 (1986): 2–3. _____. “A Small Memorial,” New Yorker (25 September 1995): 54, 59 –63. _____. “The Thin Man Makes History, Biting the Imperial Hand,” Australian Author 21, no. 3 (1989): 17. _____. “When the Living Is Easy,” New Statesman (20 August 2001): 28 –29. Castle, Claudia, and Rex Butler. “Your A-Z Guide to Peter Carey,” Honi Soit (7 June 1982): 8 –9. Charles, Ron. “Pay No Attention to the Poet Behind The Mask,” Christian Science Monitor (23 October 2003): 14. Coe, Jonathan. “The Inspector of Oz,” The Guardian (5 September 1991). _____. “Principia Efica,” London Review of Books 16, no. 18 (22 September 1994): 5. Craven, Peter. “Doubting Peter,” Business Review Weekly Spring Supplement (spring 1991): 47. Daniel, Helen. “A Dazzling Sleight of Hand,” The Age Books Extra (20 August 1994): 7. Doolan, Robert. “Creation Ex Nihilo,” Answers in Genesis 18, no. 1 (December 1995 –February 1996): 4. Dudar, Helen. “An Aussie Writer at Home in the Village,” Wall Street Journal (15 January 1992): A10. “Ex-Wife Comes Out Swinging,” Sydney Morning Herald (13 May 2006). Fitzgerald, Michael. “Changed Expectations,” Time South Pacific 32 (11 August 1997): 82. Freeman, John. “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” The Australian (26 January 2008). _____. “Sphere of Influence,” www.alibi.com/index.php?story=22875&scn=art, accessed on November 26, 2008. Gourevitch, Philip, ed. The Paris Review Interview, II. New York: Picador, 2007. Griffin, David. “Review: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” New York Review of Science Fiction 97 (1996): 14 –17. Grimes, William. “An Australian Novelist with a Full-Tilt Pace and Ferocious Humor,” New York Times (28 January 1992): C11, C15. Groom, Nick. “Beyond a Joke,” Independent (13 September 2003): 32. Gussow, Mel. “An Australian Novelist Takes Another Look at Dickens’ Inimitable Convict,” New York Times (25 May 1998). Harford, Sonia. Leaving Paradise: My Expat Adventure and Other Stories. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006. Hasluck, Nicholas. Offcuts: From a Legal Literary Life. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1993. Hassall, Anthony J. “Telling Lies and Stories: Peter Carey’s Bliss,” Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 4 (1989): 637–653. Hawley, Janet. “How an Ad Man Found Bliss,” The Age 26 (September1981): 26. Holtsberry, Kevin. “Atlantic Unbound Interview with Peter Carey,” http://kevinholtsberry.com/kh/ 2003/10/30/atlantic-unbound-interview-with-peter-carey/, accessed on November 26, 2008. Hunter-Tilney, Ludovic. “The Fugitive’s Lament,” Financial Times (15 February 2008). Hyman, Ben. “Novelist Reads to Intimate Crowd,” (Providence, R. I.) Brown Daily Herald (19 March 2009). Ifeka, Helena. “Peter Carey,” Hermes 8 (1992): 14 –23. “Interview with Peter Carey,” www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid= 95, accessed on November 26, 2008. Jarvis, Jill. “CUNY Distinguished Professors: Peter Carey,” www1.cuny.edu/forum/?p=2668, accessed on November 26, 2008. Jones, Malcolm. “The Down-Under Car Dealers from Hell,” Newsweek 119, no. 4 (27 January 1992): 60. Jones, Rhadika. “Interview,” Paris Review in The Paris Review Interview, II. New York: Macmillan, 2007. Kachka, Boris. “Influences: Peter Carey,” New York 38, no. 6 (21 February 2005): 76. Koval, Ramona. “The Unexamined Life: Peter Carey Interviewed,” Meanjin 56, nos. 3 –4 (1997): 667–682. Lamb, Karen. Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992. “Literary Matters,” Sydney Morning Herald (30 January 1992). Lord, Gillian. “True History of Peter Carey,” Canberra Times (26 January 2008). Lyons, Charles. “Jordan, Scala Shell Out ‘Kelly’ Green for Novel,” Daily Variety 270, no. 27 (10 January 2001): 5. Maclean, Marie. “Carey Goes Cybersurfing,” Australian Book Review 164 (19 September 1994): 8 –10. Maddocks, John. “Bizarre Realities: An Interview with Peter Carey,” Southerly 41 (1981): 27–40. Markus, Andrew. Building a New Community. Crows News, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2001. Marx, Bill. “Dystopia Down Under,” The Nation 254, no. 10 (16 March 1992): 346 –348. Maver, Igor. Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies. Oxford: Lexington, 2006. Mayer, Geoff, and Keith Beattie. The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand. London: Wallflower, 2007. McChonchie, Rod. “The Trendy and the True,” Overland 60 (1975): 83. McKenzie, Suzie. “Convicts Redeemed,” Guardian (13 September 1997): T30, T33. Messud, Claire. “The Robbers of Bruder Mouse,” Independent (17 September 1994). Meyer, Lisa. “An Interview with Peter Carey,” Chicago Review 43, no. 2 (1997): 83 –84.

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Miller, Karl. “Late Expectations,” New Republic 218, no. 16 (20 April 1998): 40 –41. Morgan, Wendy. “Treading a Fine Line? Carey’s Kelly,” Social Alternatives 20, no. 1 (January 2001): 71 –72. Mudge, Alan. “The Seduction of the Scam: A Literary Imposter Comes Alice in Peter Carey’s ‘Fake,’” Book Page, 2003, www.bookpage.com/0311bp/peter_carey.html, accessed on November 20, 2008. Munro, Craig. “Building the Fabulist Extensions: An Interview with Peter Carey,” Makar 12, no. 1 (1976): 3 –12. Murphy, Jessica. “A Living, Breathing Hoax,” Atlantic Unbound (22 October 2003). Murray, Scott, ed. Australian Film: 1978 –1992: A Survey of Theatrical Features. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993. Nicklin, Lenore. “Peter Carey an Ad-Man,” Sydney Morning Herald (13 February 1975): 3. Nielsen, Philip. “Authors’ Statements,” Australian Literary Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 191 –193. Oakley, Barry. “Review: True History of the Kelly Gang,” Australian’s Review of Books (November 2000): 5. O’Donohue, Barry. “Write and Person,” Arts National 3, no. 2 (December 1985): 106 –107. O’Reilly, Nathanael. “The Voice of the Teller: A Conversation with Peter Carey,” Antipodes 16, no. 2 (December 2002): 164. Petersen, Kirsten Holst. “Gambling on Reality,” Australian Literary Studies 15 (1991): 107–116. Pierce, Peter. “The Problem of Consolation in the Country of Lost Children,” Society for Studies in Religion, Literature and the Arts (2001): 73 –86. Polito, Robert. “Peter Carey,” Bomb no. 54 (winter 1996): 1. Riemer, Andrew. “Review: His Illegal Self,” Sydney Morning Herald (4 February 2008). Rogers, Susan L. “Review: The Big Bazoohley,” School Library Journal 41, no. 10 (1995): 132. Ross, Bruce Clunies. “Some Developments in Short Fiction 1969 –1980,” Australian Literary Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 165 –180. Rubbo, Mark. “Interview: Peter Carey,” www.readings.com.au/interview/peter-carey, accessed on November 26, 2008. Ryle, John. “Magic and Poison,” Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1981): 1350. Schillinger, Liesl. “Child of the Revolution,” New York Times Boook Review (10 February 2008). Seaman, Donna. “Review: Theft: A Love Story,” Booklist 102, no. 14 (15 March 2006): 5. _____. Writers on the Air. Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2005. See, Carolyn. “A Magic Tale of Spectacle,” Washington Post 118, no. 74 (17 February 1995): F2. Shields, Carol. “Voorstand, Go Home!,” New York Times (12 February 1995). Shriver, Lionel. “Flashes of Mastery from Peter Carey,” London Telegraph (10 February 2008). Sibree, Bron. “Peter Carey Rechards His Sense of History,” Canberra Times (21 September 1997): 22. Stead, C. K. Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989. Stewart, Miranda. “Australian Stories of Tax and Fairness: A Feminist Reading of Peter Carey’s The Tax Inspector,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 18 (June 2003): 1 –25. Sutherland, John. “Division Street,” Times Literary Supplement (9 April 1976): 445. Tausky, Thomas E. “Getting the Corner Right,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 4 (1990): 27–38. Taylor, Alan. “Peter Carey: In Exile from His Own Life,” Sunday Herald (17 February 2008). Taylor, D. J. “A Ventriloquist’s Tale,” New Statesman 130, no. 4519 (8 January 2001): 42. Updike, John. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism. New York: Random House, 2007. Wagner, Erica. “Peter Carey Talks about Prose, Politics, and His Passion for Australia,” London Times (1 February 2008). Watchel, Eleanor. “‘We Really Can Make Ourselves Up’: An Interview with Peter Carey,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 9 (1993): 103 –105. White, Edmund. “Recognizing Jack,” Times Literary Supplement (30 August 1991): 21. Wiener, Jon. “Growing Up Radical: An Interview with Peter Carey,” www.dissentmagazine.org/online. php?id=57, accessed on November 26, 2008. Willbanks, Ray. Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and Their Work. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1992. Woodward, Richard B. “Out of Efica,” Village Voice 40, no. 9 (28 February 1995): 59. Wroe, Nicholas. “Between Two Worlds,” Guardian (19 January 2008), www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/ jan/19/fiction.petercarey, accessed on November 20, 2008. _____. “Fiction’s Great Outlaw,” Guardian (6 January 2001): 6. Wyndham, Susan. “For My Next Trick,” www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/25/1059084198825.html, accessed on November 25, 2008. _____. “A Love-Hate story,” Sydney Morning Herald (1 April 2006). _____. “Peter Carey: An Unusual Life,” Australian Magazine (20 August 1994): 42–46, 48.

Carey Genealogy Edith Carey=Robert Graham Ada Louisa Roberts=John Thomas from | Carey Welsh teacher | Warriner London | Irish pilot | teacher from | (1874 –1959) | Camperdown -----------------------------------------------| | | | | Edith 4 more Percival Stanley=Helen Jean Warriner brother Martin “Percy” Carey | Carey amputee d. 1985 | -------------------------------------------------------| | | Patricia Paul Leigh=Peter Philip=Alison Margaret Summers “Trish” b. 1933 Weetman | Carey | b. 1951 b. 1932 b. 1941 | b. 1943 | m. 3/16/1985 m. 11/7/1964 | | div. 6/2005 div. 1974 | | ----------------------------------------------------------------| | | | stillborn daughter twin boy and girl Sam Summers Charley fall 1971 died at birth b. 9/13/1986 b. 1990

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Peter Carey: A Literary Companion abortion Carey speaks knowledgeably, but not patriarchally on the subject of female reproduction rights and responsibilities. He lists abortion among the survival needs of the mouette bird and satirizes the concern of Phoebe Selkirk for her pregnant 16-year-old daughter Susan, a freshman at Radcliffe. To Phoebe, the “condition,” a little “bump,” requires “tidying up,” a euphemism for an abortion that Susan rejects (Carey, 2008, 130). In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), the author describes the plight of parturient women like actortheater manager Felicity “Flick” Smith, who patronizes the Mater Hospital to assure her son’s survival in morally perilous times. Although the hospital carries the Latin word for “mother” in its title, Felicity’s doctors propose euthanizing her pitifully handicapped son Tristan. Carey’s sympathy for women trapped in unfulfilling marriage and coercive motherhood takes dramatic form in Illywhacker (1985), his story of the life and loves of liar and drifter Herbert Peter Badgery. Besotted with Phoebe McGrath, his second wife, Herbert smothers her spirit in a house that becomes a metaphoric parrot cage. After she births son Charles, the prospect of bearing more children drives her to attempt an illegal abortion, a form of self-liberation from husband, home, and maternity. Carey acknowledges through the advice of poet Horace Dunlop the danger of a felony at a time when “the press was in a hysteria about abortion and did not hesitate to report what grisly details came its way” (Carey, 1985, 168). Because of his pity for Phoebe, Horace clenches his thighs “in sympathetic agony” and imagines “bloody instruments and tearing life,” but admits that the lot of the reluctant pregnant woman is “monstrously unfair” (ibid., 169). Out of self-preservation, Phoebe attempts to end a second pregnancy by swallowing an abortifacient, probably ergot, a fungus containing alkaloids that expel the fetus from the uterus. To cushion the father’s shock and outrage, Dr. Ernest Henderson takes on the unaccustomed job of prevaricator by producing “such a dazzling thread of pure invention and looped it back and forth so many times that I could not work out where anything started or stopped” (Carey, 1985, 186). Ironically, the doctor surpasses Badgery himself at verbal chicanery. Crucial to the humbuggery is Herbert’s willingness to exonerate Phoebe and his gratitude for a lie that comforts him in the face of his wife’s treachery.

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THE UN-MOTHER For Jack Maggs (1997), Carey returns to the issue of terminated pregnancy by picturing the title character as the foster son of “Ma” Mary Britten, a faux healer and abortionist in the London slums. To criminalize her inability to love, the author names her for the iconic Catholic madonna and equips her with the viciousness and rapacity of a crime boss. Supplied with trainees by partner Silas Smith, she coaches her son Tom, daughter Sophina, and the orphan Maggs in housebreaking and selecting high quality silver for resale. To feed the family, Ma Britten works her own form of housewrecking, the luring of unsuspecting girls and wives into taking crude abortifacients. She boldly advertises her wares with a “puff in the newspaper” and arms herself against the police with a “Bilboa,” a Spanish thrusting sword (Carey, 1997, 5). To coarsen the scenario, Carey refers to pharmaceutical stock as “belly-ache sausages” and “Dr Britten’s Cock Spur Pills for Female Disorders,” two womb cleansers sporting penile, macho designations on a par with the Bilboa for imagery merging male penetration with the cutting edge of a surgeon’s curette (Carey, 1997, 209). Profit controls the workings of the mother’s conscience. To ensure loot from the children’s burgling, she subjects Maggs’s beloved Sophina to a home abortion that ejects a damaged love child that Ma abandons in a sewer. Like a mother bird, Maggs recoils from the violation of the unborn. Because of his lashing 20 times with a strop, he believes himself “assaulted for being the father of an unborn babe” (ibid., 261). He determines to “weave [his foster son] a nest so strong that no one would ever hurt his goodness” (ibid., 287). The strengthening of the nest implies a fortification of the womb against the machinations of unmotherly women like Ma Britten. Choking on the words, Maggs writes of the loss in a letter to Henry Phipps: “There lay our son — the poor dead mite was such a tiny thing” (ibid., 241). Enhancing the squalid rejection of the fetus is a slash on the baby’s face, a symbol of the indiscriminate slicing of new life from Sophina’s uterus. Through hypnosis induced by writer Tobias Oates, Maggs relives the horror, wailing, “My babe. My babe is dead” (ibid., 204). A token of England’s rejection of its orphaned expatriates through expedient transportation of convicts to the colonies, the memory of the tiny corpse goads the would-be father into returning to the place of incarceration, an ironic venture that allows him the safety and serenity to sire a healthy family by wife Mercy Larkin Maggs, the literary foil of the Un-Mother.

THE UNWED MOTHER Compounding the view of Ma Britten as a monster, the obverse of the English gentlewoman, Carey embroiders the death of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Warriner, writer Tobias “Toby” Oates’s sister-in-law and lover, with a lingering demise brought on by an overdose of abortion pills. Oates’s wife Mary snips Ma’s advertisement from the newspaper with sewing scissors, a subversion of a domestic tool for nefarious purpose. The trip to Ma’s office takes Mary to 4 Cecil Street, a thoroughfare bearing the name of Robert Cecil, spymaster for Elizabeth I, England’s childless queen. Carey extends the concept of stunted motherhood by describing Ma as severe and starchy like a portrait of a “Dutch nun” (Carey, 1997, 288). The abortionist takes the proffered advertisement in her fingers just as Mary’s grandfather once “squashed caterpillars in his garden,” an image that envisions the fetus as vermin (ibid., 289). Carey’s tone builds on Victorian melodrama enhanced by the pathetic fallacy. Ma, a

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chameleon capable of both cruelty and solace, warns Mary of the danger of swallowing pills “if she is gestational,” a professional term that strips her of fault (Carey, 1997, 289). On a stormy night at winsomely named Lamb’s Conduit Street, Lizzie pictures her “homunculus ... at least dimly aware of its fate” and “[waiting] in dread” (ibid., 305). Pulled between passion for Oates and love for “that little mound, that soft roundness of her stomach,” Lizzie faces five hours of agony brought on by bitter tea that Mary laces with Ma’s pills (ibid., 307). As though purifying the scene of his evil in-house debauchery of his wife’s sister, Oates thrusts the bloodied bedclothes in the fire, a symbol of eternal damnation. A grisly feminine image dances before his eyes of “the wraith of their dead child folding and unfolding in the skirts of fire” (ibid., 326). The jettisoning of the unborn love child on May 7, “the darkest night of his life,” sets Oates to framing a criminal fiction demonizing Maggs, upon whom he projects blame (ibid.). At the same time that Carey yokes the two men with grief for aborted children, the scenario suggests the author’s view of writing as empowerment to ensnare and avenge. See also female persona; mothering; women

• Further readings Carey, Peter. His Illegal Self. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2008. _____. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. Jack Maggs. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Dellapenna, Joseph W. Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic, 2006. Mukherjee, Ankhi. “Missed Encounters: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 1 (spring 2005): 108 –133. Pell, George. Issues of Faith and Morals. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999. Wroe, Nicholas. “Fiction’s Great Outlaw,” Guardian (6 January 2001): 6.

achievement World reception of expatriate author Peter Carey’s fiction is most enigmatic in his motherland. In the opinion of analyst Karen Lamb, the fault lies in Australians who have “always had [difficulty] in recognising creative achievement,” especially when accompanied by wealth, prestige, and awards to an “infant prodige”(Lamb, 1992, 3, 4). Early in his career, he toyed with questions of success in characters from short works in his first collections, The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979): character Anna commandant Gerrard Haflinger Gleason husband Lilly Darko mime Paul soldier Teddy Finch Turk Kershaw Vincent

story “He Found Her in Late Summer” “Fragrance of Roses” “Kristu-Du” “American Dreams” “Happy Story” “Exotic Pleasures” “The Last Days of a Famous Mime” “The Chance” “A Windmill in the West” “The Fat Man in History” “A Schoolboy Prank” “The Puzzling Nature of Blue”

achievement monogamous relationship hybrid rose domed assembly hall miniature city flying recovery from unemployment stage stardom risking love for a woman military obedience replacing Fantoni mentorship of young boys righting a moral wrong

The quirks of Carey’s dramatis personae suit his attitude toward his homeland, a twosided viewpoint he explored in the 54th annual Sydney-to-Hobart Yacht Race of Decem-

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ber 1998, a vigorous episode of 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). He explained, “In Australia we trust loss and we are very suspicious of success. We have an affection for outcasts and oddballs,” a belief that empowers My Life as a Fake (2003) and Theft: A Love Story (2006) as well as his historical portrait of Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) (Jarvis 2008). Of his initial notoriety, he questions his countrymen’s diffidence and their inability to judge accomplishment: “We’ve continually set ourselves up, and been set up, to be judged by outside experts: What do they think in London? What do they think in New York? How do you like it here? All that stuff we crave and resent” (Wyndham, 2006). In his second published novel, Illywhacker (1985), Carey explains the failure of Australians in a simple comparison with Americans. Unlike United States citizens, who are “never hesitant about expressing an opinion,” Australians remain diffident, often selfsilencing (Carey, 1985, 346). Carey emphasizes that capitalistic success is less influential on the island nation than national identity: “It is this, not steel mills or oilwells, that is the difference between the two nations” (ibid.). The author challenges the Australian selfrecrimination as a nation of losers by creating fictional casts of risk-takers and outsiders, such as storyteller Harry Stanthorpe Joy and his hippie second wife, Honey Barbara Harrison, in Bliss (1981); car salesman Herbert Peter Badgery and his son Charles in Illywhacker; single mother Maria Takis in The Tax Inspector (1991); the title character and his mother, actor and troup manager Felicity “Flick” Smith in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994); and Takashi, the enigmatic tour guide in Wrong about Japan (2005). Amid his novels and stories, Carey halted to pose a different view of achievement through subversion in The Big Bazoohley (1995), a children’s satire on the commercial use of children and their ingenuous appeal in advertising. Through initiative and self-assertion, nineyear-old protagonist Sam Kellow manages to win a contest that saves his family from financial ruin. The emergence of a child hero implies the author’s faith in the upcoming generation, particularly in his two sons, Sam and Charley, who were the sources of the story.

DARING FOR EXCELLENCE In his Booker Prize winner, the neo–Victorian novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Carey examines the challenge of a daring project with winner-take-all ramifications. He depicts the title pairing as a loser, the Oxford-trained Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins, yoked to a dreamer, glass manufacturer and labor leader Lucinda Leplastrier. During her in-home rehabilitation of Hopkins from scandal and defrocking by the Church of England, she relishes a platonic relationship as close as siblings. While controlling their mutual compulsion to gamble, she fantasizes the realization of an industrial challenge —“to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast-iron” (Carey, 1988, 305). Some 15 years after the completion of London’s Crystal Palace, she imagines the spinning of a weblike metal frame to hold glass— a “bat-boned glass castle” that pounds her brain with an ache to see it built (ibid., 306). The concept enhances the author’s depiction of Lucinda as the daughter of Elizabeth Fisher Leplastrier, a liberated women who rears her daughter to respect work and to value its profits. The concept of achievement in Oscar and Lucinda requires two participants, the designer and the deliverer. At a moment of miscommunication and spiritual letdown, Lucinda shares her aspiration with Oscar, who glimpses the glass prototype as “light, ice, spectra,” a diametric contrast to his own career prospects, which indiscretion has shat-

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tered (ibid., 317). To a man reared in a fanatic fundamentalist household, glass equates with the soul for its freedom from blemish, vanity, dust, and corruption. To him, a glass castle is “an avenue for glory,” a parody of the 19th-century intent to Christianize the world’s colonial hinterlands (ibid.). His failure to deliver Lucinda’s sparkling chapel to the Australian outback is the product of the venality and racism of the expeditioner Jeffris and the terror of water that swamps and drowns Oscar. Irony shifts the story to success in the survival of Oscar’s great-grandson, the teller of family history who reclaims the failed prelate from ignominy. In an off hand comment on Lucinda, the unmarried, childless industrialist, Carey pictures a variant form of achievement in her contributions to the labor movement. Her success echoes the claims of the “New Woman,” the aggressive, careerminded, go-getter who needs neither husband nor offspring to fulfill her promise.

OVERCOMING DISABILITY Achievement takes a problematic turn in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, a combination Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman that poses a protagonist more indelibly marred than Oscar Hopkins. The plot follows the title figure, a freakish seeker-hero, from birth through adaptation to physical handicap and public rejection for his unsightly body, uncontrolled twitches, and indecipherable speech. In the view of critic Brian Edwards, the coming-of-age of a disabled boy passes through the “instabilities, uncertainties, needs, and small triumphs of individuals” more in need of acceptance than the “odd bod” Oscar (Edwards, 1998, 268). By surviving a twisted digestive tract that spews green vomit, the infant escapes the unspoken proposal of pediatrician Marc Laroche and Dr. Eisner that Felicity “Flick” Smith euthanize her newborn. Instead of rejecting a nightmare that “she might expect to stay forever hidden in the entrails of her consciousness,” Felicity makes “mummy-noises,” a tender expression of love and acceptance (Carey, 1994, 17). With the support of her acting troupe and a triad of fathers, Tristan survives tortuous medical treatments. Carey validates the marginal lives of surrogate parents who include “men with tattooed fingers, women with tinted leg hair ... ornamental face scars” (ibid., 66). Under their tutelage, Tristan, “their emblem, their mascot” progresses to eating, talking, walking, learning acrobatics, and living like a near-normal child (ibid.). Limitations become Tristan’s impetus to greater achievement. Felicity nurtures his brilliance by buying him dictionaries and reading aloud from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), England’s literary epic. To prove his dexterity as an acrobat, Tristan climbs a tree and returns to the ground bearing an unbroken egg in his mouth, a symbol of his advancement from fetus to the promise of youth. Throughout the quest for normalcy, he relies on the expertise of the mélange of actors and circus performers led by his adoring mother, an actor and theater manager of the radical Feu Follet in Chemin Rouge, Efica. He longs to play the lead in William Shakespeare’s King Lear (ca. 1603). To develop stagecraft, the boy practices dramatic dialogue by delivering lines from Richard III (ca. 1589), Julius Caesar (ca. 1599), and The Tempest (ca. 1610), plays based on Elizabethan concepts of human foible and ruin. Tristan’s advance from the tragedy of a Plantagenet warrior-king and a doomed Roman titan to the romance of castaways in the New World predicts the boy’s censure of his mother’s imperious homeland and his readying for combat against Voorstand in the art wars of Efica, his colonial island home. At stake is the colony’s self-esteem and pride in accomplishment. Carey illustrates that Tristan’s extreme idealism carries mortal costs. The assassination of Felicity by agents of the Voorstand Intelligence Agency thrusts Tristan into an

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emotional spiral. A symbolic pupa stage sends him to a cubby below the Feu Follet platform to read banned radical works and to write populist tracts. His emergence from the emotional chrysalis requires a grab bag of circus tricks: after his migration from Efica to Voorstand, he acquires the seedy costume of a robotic Bruder Mouse and the voice modulator used in Saarlim City’s Water Sirkus. Like Australia itself, the microcosm of Tristan’s coming of age requires spunk and spare parts, which he must dump to escape a charge of treason. At his most resilient, he emerges from his pupa to claim his actual body and voice. The final vault into the future requires an ad hoc family — acrobat Bill Millefleur, Tristan’s biological father, and surrogate mother Jacqui Lorraine. Bill’s rescue of Tristan and Jacqui down the 20-story banister of a fire escape at Demos Platz takes on a Spiderman aura and precedes the trio’s trek north to the Arctic before eluding a team of assassins by deflecting their route to Bergen, Norway. Just as Carey leaves the new frontiers of Harry Joy, Maria Takis, Lucinda Leplastrier, and Ned Kelly’s daughter open to the imagination, he closes on Tristan’s new horizons with faith in the future.

QUESTIONING CRITERIA For Theft: A Love Story, Carey turns from questions of achievement to matters of evaluation. For egotistic painter Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone, the question of who defines artistic achievement plunges him into a four-continent tangle of critics, galleries, dealers, and investors. His success in Australia precedes a sell-out showing in Tokyo, which plunges him into the doldrums at the sale of his two masterworks, I, the Speaker and If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die, titles implying the ephemeral nature of human actions. He snarls, “It is very bloody unpleasant to have all your paintings hoovered out of you by strangers” (Carey, 2006, 165). He differentiates between monetary reward from “a corporate Japanese” and the thrill of being displayed in a museum (ibid.). Butcher belabors the problems of artistic longevity. Because his work lies in the hands of an acquisitive investor, he fears the worst — his erasure from history. Carey broadens the satire of his novel by concluding with the success of Le Golem Électrique, Butcher’s forged Leibovitz worth $3.2 million. Ironically, it may be Butcher’s greatest achievement and certainly the top monetary success. The coming to knowledge dumbfounds the artist, who, according to his retarded brother Hugh, looks “like Melbourne weather, rain, sunshine, hail, smile, frown, scowl, blow the schnozzle, bless me, what will happen next” (ibid., 268). In the final line, the artist falls back on laughter, the human outlet for frustration. The fade-out stresses the novel’s survivalist theme. By empowering Butcher to laugh at his own foibles, Carey crowns him with the achiever’s ability to accept himself, his art, and a skewed critical audience as ineluctable topics for humor. See also powerlessness; reclamation

• Further readings Carey, Peter. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Edwards, Brian. Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction. New York: Taylor & Francis, 1998. Fiander, Lisa M. “Writing in “A Fairy Story Landscape”: Fairy Tales and Contemporary Australian Fiction,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian 2 (2003): 157–166. Jarvis, Jill. “CUNY Distinguished Professors: Peter Carey,” www1.cuny.edu/forum/?p=2668, accessed on November 26, 2008. Lamb, Karen. Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992.

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Wyndham, Susan. “For My Next Trick,” www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/25/1059084198825.html, accessed on November 25, 2008.

adaptation Essential to survival and achievement in Peter Carey’s fiction is the individual’s willingness to accommodate unforeseen demands and challenges that range from a near-death experience and the birth of a crippled son to the persecution of the Irish by Australia’s Victorian police, the nettling of an autistic man for sitting on a New York City sidewalk, and the kidnap of a poor little rich boy from Manhattan to a commune south of Yandina, Queensland. In his first published novel, Bliss (1981), a satire on capitalism, Carey twice thrusts advertising magnate Harry Stanthorpe Joy to the edge of death and forces him to examine the realities of family life. The miseries of marriage to adulterer Bettina “Betty” McPhee Joy and fatherhood to drug dealer David Joy and Marxist Lucy Joy help Harry accept the loss of prestige as a top salesman that accompanies his escape into atonement and a new self. On his flight from a life of dishonesty and from incarceration at the Merry Lands asylum, Harry flees into the soul-reviving wilds of Bog Onion Road. Among pantheistic commune dwellers, Harry acclimates to the forest by planting trees and by building his own shelter. While sowing vegetable seeds, he experiences an epiphany of change: “At the age of forty he is reduced to open-mouthed amazement by the sight of a pea he has planted uncurling through the soil,” an image of newness and promise (Carey, 1981, 284). He reaches back to his father, American storyteller Vance Joy, for a ready-made source of community. By becoming a storykeeper and culture conveyor to spiritually jangled forest dwellers, Harry discovers not only trust and friendship but family cohesion and purpose: “He was not only liked, he was also necessary,” Carey’s definition of the reciprocity of giving and receiving from the community (ibid., 290). To a fellow salesman, Herbert Peter Badgery, the roguish idea man in Illywhacker (1985), adaptation evolves from periodic failures and heartbreak. The abandonment by wife Phoebe McGrath Badgery and the disappearance of their 14-year-old daughter, Sonia “Sonny” Badgery, down a mineshaft jolt Badgery into new patterns of survival. He deserts his job as seller of T Model Fords and, during a decade of cell time at Rankin Downs Gaol, turns to literacy for salvation. With a history degree from the University of Sydney, he begins researching the question of the lies at the basis of Australia’s self-perception. Like Harry Joy, Badgery gives to get. His compassion for displaced Aboriginals and for persecuted Asian laborers eases his need to outwit and dupe. Long into old age, he fits his feeble frame to adversity like a weary back to a hammock. Rather than fight the notion of advancing frailty and death, amid bouts of vertigo, psoriasis, nausea, and incontinence, he delights in being a poster boy for longevity. With a touch of his former egotism, he boasts, “Naturally they come to see me, not just the men with calipers and bottlers, but the ordinary visitors” (Carey, 1985, 598).

YOUTH’S ADJUSTMENTS In the title figures in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), the Booker Prize–winning neo–Victorian novel of two mismated gamblers, Carey examines shifts in belief and outlook. In childhood, Lucinda Leplastrier grows up under the guidance of Elizabeth Fisher Leplastrier, her liberated mother. Early widowhood forces the mother to rear Lucinda under a regimen of hard farm work and the appreciation of the profits of labor. The mother urges

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Lucinda to avoid grief: “We are not going to leave this country to the Irish ... so look smart, my girl, and help me here” (Carey, 1988, 72). Upon receipt of her inheritance on May 10, 1859, 18-year-old Lucinda is familiar with cycles of change and with the adaptation necessary to her purchase of Sydney’s Prince Rupert’s Glassworks, her venture into industrialism in a male-dominated metropolis. Simultaneous with Lucinda’s cutting and shaping of a career to suit her style, the Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins prepares for the colonial mission fields. Oddly, his self-readying leads him to gambling and to a system of charting horses and races with remarkable predictive success. Upon his arrival from England to Randwick, his assigned vicarage in Sydney, Australia, his naiveté costs him his post and dignity after he disgraces himself by playing cards with a single woman unchaperoned in his own parlor. Rescued from penury by Lucinda, he adjusts to a platonic relationship in the country at her Balmain cottage at Whitfield’s Farm on the Parramatta River and to the extremes of her plan to ship a glass chapel up the Bellinger River to the Reverend Dennis Hasset at Boat Harbour. Adaptability fails Oscar in the clutches of Mr. Jeffris, a self-glorying explorer who subdues Oscar’s fear of water with regular doses of laudanum. Oscar’s inability to cope with Lucinda’s bold plan leads to death in the water, the terror that wraps the former minister like chains. At the ends of his courage, he pleads, “Oh Lord, I am alive in the midst of Thy dreadful river. All Thy glory surrounds me, but I am afraid” (Carey, 1988, 416). With a blend of pity and ridicule, the text sets Oscar on his last venture, the siring of a son and a patriarchal line that keeps his story alive through four generations.

TORMENT AND SURVIVAL Carey’s sharp downturn to sexual hurt and psychic pain in children for The Tax Inspector (1991) generated negative critiques as well as qualms in the author. In the Catchprice family, parental incest against offspring has a three-generation history. The plot depicts the rationalization of Jack about his father Cacka’s molestations of him, brother Mort, and sister Cathy of Mort’s perpetuation of the crime on his children, Johnny and Benny. Tacitly approved by his wife Frieda, Cacka summons family tradition as a lame excuse for squalor, moral degeneracy, and carnal opportunism. Cathy turns her brain power to the running of Catchprice Motors; 18-year-old Johnny, in need of structure and nurture, adapts to the demands of vegetarianism among Hare Krishnas and alters his name to Vishnu, the all-pervasive deity of Hinduism. The deviance in the Catchprice family tree creeps down to the basement lair of Benny, Vish’s 16-year-old brother, a psychopathic stalker looking for a new source of prey like the bestial title character in John Gardner’s Grendel (1971). Upon Benny’s seizure of tax inspector Maria Takis at gunpoint, Carey reveals an adjustment to a perverse childhood that turns the twisted teen into a skulking rodent. Maria sniffs fetid air “like a subway tunnel” and perceives the basement milieu like a “coldness, the cold hurting emptiness” of a subhuman reject (Carey, 1991, 277). Because Benny lies beyond reclamation and his family past salvation, Carey ends the novel with a burst of explosives that wipes the landscape clean of Catchprices. Another type of survivalism rescues the title character in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), a dystopic view of a colonial hinterland. At the Feu Follet, a radical theatrical collective in Efica, Tristan enters life too misshapen and distorted for Doctor Marc Laroche to rectify. Tristan’s mother, actor and troupe manager Felicity “Flick” Smith, insists on rearing her son amid an extended family of stage players, tumblers, and a triad of fathers. Carey’s tribute to human flexibility, the novel echoes with rejection and disgust

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at the sight of a drooling, toddling humanoid. Tristan opts for acting as a career, a choice his mother recognizes as hopeless for a boy who walks on his ankles and struggles to ungarble his words. After her murder, 23-year-old Tristan rouses to the challenge and accidentally latches on to a solution, disguise as Bruder Mouse with a robot suit and voice modulator. Although he could net a jail term for blasphemy against Voorstand’s Sirkus icon, Tristan learns, “You take the risk, you get the reward” (Carey, 1991, 286). In the interim of Tristan’s adjustment to posing as Bruder Mouse, Carey characterizes the huge change in the handicapped 23-year-old, who manages to turn himself into an actor and to a sexually experienced male. Freed from the infantilism of constant appeasement and nurse care, Tristan transforms himself into a saintly icon “[walking] in bowlegged majesty” and receiving nose kisses from investor Peggy Kram, his benefactor and lover (Carey, 1994, 381). The dual nature of his disguise liberates him from public revulsion, but imprisons him in a hot, prickly mouse suit and comic persona. On his flight from unmasking, he accepts an unremitting physical fact: “I was accustomed to pain, that it was, in my case, almost synonymous with pleasure” (ibid., 414). That said, he adapts to a circumscribed existence that allows him to feel truly alive.

OUTSIDE THE LAW Like Tristan, Ned Kelly, Australia’s frontier rogue, adapts to situations not of his making or liking. In the fictional memoir True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), he fails to understand the Celtic tradition of rebelling and transvestism that conceals the identity of his father, John “Red” Kelly of Tipperary, Ireland. Upon assuming the role of male head of household at John’s death, Ned adapts to the demands of felling trees and clearing land for horse breeding. His intent to farm and to protect his mother and siblings runs afoul of Ellen Quinn Kelly’s decision to apprentice him at age 14 to highwayman Harry Power, an accomplished thief. Ned’s gallops south over Victoria’s rough terrain introduce him to a lifestyle of day and night ducking and hiding from the law. He appreciates Harry’s many bolt holes, the forest spots where both men can breathe easy and rest up from running. At first, he suffers homesickness for his siblings and wants “to be back up in his crib breathing that warm familiar fug” (Carey, 2000, 68). Although robbing and killing are averse to Ned’s nature, he develops a skill at life in the saddle amid the natural beauty of Australia’s southeastern wilds in the Warbies and Wombat Ranges. He rhapsodizes, “The Warbies folded themselves around us like a mother and we slept protected” (ibid., 367). On his cyclical visits to Ellen at Eleven Mile Creek, Carey’s fictional Ned reaches manhood through a complicated process of surviving treachery and of dodging pursuers. Central to Ned’s motivation is his refusal to fault her for a profligate life of lovers and a growing family fathered by boundary rider Bill Frost and George King, an American outlaw. Ned’s own common-law relationship with Mary Hearn and the conception of their daughter coincides with his respect for struggling Irish Catholic immigrants and selection farmers. Among them, he enjoys “the celebration which now spread like yellow gorse across the hills ... [among] the good people of Greta & Moyhu & Euroa & Benalla,” who revere Ned with “no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born” (ibid., 337). Allied with their grievances and their disdain for the corrupt law, he identifies himself at last as a Celto-Australian. On behalf of the underclass, he shoots police, robs the Euroa bank, and takes to the back country on a reckless spree. Adaptation to the rootlessness and disorder of outlawry forces him into a defensive mindset. To protect the unborn generation from shame and ostracism, he writes his apologia explaining all to his infant daughter, an

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American born in San Francisco. The resultant 13 letters speak for the marginalized Irish the constant shift in fortunes and the unending clashes with predatory police and politicians.

LIFE OBSTACLES In Theft: A Love Story (2006), Carey perpetuates his system of heaping enough frustration on a Job-like character to push the beleaguered mind to despair. For Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone, birth to a family of slaughterers and meat sellers threatens to force him into a detested apprenticeship. To achieve a career in art, he must abandon the village of Bacchus Marsh and find means to paint for his life’s work. The continuum of his success is a slash of peaks and valleys, some low enough to doom his efforts. After the failure of his marriage, he loses custody of son Billy Bones and possession of his early canvases, which a divorce court awards his ex-wife, humorously dismissed as the “Plaintiff.” Carey lines up like pins in a bowling alley the erosion of self from loss of mate, house, offspring, and life’s work. Pushed over the edge of discretion, Butcher risks arrest and four years in Long Bay Prison at Malabar, New South Wales, for his rebellion. Adaptation to life’s inconveniences requires another six years of compromises. Carey dramatizes Butcher’s extremes— tantrums over betrayal by his patron, Jean-Paul Milan, and by a neighbor, Dozy Boylan. Complicating his life is an overlay of daily encumbrance with his autistic younger brother, 34-year-old Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone, who behaves like a small boy. An uptick of fortune that allies Butcher with Marlene Cook Leibovitz, the love of his life, proves more treacherous than his past associations. Beaten, tricked, spiritually eviscerated, Butcher retreats from pursuing greatness in the world’s art salons and begins a lawn-mowing business as an antidote to “a ROUGH PATCH at various addresses in Sydney” (Carey, 2006, 265). Accompanied by his brother, Butcher spends five years of normalcy, during which he cherishes memories of father and love for Marlene. Carey avoids happily-ever-after exaggeration by rewarding the has-been painter with a late adulation at “MoMa, the Museum Ludwig, the Tate,” world-class venues for Butcher’s art (ibid., 269). See also achievement

• Further readings Barfoot, C. C., and Theo d’Haen. Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-colonial Literatures. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. Blaber, Ronald, and Marvin Gilman. Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian, Canadian and Indian Fiction. Springwood, NSW: Butterfly, 1990. Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. _____. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. The Tax Inspector. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991. _____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994.

ambition Carey’s interest in human yearnings extends from unrealistic anticipations of a male commune in The Fat Man in History (1974) to the marketing chicanery in The Big Bazoohley (1995) and the builders of ugly housing overlooking Bondi Beach and the competition

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of sailors in the 54th annual Sydney-to-Hobart Yacht Race of December 1998 in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). At his best, the author pities the disillusion in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) of the outlaw Ned Kelly, who, in boyhood, yearns to be class ink monitor. The text of Theft: A Love Story (2006) is less empathetic with a painter so full of self that he jeopardizes life and career by becoming a criminal. In the parable “Report on the Shadow Industry” (1974), a commentary on the writing process, the author focuses on unidentified products built by shadow factories in Topanga, California, and marketed in boxes at grocery stores. The mystery of the contents enhances the allegory, which charges shopaholics with an addiction to seductive marketing. The narrator, who sees his family shattered by disappointment, admits that he perpetuates the household penchant for searching for joy in perpetual shopping hauls. Rather than blame clever packagers and merchandisers, the story finds fault with adults who live in infantile hope of the ultimate marketable satisfaction. In a clever reworking of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the first person narrative “American Dreams” (1974) examines ambition from a retaliatory angle. In a rural region north of the author’s birthplace in Victoria, Australia, Mr. Gleason tricks inquisitive residents by retreating to Bald Hill to wall in a secret project, his erection of a scale model of the town, a hobby construction that anticipates Hissao Badgery’s steel-andglass aerie in Illywhacker (1985) and Lucinda Leplastrier’s glass-and-cast iron chapel in Oscar and Lucinda (1988). At Gleason’s death, the removal of the wall reveals his knowledge of local vice and pettiness in the accuracy of tiny portrait models of townspeople. The town’s reaction to its notoriety, like Australia’s desire to woo North American tourism, results in a limitation on growth and expansion. Carey twists ambition into an obstacle as unyielding as prison bars. The speaker repines, “We spent six long months doing nothing more with our lives than waiting for the Americans,” an ennui parodying world market dominance by United States wealth and artistic taste (Carey, 1974, 156). Locked into replications of daily activity during Gleason’s lifetime, the citizens regret their envy of American materialism and their greed for big cars and television sets. Gleason’s legacy, a backlash against snoopy small-mindedness, thwarts anticipations of fame and money. In a book by the same title, “War Crimes” (1978), Carey’s most powerful denunciation of ambition, sets a satire of demonic American corporations north of Nebraska at a repulsive plant manufacturing TV dinners, an emblem of United States vapidity and sloth. Wasted on the board of directors, the talents of Bart and his accountant partner focus on the selling of low-quality meals to the despairing unemployed. Carey measures ambition in the sybaritic pleasures— drugs, wine, luxurious furnishings, a Cadillac, rock music — that the partners purchase with short-term profits. The speaker snickers, “Metaphorically, we shat with the door open” (Carey, 1979, 268). Through a mix-up, the two murder a boy stealing a frozen meal and kill Sergei, an employee who appears to skim ten percent of the company’s income. The abysmal values of manufacturing sap both productivity and long-range planning, thus placing management in the unenviable position of exterminating the jobless class that it feeds. Heavy with tragic irony, the cautionary tale lambastes American ambitions with tyrannic factory conditions, mismanagement of resources, destruction of the environment, and waste of profits on lavish living and cocaine. “Exotic Pleasures” (1979), a beast fable blended with speculative fiction, reprises Carey’s vision of jobless hell by awarding Lillian “Lilly” and Mort Danko the Aesopian golden goose — a gorgeous bird from a distant planet. By selling opportunities to the curious to stroke its feathers, the couple refills its family coffers, a form of income that Carey

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develops in the zoo atmosphere of the “Best Pet Shop in the World” in Illywhacker (1985) (Carey, 1985, 443). Lilly, the prime mover in the scheme to market the bird at a carnival booth, succeeds so well that she subverts Mort’s delight into jealousy. The collapse of their marriage parallels the destruction of the planet by bird droppings that sow roadsides with invasive Kennecott Rock-drill trees. Carey’s cautionary theme satirizes American power hunger to colonize space by speculating on the resultant loss of jobs on earth and on the introduction of alien biota capable of destroying the planet.

RACIAL CONQUEST Carey makes a direct link between imperial ambitions and the displacement and slaughter of Australian first peoples. Mr. Jeffris, the organizer and leader of the expedition to Boat Harbour in Oscar and Lucinda (1988) aggrandizes himself by demanding total obedience from his crew, comprised of “a storekeeper, two blacksmiths, a medical attendant, a collector of birds and a collector of plants (although these last two were entered on the paybook as ‘riflemen’), a groom, a trumpeter, two carpenters, a shoemaker, a cook” (Carey, 1988, 371). Dressed in uniforms topped with red shirts and white suspenders, his followers, including the hapless Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins and his guardian, Mr. Percy Smith, proceed along the nation’s east coast by chopping trees from the path of their wagons. In chapter 101, Jeffris congratulates himself on producing “evidence of his ability to lead other expeditions,” a calling that could supplant his accounting work with a career in he-man adventuring and map-making (ibid., 399). In addition to journal entries on gun battles with the Yarra-Happini and the Kumbaingiri, Jeffris sketches topography, the basis of a projected book that he intends to bring him lasting international fame. The ironic shift of ambition from Jeffris to his killers, Oscar and Percy, reveals in Jeffris’s literary foils a fount of piety lacking in the trek leader. The morning of Jeffris’s burial in a cess pool selected by Kumbaingiri Billy’s aunt, through rationalization, Smith escapes biblical injunctions against killing by declaring God broader in scope than a nitpicking avenger. He bolsters Oscar’s spirits by envisioning the glass chapel as a phenomenon on a barge “[entering] Boat Harbour in glory” before the gawking godless (Carey, 1988, 410). To complete the transfer from river to bank, Smith plans to tap a mundane form of ambition in the pride of local men who seek muscular feats to display their virility. The grandeur of the entrance Smith pictures as a “float in a procession,” a suggestion of the showmanship that mocks the Church of England’s mission to pagan Australia (ibid.). A more comic fillip to the resolution is the conniving of governess Miriam Chadwick, who seduces Oscar in his last hours to rid herself of widowhood. Carey turns to irony the unlikely conception of a child who perpetuates a patrilineage that secures notoriety for the failed minister.

THE TWISTED PSYCHE For his next fiction, the Gothic novel The Tax Inspector (1991), Carey surpasses the capitalism of Harry Stanthorpe Joy in Bliss (1981) and of Herbert Peter Badgery in Illywhacker (1985) with the surreal self-delusion of Benny Catchprice, a 16-year-old psychopath. Like a venomous reptile in a subterranean tunnel, Benny states his credo: “I cannot be what I am” (Carey, 1991, 21). He strokes his insane ego in a sodden basement hideout and dresses in ostentatious glory — rat-tailed hair, pointed-toed shoes, and an 80 percent silk suit — to assume the role of top salesman for Catchprice Motors. The transformation bears the added perks of flirtation with the tax inspector, 34-year-old Maria Takis. Carey

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choreographs a bizarre falling action in the cellar tryst that turns into a birthing scene, with Benny serving as midwife. At the height of his schizophrenia, he escapes a tainted childhood with a new pose: “I am an angel. I’m a fucking angel now,” a guise he enhances by tattooing himself with a shoulder-to-buttocks wing (Carey, 1991, 262). The author’s pairing of a schizophrenic with an ambitious civil servant results in necessary mayhem. For Maria, the eventual acceptance of pregnancy produces fantasies of mothering —“Maria and her baby, sitting up in bed,” a pink-skinned newborn appealing in its innocence (Carey, 1991, 253). Its vulnerability contrasts the repellant behaviors of Benny, whom Maria pictures as “some creature run over on the road” (ibid., 259). To survive labor and delivery under the barrel of Benny’s sawed-off shotgun, she must stem panic and keep the flow of conversation positive and controlled. While Benny cuddles “little Benny,” Maria’s ambivalence toward motherhood shifts into killer mode (ibid., 276). The instant clarification of her future exonerates the hormonal maternal drive for protecting the helpless babe from a mother’s apathy and a lunatic’s curiosity. The bonding scene that concludes with Maria’s murder of Benny and Frieda’s explosive end to Catchprice Motors and its loopy clutch of owners implies a dual view of mothering — Frieda’s destruction of family and their failed business and Maria’s acceptance of single parenthood as her true goal.

MARKETING TALENT Carey creates a triad of studies of ambition with three consecutive works: My Life as a Fake (2003), Wrong about Japan (2005), and Theft: A Love Story (2006). The first title, a convoluted mystery about a literary hoax, turns ambition run amok into Gothic clay for the shaping of a murderous thriller set in the noisome back alleys of Penang, Kuala Lumpur. By overlayering the literary triumph of Australia poet Christopher Chubb with his creation, the phantasm Bob McCorkle, the text extends an irresistible possibility to Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, the acquisitive editor of the failing London-based poetry journal Modern Review. Through a rambling second-hand account, she follows Chubb’s explanation of how he falsified the work of a non-existent poet, who takes shape as McCorkle and kidnaps Chubb’s infant daughter Tina. Precipitating the collapse of Sarah’s dream of discovering a literary star are Bob’s death from leukemia and Chubb’s murder by his wife and daughter. Thwarted hopes of profiting from someone else’s talent thrust the literary editor into howling sorrow. Of her failed ambition, she laments, “I was left with a wound that would not heal no matter how I tended it” (Carey, 2003, 265). Exacerbating Sarah’s tragedy is the obvious conclusion that her wound is self-inflicted. The ambiguity of ambition belabors the author in Wrong about Japan, in which he battles conflicts on two fronts. While touring Tokyo with his 12-year-old son Charley, an exuberant Japanophile, Carey tries to rid himself of misconceptions about Japanese philosophy and art through the study of manga and anime, graphic fiction that turned into a global fad. Simultaneously, the author attempts to know his son as a preteen on the threshold of manhood. The front gate to guiding Charley’s evolving maturity is his immersion in Japanese novel-length comic books and animated film, an interest he shares with his father. The main threats to the author’s objectives are time and history. For Carey, wildly exaggerated comic book excursions into crime and perverted science bear an unsubtle message from the past generation, the Japanese who survived the firebombing of their nation and the loss of World War II. In an unforeseen clash, the two aims entangle, leaving the father less certain about the intent of Japanese manga artists in alienating the young from

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normal society, but reassured that Charley bears compassion in his character. As described by Francine Prose, a critic for O, the travelers “each accommodate the other’s unaccountable tastes,” the father with kabuki theater and samurai sword-making, the son with a video arcade in an electronics bazaar (Prose, 2005, 87). The last of the trio, Theft: A Love Story, examines the artist up close. A poorly educated painter from Bacchus Marsh, Australia, Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone moves gracelessly among aesthetes. Empowered by a visceral need to paint, he completes huge canvases, but lacks the polish to see his work through to its end as investment art or show pieces for museums. Like Sarah with her hoaxer and Carey in the comic book world, Butcher tries to comprehend the aspirations of collectors and dealers who shuffle canvases about the global market like stocks and bonds. Contributing to the question of appraising worth, Olivier Leibovitz, the son of a famed artist, devalues his father’s works through “pathetic efforts on the Lazy Lucy, that is, licensing small slices of three Leibovitzes,” which he turns into decals to paste on coffee mugs (Carey, 2006, 153). In all three works, Carey leaves moot questions of merit and peruses instead doubts about human integrity. His assumptions point to a perpetual divide between the intrinsic worth of creativity and the consumption of those products by a society governed by dollar values.

• Further readings Carey, Peter. The Fat Man in History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1974. _____. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. The Tax Inspector. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991. _____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. War Crimes. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979. Prose, Francine. “Travels with Charley,” Oprah 6, no. 1 (January 2005): 87. Quinn, Anthony. “Robin Hood of the Outback,” New York Times Book Review (7 January 2001).

Australia Peter Carey, a spokesman for his mother country, is the world’s most-read contemporary author representing what he calls a “settler culture” (Carey, 1994, 165). Critic Bill Marx, in a review for The Nation, lauded the author’s objective national history: “Carey has plugged his homeland’s racial myths, economic skullduggery and collective search for identity into the sophisticated machinery of international prose” (Marx, 1992, 346). His impressions and criticisms carry the ring of authenticity in much the same way that Chinua Achebe speaks for Nigeria, Margaret Atwood for Canada, Jamaica Kincaid for the West Indies, and Salman Rushdie for India. A preponderance of the novelist’s work winnows from his Australian experiences the intrusions that prevent Aussies from developing their own literature. In March 2009, he stated to admirers, “If you’re Australian, you live daily, almost no matter what your politics, with the recognition that the place you’re living in is not yours, that it was taken” (Hyman, 2009). To John Freeman, an interviewer for the London Independent, the author pinpointed the source of Aussie alienation: “It goes right back to, you know, being the sons that didn’t inherit and being the convicts, being of the lowest quality who were sent to Australia, because if you had connections you weren’t going to be sent to Australia” (Freeman, 2006). Carey pictures his fellow Aussies as dupes. He groused that his homeland has a “history of putting up our hands to fight in any war when asked by powerful people working

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on the principle that it will pay off for us in the end and they’ll look after us in the end, which I doubt, anyway” (Balogh, 2007). He reprised the motif of national naiveté in My Life as a Fake (2003) by picturing the gullibility of Malaysians to Communist promises in the late 1950s. For Theft: A Love Story (2006), Carey expanded on previous comments about Aussie diffidence. He introduces antagonist Marlene Cook Leibovitz, an escapee from rural Benalla, to “a completely unmapped ocean, and [she] was gobsmacked, like Cortez, or like Keats himself, to see what the conditions of birth and geography had hidden from her” (Carey, 2006, 140). Patrick Ness, in a review of the novel for The Guardian, explained Marlene’s tenuous position on the horizon of self-education: “Australia no longer kneels at the foot of the empire, but neither is it allowed proper standing as a source of world culture” (Ness, 2006). Teetering on the divide between inferiority and self-affirmation, Marlene opts for criminality, a harvesting of ill-gotten loot from the mercenaries who set the standards of art and intellectualism. The concept of a free people still haunted by a convict culture and an insidious prison system burdens the author. To Lisa Meyer, an interviewer from the Chicago Tribune, he admitted his country’s split personality: “We Australians pretend that we are very free and independent, but the level of our freedom depends on the length of the leash permitted to us by such countries as England and America” (Meyer, 1997, 83). His writings indicate that he also holds the moneyed Japanese accountable for belittling Australia. He described to William Grimes, an analyst for the New York Times, “a self-hating environment” that he longed to endow “with magic and love,” a goal he achieved in part with True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and, to a lesser extent, with 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001), a tribute to the beauty and uniqueness of Australia’s birthplace (Grimes, 1992, C15). In lyric mode, he gloried in the mélange of Aussie assets: “I have seen nothing to equal it in the way of landlocked scenery, in the particular relationship between the races, in the easy tolerance of crime and corruption, in the familiar mingling you can witness on the footpath outside Bar Coluzzi any morning” (Carey, 2001, 229).

HOME BASE Even when setting fiction in the Americas, England, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, and imaginary Voorstand, the author seeks a broader perspective on homeland conditions. He is particularly drawn to the fetid glamour of the Queensland rainforest in Bliss (1981) and His Illegal Self (2008), which reviewer William Sutcliffe, a critic for the London Independent, calls “a love letter to nature, and to the Australian wilderness” (Sutcliffe, 2008). After publication of 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001), he explained, “I have to write for a place, and Australia is my place” (Wroe, 2001, 6). Critic Alan Mudge describes this perspective as Carey’s “ambivalent passion for Australia” (Mudge, 2008). Author John Updike characterizes Carey’s survey of home as wrought with “hectic fullness and fond cruelty” (Updike, 2007, 354). In a spot of satire in My Life as a Fake (2003), Christopher Chubb, an Australian expatriate living in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, recalls how the women in Sydney cluster around English ladies disembarking at the harbor to study their outfits: “Look at that. Must have one now. Whatever they saw there would be copied in one week” (Carey, 2003, 30). The parasitism of Sydneyites for English styles suggests an unhealthy regard for the people who relegated their rejects to the Antipodes. In the fantasy cluster of 18 archipelagos into Efica, setting of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Carey hints at the mindset of his fellow Aussies, who are “abandoned, self-doubting, yet ... willful” (Carey, 1994, 5). Analyst James Bradley deepens the criticism

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with the descriptors “brutal, anti-intellectual, collaborationist and divided” (Bradley, 1997, 663). Carey wrote the thriller-memoir during a period of “[obsession] with my Australianness,” a sense of displacement he identified as “not at home,” a phrase replete with alienation from the things that matter (Woodward, 1995, 59). Bruce Clunies Ross, in an analysis for Australian Literary Studies, depicts the “Peter Carey world” as distinctive for artifacts and natural settings as well as incisive mannerisms, thought, and speech “registered with an exact ear for accent and idiom” of the author’s native land (Ross, 1981, 179). Claire Messud, in an essay for the LA Weekly, summarized the author’s mission as “no less than the writing of his beloved country, the voicing of Australia” (Messud, 2002, B2). The comment suggests Carey’s role as storykeeper and guardian of home.

WRITING AS CULTURE To set Australia on the page, Carey must punctuate scenes and characters with universal appeal. The creation of a distinctive Australian fiction in The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979) results from endowing remote, alien settings with “an original and disturbing perception” of ordinary reality (Ross, 1981, 179). For his insights into national uniqueness, reviewer Lenore Nicklin early on labeled Carey “a writer with a Capital W” (Nicklin, 1975, 3). Bruce Ross extolled the first anthology for innovation and proclaimed the author a rehabilitator of the short story and an amplifier of the scope of short fiction that captures the mundane experiences that novelists ignore. Two titles, “American Dreams” and “A Windmill in the West,” earned particular regard for their depiction of American adulteration of Australian values. In a review for the Time Literary Supplement, critic Edmund White identified Carey’s targets as “urban blight, greed, youth, violence, ecological disaster” (White, 1991, 21). Ross noted that Carey’s “entirely original visions are rooted in precise and detailed observations of contemporary Australian life” (Ross, 1981, 178). Carey’s success derives in part from a capitalist concept that the product should seal a gap, fill a need. Critic John F. Baker of Publishers Weekly attributed Carey’s immediate rise to name recognition to the Australian hunger for native literature and national selfesteem, which imperialism compromised by settling the Australian frontier with transported criminals and social rejects. After publishing Bliss (1981), the author’s first novel, he took a schoolmarmish pose and upbraided his countrymen for self-delusion. Ray Willbanks, an interviewer for Antipodes, commented, “In Bliss, you set up a positive/negative polarity between Australia and the U.S., with America standing for petrol, cancer, bad advertising and spiritual death; and Australia, through Honey Barbara standing for a kind of natural, romantic self-reliance” (Willbanks, 1997, 13). Carey admitted, “I did have a thing about Australia being on the edge of the American Empire, which still seems essentially true” (ibid.). According to cultural critic Graeme Turner, the novel, an exposé of capitalistic greed, “depicts Australia as being colonised by ‘the Americans’; in this process, the natural indigenous remnants of Australian life are the good, and the ‘imported shit’ is the bad” (Turner, 1986, 135). To jolt complacent Aussies to higher standards of pride and selfassertion, Carey charged, “We think of ourselves as a proud and free and anti-authoritarian people, and that’s ludicrous” (Dare, 1982, 3).

POSSIBILITIES FOR AUSTRALIA Through comedy, wit, and mockery, Carey ramped up his message. In the allegory of the critically acclaimed satire Illywhacker (1985), Australia poses new possibilities— “that big sky, that vast clear cobalt sky without history, clean, full of light, free of sombre

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clouds” (Carey, 1985, 262). The country produces a unique citizenry “spawned by lies, suckled on dreams, infested with dragons,” a metaphor for horror stories of racism, persecution, and genocide (ibid., 359). Among the early settlers, Carey stresses the diversity of Jews, Chinese, and Communists, who have little representation in newspapers, television, and advertising. In opposition to English philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s “great man” theory of human affairs, protagonist Herbert Peter Badgery exemplifies what critics call the “‘little man’ version of history,” a commoner’s creation of nationhood as opposed to a series of cataclysmic events and spin-offs resulting in awe-inspiring grandeur (Blaber & Gilman, 1990, 58). Herbert pictures inhabitants as autodidacts who educate themselves by “fossicking in a tip,” a local idiom for dumpster diving (Carey, 1985, 359.). From a make-do education and serendipitous lifestyle, provincials develop into an extraordinary populace impelled by their upbringing to be eccentrics and exhibitionists, oddballs mirroring the roustabouts and squatters who populated the North American West from the Mississippi River to the goldfields of Alaska and the Hawaiian shores. The text of Illywhacker dramatizes what critic Karen Lamb calls “a nation’s damaging obsession with its self-esteem” (Lamb, 1992, 41). Carey discloses the cost of national incarceration in scenes of inmate coercion, maimed beasts, ruined family trust, marital treachery, the disjuncture of grandfather from grandsons, and the smuggling of endangered fowl and reptiles to collectors of global exotica. For Herbert, Australia becomes the “Best Pet Shop in the World,” a comfy cage that houses indigenous fauna until the owners export or smuggle them to distant markets (Carey, 1985, 443). The travesty of depleting national treasures, according to critic Jonathan Highfield, results from the colonial failure to prize Australia for its uniqueness and strangeness. In the end, grandson Hissao Badgery, a prosperous fauna smuggler, designs a futuristic lockup, a pet shop comprised of floating cages to house and propagate human curiosities. The controlling metaphor underlies a pervasive sorrow for diminished, intimidated, and spiritually dwarfed individuals who expend their imagination on wild fancies. Showmanship and tourism become the downfall of Hissao, the third generation of Australian Badgerys, a topic that postcolonial Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid peruses in A Small Place (1988).

LAND AND MONEY In Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Carey develops a negative image of Australia as a locus of “saw-toothed savagery” (Carey, 1988, 327). He perceives in Sydney a destructive practicality, a bleak materialism aimed at “damaging the spirit” (ibid., 325). By analyzing the city’s working-class tastes and poverty of imagination, the author probes the topsy-turvy social mix that fosters “piemen affecting the dress of gentlemen, ladies’ maids with glass tiaras” (ibid., 268). Heiress and industrialist Lucinda Leplastrier perceives the true nature of Australian land and people through the perspective of agrarianism. She recognizes the pre–Christian roots of the island nation, where spirits loom, “but not Christian ghosts, not John the Baptist or Jesus of Galilee. There were other spirits, other stories, slippery as shadows” (ibid., 135). Because a cow bellows for rescue from the mud flats, Lucinda longs to escape an evening salon with amusing people to assist the doomed animal. Strong ties to the mangroves beyond the window encourage a feeling of “I should not be here” (ibid.). To her dismay, she is no more acclimated to London during her visit to her parents’ motherland. She concludes, “It was soon clear that this great sooty machine was not home at all” (ibid., 203). On a whim, she invests her fortune in Sydney’s Prince Rupert’s Glassworks, a stinking factory at the colonial end of the Industrial Revolution.

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Carey amplifies Lucinda’s insights into Australia through her friendship with a newcomer. An outcast tarred with scandal by the Sydney Mail, the Oxford-educated Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins perceives Australia as “a loathsome place” (Carey, 1988, 308). After the loss of his Church of England appointment to Randwick parish in punishment for openly gambling at cards for money with an unchaperoned woman, he composes a loser’s view of Australia. He writes his father, evangelist Theophilus Hopkins, begging for news of the hedges, birds, and blue skies of England, an idealized memory devoid of damp, poverty, and other detractions from his fantasy. He contrasts the loam of Hennacombe with Australia’s unmalleable clay and sandstone. He criticizes Aussie birds for raucousness and finds the people self-involved rather than “concerned with the common good,” a preoccupation of his father and other Victorian pietists (ibid., 273). On Oscar’s lengthy expedition into the outback, at the Bellinger River, he arrives at “a landscape already bleeding from the stabbing and hacking of the cedar cutters,” opportunists who chopped their way through foliage that the Aborigines considered sacred (ibid., 416). The narrator, Oscar’s great grandson Bob, notes the indigenous animism contained in oral tradition, “sacred stories more ancient than the ones [Oscar] carried in his sweat-slippery leather Bible” (ibid.). The contrast in lore honors Koori love of earth at the same time that it excoriates white Europeans for damaging and exploiting their colonies.

NATIVE VS. IMMIGRANT The polarizing of native-born white and immigrant Europeans draws an adversarial battleline in The Tax Inspector (1991), Carey’s most controversial Gothic work. Gran Frieda McClusky Catchprice, in her initial conversation with tax investigator Maria Takis, notes the auditor’s Greek surname. In the same scene, Dr. Taylor, who examines Frieda for mental competency, bears the “blunt blond certainties that come from being born ‘a real Aussie,’” a swaggerer suited to his elevated caste (Carey, 1991, 28). From his elite position, he feels free to mock the tax auditor as “a little Hitler from the Tax Department” (ibid., 29). Fleshing out the author’s hostile scenario is a predatory street scene. Vulnerable pedestrians encounter the next generation of marauding preteen gangs with “stolen commando boots, lighter-fluid breath ... ripping the insignia off a Saab Turbo,” a background din similar to the rumble in Anthony Burgess’s dystopic threnody A Clockwork Orange (1971) (ibid., 93). The juxtaposition of physician, civil servant, and street maulers belies Frieda’s generalizations about the kinds of people who bolster and upgrade Australian society. Carey returns to the issue of colonial Australia in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) with a more positive approach. The true national, ex-con Wally Paccione, represents the white Australian who takes pride in pragmatism. While reviving the radical Feu Follet, a defunct stage company in colonial Efica, with a tumbling pigeon act, he asserts, “We make do with what we have” (Carey, 1994, 149). He summarizes history in a single sentence, beginning with the seizure of aboriginal lands and “then all the captains and generals sailed away and abandoned them, left them with the ghosts and bones” (ibid.). In disparagement of European exploiters, Wally claims that, after the desertion, Efica’s poor and sick have a better life and that women get equal pay. Gabe Manzini, a Voorstand spy and the seducer of Wally’s paramour, Roxanna Wonder Wilkinson, ponders an isolated, sparsely populated island nation lacking natural resources, military might, a substantial gross national product, and the self-determination to halt the dumping of toxic waste or the building of foreign defense projects on its soil. Despite his posting in the hinterlands as a subversive agent, he takes an outsider’s view of Eficans, whom he admires for being

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“dry, ironic, uncomfortable with dogma, suspicious of high-sounding rhetoric” and practical (ibid., 202).

RETURN TO THE MOTHERLAND Actualizing the concept of soil turned to profit, Carey presents the protagonist of Jack Maggs (1997) as amassing a fortune from turning Australian clay into bricks. On the proceeds, Jack, a condemned convict, risks a return to London, which he considers home. The result resets Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) with a view of the Australian success story. Michael Fitzgerald, a critic for Time magazine, exults that “Carey turns Dickens upside down. And upside down, Australia is on top of the world” (Fitzgerald, 1997, 82). A similar take on home turf in My Life as a Fake (2003) stretches the imagination with its vigorous quest tale sprawling over Australia and into Bali before settling in Penang, Kuala Lumpur. According to Clea Simon, reviewer for the Boston Phoenix, the search for a startling poetic genius reveals “self-made, fate-bound characters” in a “tale [crossing] creation myths with literary gamesmanship and Australia’s ideas about itself ” (Simon, 2003, 28). Likewise home-minded, Theft: A Love Story exhibits a local pride in the art works of Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone, a home-boy from Bacchus Marsh who exults in showings of his work New York City, London, and Cologne, Germany. See also self-esteem

• Further readings Baker, John F. “PW Interviews: Peter Carey,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 54 (13 December 1991): 37–38. Balogh, Stefanie. “Peter Carey Yearns for Oz,” Courier-Mail (28 October 2007). Blaber, Ronald, and Marvin Gilman. Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian, Canadian and Indian Fiction. Springwood, NSW: Butterfly, 1990. Bradley, John. “Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs,” Meanjin 56, nos. 3 –4 (1997): 657–665. Carey, Peter. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Dare, Tim. “He Bit, Chewed, and Found Bliss,” Sydney Morning Herald (27 May 1982): 3. Edwards, Brian. Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1997. Fitzgerald, Michael. “Changed Expectations,” Time South Pacific 32 (11 August 1997): 82. Freeman, John. “Peter Carey: Art and Lies— and Money,” Independent (26 May 2006). Grimes, William. “An Australian Novelist with a Full-Tilt Pace and Ferocious Humor,” New York Times (28 January 1992): C11, C15. Highfield, Jonathan. “Suckling from the Crocodile’s Tit: Wildlife and Nation Formation in Australian Narratives,” Antipodes 20, no. 2 (1 December 2006): 127–140. Hyman, Ben. “Novelist Reads to Intimate Crowd,” Brown Daily Herald (19 March 2009). Lamb, Karen. Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992. Marx, Bill. “Dystopia Down Under,” The Nation 254, no. 10 (16 March 1992): 346 –347. Messud, Claire. “The Voicing of Australia,” LA Weekly (3 May 2002): B2. Meyer, Lisa. “An Interview with Peter Carey,” Chicago Review 43, no. 2 (1997): 83 –84. Mudge, Alan. “The Seduction of the Scam: A Literary Imposter Comes Alice in Peter Carey’s ‘Fake,’” Book Page, 2003, www.bookpage.com/0311bp/peter_carey.html, accessed on November 20, 2008. Ness, Patrick. “The Sacred in the Profane,” Guardian (27 May 2006). Nicklin, Lenore. “Peter Carey an Ad-Man,” Sydney Morning Herald (13 February 1975): 3. Ross, Bruce Clunies. “Some Developments in Short Fiction 1969 –1980,” Australian Literary Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 165 –180. Ross, Robert L. “Expectations Lost and Found,” World & I 13, no. 7 (July 1998): 250 –257. Ryan-Fazilleau, Sue. “The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and the ‘Pain of Unbelonging’” in The Pain of Unbe-

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longing: Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature, eds. Sheila Collingwood-Whittick and Germaine Greer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Simon, Clea. “Dead Poet’s Society: Peter Carey’s Game of Literature and Life,” Boston Phoenix (7 November 2003): 28. Sutcliffe, William. “Peter Carey’s Latest Fits Neatly into the Child-and-Reluctant-Guardian-Flee-from-Peril Genre,” The Independent (17 February 2008). Taylor, Christopher. “The Lost Boy,” The Guardian (2 February 2008). Turner, Graeme. National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1986. Updike, John. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism. New York: Random House, 2007. White, Edmund. “Recognizing Jack,” Times Literary Supplement (30 August 1991): 21. Willbanks, Ray. “Peter Carey on The Tax Inspector and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” Antipodes 11, no. 1 (1997): 11 –16. Woodward, Richard B. “Out of Efica,” Village Voice 40, no. 9 (28 February 1995): 59. Wroe, Nicholas. “Fiction’s Great Outlaw,” Guardian (6 January 2001): 6.

Badgery, Herbert A “blue-eyed scoundrel and confidence man,” Herbert Peter Badgery is Peter Carey’s ebullient larrikin, anti-historian, and chronicler of four generations of family lore in the saga Illywhacker (1985). Prefigured by advertiser Harry Stanthorpe Joy, protagonist of Bliss (1981), Herbert anticipates Christopher Chubb in My Life as a Fake (2003) and Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone in Theft: A Love Story (2006). A model of what social analyst Helga Ramsey-Kurz calls the “non-literate other,” Herbert is a microcosm of Australia who speaks the national vernacular as the lingua franca of a determined, creative people (Ramsey-Kurz, 2007, 142). He invents himself in the same way that Australia’s convict population donned respectability, by whitewashing their sordid past. In an analogy of a scapegrace with the snake-in-the-bag trick, the autocrat declares his credo: “This snake has been in gaol. It is a mean bastard of an animal and it cannot be bought” (Carey, 1985, 141). The character returns to Carey’s canvas in 30 Days in Sydney (2001), a mural of coastal Australia bristling with resolute rascals and storytellers. Given to fecklessness and lies, Herbert is a born subversive. His method of storytelling varies completely from Harry Stanthorpe Joy, the soulful cultural fabulist in Bliss (1981); the precise reflections of Bob, the raconteur in Oscar and Lucinda (1988); and the plaintive apologia of Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Because of the aged windbag’s candor and insight into post-colonial angst, Herbert earns a limited credibility as well as a gullible following for his grotesque anecdotes. Critic Peter Pierce, in an essay for Australian Literary Studies, remarks, “Carey plays at length with this ambiguity, teasing out the possibilities of an unreliable narrator who may therefore be the most reliable recorder of the national history” (Pierce, 1992, 307). The gray area separating eyewitness history from reported fact suits Herbert, a vigorous beguiler who eases the skeptical reader into a credulous frame of mind. As the spieler extraordinaire of the Badgery-McGrath family saga, Herbert epitomizes the vigor and vision of Australia’s homeboys who layer truth with romance. In the view of Ronald Blaber and Marvin Gilman, through extravagant antics and pranks, the protagonist exhibits “a particularly dogmatic set of convictions such as Australian nationalism, commitment to egalitarianism, a belief in democracy” (Blaber and Gilman, 1990, 55). To elude his father’s cannon-selling racket and family cruelties, in 1899, ten-year-old Herbert wrecks the merchandise, flees his father and brothers, and makes his own way. From 1924 to 1931, Herbert crisscrosses Victoria “writing bad cheques when I could get

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hold of a book, running raffles in pubs, buying stolen petrol,” even cadging rides by boxcar (Carey, 1985, 222). He besmirches his persona by establishing a carnal relationship with his mother-in-law, Molly Rourke McGrath, and, in 1937, by failure to protect his 14-yearold daughter, Sonia “Sonny” Badgery, from death in an abandoned mine shaft. Carey implies that, despite good spirits and verve, Herbert’s irresponsibility is the unforgivable aspect of the rogue’s natural inclinations.

PROGRESSIVE CAPRICE Mid-life signals a change in Herbert from ambiguous morality to introspective survivor of ongoing challenges, the beginning of his transmogrification into an elderly ascetic and sage. From 1931 to 1937, he adopts mime as a way of life while performing theatricals with lover Leah Goldstein Kaletsky throughout Queensland and New South Wales. In an article for Span, critic M. D. Fletcher, a specialist in political satire at the University of Queensland, depicts Herbert as a picaro, the standard opportunist of Menippean satire who uses astute observation and ready embellishment as means of plotting a life of rootless profligacy. Of the weak and unprincipled, Herbert admits, “I have been both, am both, will always be both” (ibid., 338). His bonhomie and wit earn him a grudging reader respect, particularly his gratitude for an upbringing under the tutelage of the Chinese herbalist Goon Tse Ying, a fellow orphan and social reject. The illywhacker has a lengthy literary beginning, dating to the wily slave of Roman Atellan stage farce, an improvisational stage entertainment of the third century B.C. Herbert is the progeny of Henry Fielding’s title rake in Tom Jones (1749), literary twin of the title figure in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1965), and a fictional model of Charles Darwin’s survivor. The protagonist adapts well to adversity and claims as a skill the squatter’s knack for shaping residences out of natural resources and found materials, some stolen from the unwary. In the estimation of Blaber and Gilman, Carey’s illywhacker “exposes the bare grounds of an individual way without recourse to religion, philosophy, politics as a sustaining force” (Blaber and Gilman, 1990, 59). Through unethical means, such as on-the-spot improvisation like that of Arlecchino, the mischievous clown of the commedia dell’arte of 16th-century Italy street fare, Herbert advances his checkered career as a moocher, salesman, and womanizer. His theft of Leah’s letters produces family bitterness at his handy rationalization of pilfering “a bit here, a bit there, snipped, altered,” a narcissist’s version of plagiarism (Carey, 1985, 85). Adding relish to the narrative, Carey supplies Herbert with such colorful localisms as “widdling,” “swag,” “dunnycan,” “fair dinkum,” “bludger,” and “upter,” idioms that delineate the levels of social refinement and economic success among Australia’s semiliterate white settlers. In contrast, the text poses Cocky Abbott’s son, an “imaginary Englishman” who relies on the imperialist’s language to legitimize colonial conquest (ibid., 125). Unlike Herbert, who perceives opportunity in Australia stouthearted patriots, men like Abbott perpetuate adulation of and parasitism off the mother country.

HERBERT THE SAGE At a turning point in Herbert’s disreputable career, a dilemma forces him to abandon posturing and lies for the truth about himself and his homeland. After reading a come-hither glint in the eyes of Mrs. Stu O’Hagen, he attempts to sell Stu a T Model Ford. A spasm of conscience forces Herbert to back out of the deal and to urge the family to purchase a Summit, an Australian car, a symbol of native ingenuity and industry. Junk-

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ing the Ford in the Geelong saltpans, Herbert debates with himself his addiction to shady hucksterism, which he compares to weaknesses for alcohol and cigarettes. His ambivalence toward the beauty and economy of American autos revives his yen to sell cars. At the same time, the appeal of the Ford reminds him of “the things I loathed,” an allusion to the American products that flood the Australian market and that inhibit investment in local inventions and ideas (ibid., 75). In much the same way that old-timers of the American West became savants in dime novels and newspaper interviews, Herbert transforms himself through the written word. Like the revelations of 99-year-old Lucy Marsden in confinement at a nursing home in Allan Gurganus’s tragicomic novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989), Herbert’s metamorphosis occurs from 1937 to 1947 in a cell at Rankin Downs Gaol. Fortunately, incarceration affords him time to study and the access to a history degree from the University of Sydney. In solitude, he shifts from the multifarious wordsmith to an expert on Australia specializing in the “role of lies in popular perceptions of the Australian political fabric” (ibid., 488). Ironically, scholarship liberates the felon much as storytelling frees Harry Joy in Bliss from a life of razzle-dazzle. No longer illiterate, Badgery exults: “Books! Books are no problem to me any more.... The ingenuity and effort, the deception, the stories, the bullshit, the lies I used, just to persuade people to read me the paper aloud, all this was far harder work than learning to read” (ibid., 20). Well versed in the usurpation and genocide that coincided with British colonization of the South Pacific, Herbert acknowledges the racial violence that depleted aboriginal tribes and suppressed Chinese laborers like his foster father, Goon Tse Ying, an immigrant who helped to build the nation.

• Further readings Barfoot, C. C., and Theo d’Haen. Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. Blaber, Ronald, and Marvin Gilman. Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian, Canadian and Indian Fiction. Springwood, NSW: Butterfly, 1990. Carey, Peter. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. Fletcher, M. D. “Post-Colonial Peter Carey,” Span 32 (1991): 12–23. Highfield, Jonathan. “Suckling from the Crocodile’s Tit: Wildlife and Nation Formation in Australian Narratives,” Antipodes 20, no. 2 (1 December 2006): 127–140. Pierce, Peter. “Preying on the Past: Contexts of Some Recent Neo-Historical Fiction,” Australian Literary Studies 15, no. 4 (1992): 304 –312. Ramsey-Kurz, Helga. The Non-Literate Other. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Thwaites, Tony. “More Tramps at Home,” Meanjin 46, no. 3 (September 1987): 400 –409.

Badgery-Goldstein-McGrath genealogy Carey’s haphazard family tree for Illywhacker (1985) mirrors through genealogy the colorful fabric of the Australian populace in its alliance of liars and picaresque storytellers with a Chinese herbalist, suicides, a barmaid, illiterates, Communists, and the barkeep of the Crystal Palace Hotel. shop keeper=wife | ------------------------------| | | older sons liar from | Granny Keogh

55 Warrnambool cannon seller

| | | father | murdered | 6/30/1861 | | | Goon Tse Ying | (foster father) | 1896 | | orphan | | | | | | | | | | Marjorie=Herbert Thatcher Badgery Wilson b. 1886 m. 1917

drowned herself | -------------------------| | Ester McGuinness mother=father barkeep, Crystal hanged | baker Palace Hotel herself | | bullock driver --------------------------------------------| | | | Jack McGrath=Molly Walter Sean | d. 1919 of | Rourke | snakebite | barmaid | | b. 1880 | | Peter=Phoebe Matilda=/=Annette Davidson=/=P. E. | b. 1902 “Dicksy” instructor | m. 1920 teacher | deserts b. 1898 | in 1923 suicide wife=Henry Underhill | | pound officer | | -----------------------------------------------| | | | Sonia “Sonny” Charles=Emma Underhill Badgery two sisters b. 1923 b. 1921 | teacher vanishes in m. 1938 | 1937 suicide | ------------------------------------------| | | Henry=wife George=wife Hissao b. 1939 thief b. 1943 Minsk tailor | Sidney “Sid” Sheila=husband Goldstein=Edith MacDonald | Russian | Scot | immigrant| Rosa=Lenny Kaletsky | Communist | --------------dies of cancer | | | | -------------------Nadia Grace | | | | | | Herbert=/=Leah=Izzie Kaletsky Joseph Peter Goldstein orator translator; Badgery b. 1911 amputee traitor dancer; m. 1931 author; maimed in actor 1936 affair with Herbert, 1931 –1936

See also Badgery, Herbert; Illywhacker

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• Further readings Carey, Peter. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996.

belonging Carey declares himself lucky in that his early quandary mirrors that of Australia’s settlers. He considers it fortunate “that my own personal trauma matches my country’s great historical trauma” (Hunter-Tilney, 2008). He surveys the quandary of alienation through different sized lenses, from the displaced Englishman in Jack Maggs (1997) and the returning homeboy to New South Wales in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001) to the cumbersome retardate, Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone in Theft: A Love Story (2006). In a review of thriller/love story His Illegal Self (2008), the tale of three displaced waifs— seven-year-old Che David Selkirk, Vassar English professor Anna “Dial” Xenos, and survivalist and former garbage collector Trevor Dobbs— on the run at Crystal Community, a hippie commune south of Yandina, Queensland, critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney chides Carey for an obsession with “one preoccupation: the difficulty of belonging in Australia” (Hunter-Tilney, 2008). Nonetheless, the reviewer congratulates the author for “combining elements of realism, fantasy and comedy, bringing a Dickensian readability to subject matter that in clumsier hands might be worthy or dull” (ibid.). Carey informed John Freeman, an interviewer for The Australian, that displacement affects all of his canon: “Every single one of my novels deals with this idea of being in two places” (Freeman, 2008). Carey’s sympathy with wanderers, exiles, and aliens took shape in his early short stories. In “A Windmill in the West” (1972), he sets an American soldier on a bland, featureless desert to guard a fence separating American and Australian property. Breaking the monotony of his sentry post, a clacking windmill to the west epitomizes the whirling confusion he experiences at meaningless sentry duty. Displaced from both his military superiors and from the putative enemy, he loses his sense of direction and directs his attention to boiling scorpions in hot water that spurts from artesian wells. Like the insects he captures by the bucketful, the soldier symbolizes the alien occupation force caught up in lethal international sovereignty clashes. Ironically, he faces a lost Australian pilot, another displaced soul whom the American soldier shoots down and buries. Carey connects the soldier’s personification of the windmill as a distant observer with mental disintegration resulting from a futile survey of a landscape that offers no familiar clues. In “The Fat Man in History” (1974), the allegory of six of society’s castoffs— Fantoni, Finch, Glino, May, Milligan, and the-man-who-won’t-give-his-name — accounts for an in-house camaraderie bordering on ad hoc brotherhood. Contributing to their unity in a post-revolution economy are the need to shoplift food and supplies, the sharing of beer and musicales in the communal kitchen, and the monthly ogling of the rent collector, Nancy Bowlby, author of “Revolution in a Closed Society — A Study of Leadership among the Fat,” whom they idolize as “Florence Nightingale” (Carey, 1974, 15, 32). Of their gatherings, Carey notes “The clapping is forced into the rhythm of the music and everyone claps in time” (ibid., 23). Another element of communal life, their shared disdain for the government, leads the six inmates to an illegal act risking group arrest, “when they went out to piss on the commemorative plaque outside the offices of the Fifty-fourth District” (ibid., 20). The author betrays household unity by accounting for the cyclical sac-

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rifice and cannibal feasting on the “Fantoni,” a title that passes to the next candidate for occupancy of the vacant room. Building suspense in the residents is the namelessness of each newcomer, the hapless outsider who inherits the name “Fantoni,” a name suggesting the French “phantome” (ghost). At the crux of a mid-life crisis, membership in a hippie klatch lures 39-year-old Harry Stanthorpe Joy, the advertising magnate in Bliss (1981), to flee his old life and floundering family to join a commune. Far from city materialism and glitz, like Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone and his lawn maintenance service, Harry refuels his spent system on a patch of ground near Bog Onion Road. For 30 years, to justify squatter’s rights within the circle of residents, he assumes the role of savant and storykeeper. As he generates warmth and understanding for his fellows, he “[sews] together patchworks of lives, legends, myths, beliefs, hearsay into a splendid cloak that gave a richer glow to all their lives” (Carey, 1981, 290 –291). The covering protects as it draws into intimacy a collection of marginalized hearers who need cohesion and unity. Carey extends to Harry an eternal welcome in the milieu. At his death from the blow of a fallen tree limb, he seems summoned back into the wild. His spirit thins into a sigh that embraces the woods and becomes an ethereal, yet integral part of the ecology. Because of the animistic nature of the commune, the upward drift of his spirit assures him an eternal welcome as a “fine blue line” in “their tough old heart wood” (ibid., 296). The color blue appears repeatedly in Carey’s short and long fiction as a symbol of contentment.

POLITICAL SHARDS In his second neo–Victorian novel, Jack Maggs, Carey brandishes patriotism toward the motherland like a crusader’s sword. Although exiled in 1813 at age 15 for thievery and brutalized by Rudder the flogger in Morton Bay, a British penal colony in New South Wales, at age 38, criminal Jack Maggs insists on returning to the land he calls home, even if repatriation results in his execution. Upon arrival by coach, he represents “an alien culture,” but he celebrates his love of London by eating a syrup dumpling sprinkled with sugar, a symbol of the sweetness he anticipates upon revisiting familiar places and people (Carey, 1997, 251). In an analysis for Westerly, author Elizabeth Hardy explains Jack’s rationalization of redemption: “Maggs’s memories of England enable him to transcend the agonies of convict life and construct a sense of place in which England is synonymous with the concept of home” (Hardy, 1998, 135). In defense of his need for roots, he snarls, “I am a fucking Englishman, and I have English things to settle. I am not to live my life with all the vermin” (Carey, 1997, 140). His dismissal of Anglo-Australians as vermin illustrates the degree to which his idealization of the British Isles has strayed from truth. Upon his return to Wingham, Australia, with wife Mercy, Jack creates a colonial home with his two sons and his and Mercy’s children, “five further members of ‘That Race’” (ibid., 327). The family becomes known for being “both clannish and hospitable,” a sign of Jack’s gift for welcoming others into his household (ibid.). Like Jack, the lone ex-con, Carey’s supreme oddball, the Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), recognizes an inability to accommodate place and company. Because of his lack of socialization, he chooses solitude. Limited society begins in Oscar’s childhood, when his father’s evangelism for a fundamentalist sect, the Plymouth Brethren, limits their affinity for community gatherings and holidays. His classmate Ian Wardley-Fish at Oriel College, Oxford, the future curate of Hammersmith, roars, “You do not fit. You are wonderful. You are perfectly unique” (Carey, 1988, 156). A left-handed

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compliment, the accusation forces Oscar to admit that he is ill-suited to ordinary surroundings. To rid himself of the vice of gambling, on April 22, 1863, he proposes a self-imposed penance — a voyage to New South Wales to serve the Church Missionary Society. The venture no only circumscribes him further, but leads to his drowning at Boat Harbour in the Bellinger River. Literary historian Elleke Boehmer notes the irony that, because of Oscar’s self-exile, he contributes to “a new history of the land, a tale which Oscar’s descendants will use to explain their belonging to it” (Boehmer, 2006, 17).

ASSORTED MISFITS Carey turns two of his works—The Tax Inspector (1991) and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994)— into explorations of family unity and solidarity, a topic that resurfaces in Theft: A Love Story. In the first novel, the efforts of Benny Catchprice, a 16-year-old psychopath, to lead his rudderless clan to prosperity requires a transformation from tattooed punk to flashy car salesman. His foil, his 18-year-old brother Johnny, gives up on the three-generation Catchprice auto business and chooses the communal family of Hare Krishnas, who require his loyalty and commitment to vegetarianism and nonviolence. Overhead, Carey explodes Catchprice Motors, a warren of carnality and child exploitation that 86-year-old Gran Frieda McClusky Catchprice obliterates with sticks of gelignite. As Benny retreats from the disintegrating family and forces a hostage into his cellar hideout, he unintentionally guides tax investigator Maria Takis toward motherhood. Under the barrel of Benny’s sawed-off shotgun, Maria gives birth to a son, whom her captor lovingly dubs “little Benny” (Carey, 1991, 261). In a stagy turnaround, Maria bashes Benny’s forehead with a tire iron, thus ostensibly ending his life while retrieving the newborn for cuddling and welcome into the single-parent Takis household. More poignant than Benny’s displacement within a hostile family, the title figure in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1992) presents a grotesque physique, twisted legs, and an unintelligible voice to the citizens of Efica, a cluster of 18 archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean. On tour with his mother’s acting troupe from the Feu Follet Theatre, Tristan enjoys the attentions of the whole company, yet repulses strangers who view him “like snot, like slime, like something dripping down towards them from which they wished to take their eyes and which, the clearer and closer it became, produced in their own eyes and lips such grotesque contortions that I knew ... I was a monster” (Carey, 1992, 156). Ex-con and stage manager Wally Paccione builds a special high chair; Tristan’s mother hires tutors for homeschooling. Actor-acrobat Bill Millefleur, Tristan’s absent father, suggests letting the boy study acting by observing stage drama and by playing a part. Unlike Benny Catchprice, the wannabe car salesman, Tristan develops ego strength by portraying Bruder Mouse, Voorstand’s iconic cartoon rodent. The illusion of being treasured releases a surge of possibilities in Tristan: “I was twenty-three years old, crazy for life” (ibid., 387). His presentation to fans takes on the trappings of an audience: “This is how you introduce kings, princes, and stars” (ibid.). To Tristan, his reception is only the beginning. For True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Carey tackles the scope of Australian history since its colonization by Europeans. Of the ancestral background of folk hero Edward “Ned” Kelly, the author dramatizes “a big Irish component, a folkloric culture ... being robbed, tortured, and oppressed. And then we have the convict narrative, which is certainly about loss” (Jarvis, 2008). Ousted from a loving, if quarrelsome extended KellyQuinn clan, Ned spends his youth from age 14 in Victoria’s Wombat Range. Carey explained how the backdrop echoes the boy’s emotions: “It’s a hostile place, with droughts

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and fires. There’s no frontier that triumphs over space in Australia” (ibid.). Because of the daily scramble for concealment and survival, Ned suffers yearnings for home and kin, which he eases in part by a common-law relationship with Mary Hearn, a 17-year-old Irish prostitute. Upon his return by night following the Buckland Coach and Reed Murphy’s Station robberies, Ned marvels, “It were a shock to finally see the home I had dreamed of so many lonely nights” (Carey, 2000, 93). The visual reunion and tactile stroking of siblings lapses into a gnawing sorrow that his mother, Ellen Quinn Kelly, sold him to highwayman Harry Power for cash. The depiction of Ned’s homesickness heightens the sorrow of a man whose choices separate him forever from homefolks. Carey dramatizes the blow to self-esteem as Ned realizes himself “bought and sold like carrion” (ibid., 95). See also misfits; orphans; self-esteem

• Further readings Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. _____. The Fat Man in History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1974. _____. Jack Maggs. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. The Tax Inspector. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Freeman, John. “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” The Australian (26 January 2008). Hardy, Elizabeth. “Peter Carey, Jack Maggs,” Westerly 43, no. 2 (1998): 135. Hunter-Tilney, Ludovic. “The Fugitive’s Lament,” Financial Times (15 February 2008). Jarvis, Jill. “CUNY Distinguished Professors: Peter Carey,” www1.cuny.edu/ forum/?p=2668, accessed on November 26, 2008.

betrayal Among the dangers, persecutions, and miseries that Carey depicts in fiction, one of the most hurtful is human treachery. The theme resonates in David Joy’s involuntary commitment of his father Harry to Merry Lands asylum for $5,000 in Bliss (1981), in Phoebe McGrath Badgery’s abandonment of her husband and two children in Illywhacker (1985), and in a children’s story, The Big Bazoohley (1995), in which adults exploit children to advertise hair products for the Perfecto Kiddo contest. In an early short work, the demolition of Nile in “Peeling” (1972) and the cyclical cannibalism of a nameless group leader in “The Fat Man in History” (1974) epitomize Carey’s search for meaning in flights of whimsy that reflect the intent and drive of the predator. The first narrative, a seduction gone awry, pictures an elderly retiree destroying his own illusions about femininity by stripping the garments of his upstairs neighbor. By actuating his false fantasies of Nile, the assistant to an abortion provider, he discloses a vulnerable female psyche that he shatters like glass, an image of fragility that Carey develops more fully in Oscar and Lucinda (1988). Similarly turned inward, Carey’s fat man fable, like Shirley Jackson’s classic story “The Lottery” (1948), pictures the inner weakness of society’s underclass, which ingests strength by cannibalizing its leadership. Once betrayers dispatch the titular “Fantoni,” another assumes the title that keeps the deadly cycle in motion. The duping of Nile and the Fantoni illustrate society’s willingness to martyr its victims. A more seductive form of treachery, the lure of unidentified merchandise in “Report on the Shadow Industry” (1974), a commentary on the writing process, echoes the author’s anger at ugly development overlooking Bondi Beach in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Dis-

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torted Account (2001). The story characterizes the deception of the poor in Topanga, California, by shadow factories that entice buyers to waste their money on junk. The motif of buying more and enjoying less dramatizes the self-betrayal of shoppers addicted to the cozening of advertisement. Carey returns to the issue of unethical merchandizing in “The Puzzling Nature of Blue” (1974), a witty satire of European settlers who trick Australia’s first peoples into buying worthless pharmaceuticals. Engineered by attorney-economist Vincent, the plot to dump goods manufactured by Farrow depersonalizes the buyers, unsophisticated residents of the Upward Islands. In atoning for his exploitation of indigenous tribes, Vincent faces a dilemma in a warehouse, where he tries to steal the drugs that will stain his hands blue, the evidence of theft that confers belonging to the people he cons.

SPIES AND INFORMANTS Carey particularizes insidious forms of perfidy in two novels, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). For Tristan, the spying of the Voorstand Intelligence Agency (VIA) by Gabe Manzini and the suicide of Natalie Theroux precede a turning point of evil, the contrived hanging of Tristan’s mother, actortroupe manager Felicity “Flick” Smith. Contributing to the assassination is the son’s discovery at 2 A.M. “a horror he would carry all his life, the picture of his mother dead and ugly, hanging from a bright green rope,” a violation of nature’s color of hope and renewal (Carey, 1994, 222). Tristan tries rationalizing the sight as a mask, exercise, or mistaken identity, but he experiences instant maturity from recognizing treachery in its raw form. From terror of assassins, Tristan passes through a series of psychic states— self-protection and retreat under the theater stage. He resolves, “I would live only where my mother had died ... the deepest, darkest hole on earth” (ibid., 236). In Tristan’s recovery, he fulfills his prophecy by devoting himself to acting. The career move costs him a second parent, stage manager Wally Paccione, whom VIA agent Wendell Deveau garrotes with piano wire. Serendipitously, the lurid scene inspires a new defender for Tristan in Bill Millefleur, his biological father, who whisks the boy down a stairwell to safety. Of the trade-off, Tristan admits, “It seemed, the pain was less, the pleasure greater”(ibid., 414). In the life of Edward “Ned” Kelly, Australia’s famed Anglo-Irish outlaw, the juxtaposition of pain and pleasure tips toward the former. Loyalty defines the relationship of the boy with his nuclear family, with his maternal relatives of the Quinn clan, and with the Kelly gang, which includes his younger brother Dan. As charges, both real and spurious, accrue on Ned’s police record, Dan becomes less trusting and more sophisticated about judging telltale eye movements and facial expressions and about motivation to inform to authorities Ned’s whereabouts. Betrayal looms over Ned as his dealings with the law grow more complex. From the beginning of his relationship with Aaron Sherritt, Joe Byrne’s friend, Ned dislikes and mistrusts Aaron. After Dan reports Aaron’s collusion with police, Carey jumps swiftly to the penalty for a fink: “Then he is a dead man said Joe Byrne he has just decided” (Carey, 2000, 344). The lack of punctuation and standard pronounantecedent linkage leaves in question whether Joe Byrne has decided to kill Aaron or whether Aaron’s actions settle the question of informing on Ned in exchange for a cash reward. Carey’s theme of disloyalty highlights the vulnerability of desperados. Nearing the end of Ned’s run from the law, the ties to Ellen and her children embolden the outlaw to risk arrest or an ambush on the nights he creeps back to the homestead. To his tormentors, he offers an ultimatum that concludes, “I am a widow’s son outlawed and must be

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obeyed” (ibid., 343). A final blow, traducer Tom Curnow’s betrayal of Ned’s circumstances at the Glenrowan inn wrests from Ned the charge that Tom “had entered the dragon’s lair, the benighted heart of everything rank and ignorant,” a description redolent with spite toward an informer (ibid., 357). Ned’s last words before hanging request in vain the return of his corpse to the family for Ellen to bury among trusted Kellys, the people for whom the outlaw gives his life.

ART AND TREACHERY The boomerang effect of betrayal spices up the plots of My Life as a Fake (2003) and Theft: A Love Story (2006), parallel works on scammers. As though dramatizing Sir Walter Scott’s quote from epic poem Marmion (1808): “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive,” Carey applies the perils of lying and deception to the literary world. In My Life as a Fake, Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, the self-adulating editor of the failing London-based poetry journal Modern Review, finds herself hustled to Penang, Kuala Lumpur, by novelist John Slater, a manipulator and old family friend who seduced Sarah’s mother. The pile-up of treacheries reads like a nursery rhyme chase: Sarah pursues Australian poet Christopher Chubb, who invented the poems and persona of Bob McCorkle as a literary hoax that ruined an editor and caused his death. Bob assumes flesh as a stalking phantasm to abduct Chubb’s infant daughter Tina. Tina and her surrogate mother, Mrs. Lim, murder Chubb with a machete and cheat Sarah of the verse that made McCorkle famous. The vicious cycle of trickery and exploitation concludes with McCorkle’s death from leukemia, Chubb’s dismemberment, and the mental depletion of Sarah, who “[gets] sucked deeper and deeper into the morass” of fakery to the point of nervous collapse (Carey, 2003, 266). The novel characterizes the shredding of the connections between brain and body as the moral and physical price of self-aggrandizement by appropriating another person’s creative talents. With similar attention to mental and physical collapse, the satiric novel Theft: A Love Story depicts the failure of painter Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone to navigate the global art market. He chooses as a guide art authenticator Marlene Cook Leibovitz, a former secretary who worms her way into the trust of boss/husband Olivier Leibovitz to control a fortune in modern art painted by her late father-in-law, Jacques Leibovitz. Butcher, an adulterer, adores his mistress as the love of his life. Like the wanderer Odysseus, he succumbs to a siren song, allowing passion to entice him into a felon’s plot to defraud art investors. Unlike Sarah Wode-Douglass, a lesbian who has no lust for her betrayer, Butcher accepts his lover’s criminality as a quirk of her personality on a par with a bad habit. Carey introduces her burglary tools as mere idiosyncrasies of a stylish woman who is adept at breaking and entering and at murdering her estranged husband. Aware that Marlene lures him into faking a Leibovitz painting, Butcher rephrases Shakespeare’s title figure in Macbeth, who dares his nemesis, “Lead on Macduff ” (Carey, 2006, 268). The acquiescence of a lamb to slaughter, Butcher’s unfailing love for Marlene causes him to admit, “I was still — in spite of all the death and deception — a prisoner of this tangled past” (ibid., 269). Carey awards the hapless lamb an ambiguous reward —five years of peace in Australia and surreptitious love messages as Marlene raises Butcher’s reputation to world-class artist.

• Further readings Carey, Peter. The Fat Man in History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1974. _____. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003.

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_____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Gaile, Andreas. “Re-Mythologizing an Australian Legend,” Antipodes 15, no. 1 (2001): 37–39. _____. “The True History of the Kelly Gang, at Last!,” Meanjin 60, no. 3 (2001): 214 –219.

The Big Bazoohley A rollicking farce illustrated by Abira Ali, The Big Bazoohley (1995) relies on humor based on serendipity, the artificiality of pop culture, and the natural origins of art. Carey dedicated the story to sons Charley and Sam and named the nine-year-old protagonist Sam Kellow. The plot, according to critic John Stephens, “turns on the distinction between appearance and subjectivity” (Stephens, 2002, 45). It predates by a year the strangulation of a six-year-old Coloradan, JonBenet Ramsey, whose parents forced her into a sexually ambiguous lifestyle as a model and beauty queen. The text opens on a truism of child psychology, that children interpret hushed words, body language, and anxious expressions to learn more about the secret workings of family than parents suspect. Sam is the son of gambler Earl Kellow and Vanessa Kellow, a painter of miniatures. The boy’s anxiety derives from the unconventional jobs by which his parents support the family. As their meager cash dwindles to $53.20, he tabulates mentally the leftover amount, a symbol of the secret financial shortfall his parents conceal from him. Carey reverses the motif of concealment by transforming Sam so thoroughly with velvet suit and curly coif that his own parents fail to recognize him. The repackaging of the baseball cap-wearing scamp as a charming imposter impugns cultural devaluation of normal childhood through advertising. Sam’s natural courtesy and respect for Nancy, his dance partner, informs the reader of his exemplary character. Carey curtails suspense about Sam’s escapade in the hotel ballroom by describing Vanessa’s rescue of her son as a masterwork miniature, a model of art defeating artifice. More tender and less ominous than the plot of the adult story “The Chance” (1974) and the novel The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Sam’s sleepwalking exploits lead him to a pair of grifters mirroring those of Illywhacker (1985). Carey initiates the search with a dream, a standard introduction to a child’s subconscious unraveling of a puzzle. In an episode of somnambulism, Sam — like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the siblings in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia cycle, and Robin in Marguerite de Angeli’s The Door in the Wall (1950)— enters a parallel universe. Sam’s application of gambler’s logic to his quandary thrusts him into the clutches of child abductors, “Mad Muriel and Droopy George” Mifflin, who groom Sam for a perfect child competition (Carey, 1995, 86). Unlike actors Bill Millefleur and Felicity “Flick” Smith, the parents of the title figure in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, the Mifflins treat Sam like a “performing bear, and the bear was their child” (ibid., 53). At the end of their plot to pass Sam off as their own son Wilfred, who is too ill with chicken pox to compete, Vanessa summarizes their duplicity as “name-dropping and meanness and cheating,” unconscionable methods of winning a $10,000 prize in the Perfecto Kiddo contest. Like Tristan Smith, Carla in “The Chance” (1974), the title character in “Crabs” (1974), Herbert Peter Badgery in Illywhacker, Lucinda Leplastrier in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), and seven-year-old runaway Che David Selkirk in His Illegal Self (2008), Sam Kellow models the resourceful renegade who accepts the dangers of risk-taking in a conformist capitalist society. The quest for reclusive art collector Edward “Eddie” St. John de Vere

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introduces Sam to a short mole, whose diminutive stature brings to mind the three-footsix height of Tristan. The coincidence that reunites the family with de Vere is the art buyer’s ownership of the Perfecto Kiddo product line. In selling the entrepreneur on Sam’s qualities, Vanessa speaks the story’s wisdom — that kindness and courage and loyalty to family are more important than showy manners and perfect hair. The statement suggests Carey’s decision to abandon advertising for humanism and art. In a review for the New York Times, critic Jan Slepian compared the broad fantasy and absurdity to that of Roald Dahl. The book flourished in translation — into Spanish as El Supergordo, into French as Le Jackpot, and into German as Der Grosse Bingobang.

• Further readings Carey, Peter. The Big Bazoohley. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995. Munro, Craig, and Robyn Sheahan-Bright. Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946 –2005. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006. Rogers, Susan L. “Review: The Big Bazoohley,” School Library Journal 41, no. 10 (1995): 132. Slepian, Jan. “Eyes on the Prize,” New York Times Book Review 12 (12 November 1995): 30. Stephens, John. Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature and Film. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Bliss Carey’s first published novel, Bliss (1981), a comedic Gothic satire, anticipates a socioeconomic catastrophe, the apocalypse that implodes in his fourth novel, The Tax Inspector (1991) and resurges as urban terrorism in His Illegal Self (2008). A commentary on fabulation and a flambouyant send-up of the advertising business, the narrative prefigures the impractical dreams of developers in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001), who overshadow Bondi Beach with ugly housing. According to analyst Carolyn Bliss, the novel is an “updated Divine Comedy,” Dante Alighieri’s epic allegory of penance and punishment, published in 1321 (Bliss, 1995, 100). Just as Dante’s verse was a vehicle for his criticism of northern Italian power struggles, Carey’s novel supplied him an outlet for disgruntlement with capitalistic greed. His experience with copywriting ads educated him in the psychology of commerce and the ambiguities of consumerism, which radio reviewer Tonia de Launey of Broadway, New South Wales, called a “rich bed of false idols” (de Launey, 1979). Critic Karen Lamb noted that Carey “consistently interpreted Australian attitudes towards wealth, and the mythology surrounding the cult of the entrepreneur” before its demise a decade later in recession (Lamb, 1992, 21, 26). The feeding of individual vanities and the inevitable downturn in human values precipitates the collapse of the nuclear family and the self-worth of the businessman. In the analysis of Susan McKernan, reviewer for Overland, Carey depicts a nightmarish end-time when “all the energy and creativity of mankind are marshalled for self-destruction” (McKernan, 1982, 58). Making obvious connection with New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss” (1920), Carey sets the plot in Australia, a mythic new world open to consumerism as a means of emulating the good life in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Like North, Central, and South America, the land offers jaded Europeans opportunities for enrichment and spiritual renewal. With the magical realism anticipating Isabel Allende The House of the Spirits (1982), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (1989), Carey eases into the mythic dimension through uncluttered narration of everyday events. His compact interweaving of personal stories takes the form

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of an onion, layered painstakingly with pungent leaves. Through the harmonizing of the real with the unimaginable, he conceives a world that seesaws between dreams and reality, a milieu that refutes assumptions about the times, people, and events that benefit humankind. The action of Carey’s existential fable depicts a 39-year-old advertiser, Harry Stanthorpe Joy, in the first of three diametric encounters with mortality. The first near-death collapse suspends him between “Heaven and Hell,” an existential neverland that puts his life on pause, a state that Carey explores further in the caging of aged grifter Herbert Peter Badgery in Illywhacker (1985) and in the basement self-exile of Benny Catchprice in The Tax Inspector (Carey, 1991, 12). Medical treatment transmutes Harry into a “poor weak Gulliver,” the author’s allusion to the protagonist of Jonathan swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), who is supine during his examination by Lilliputians (Carey, 1981, 52). The helplessness caused by wires and tubes sustaining his sick body jolts Harry with an unforeseen discovery — that there are other lives awaiting him beyond the conning of the affluent into advertising useless, carcinogenic products. Carey opens the first of six staves with “Knocking at the Hellgate,” an action that suggests the thrust of terror in Act II, Scene iii of Macbeth (ca. 1603) within minutes of disclosure of King Duncan’s assassination. To engulf the reader in sense impressions, Carey’s text contrasts the cool fragrance of growing plants with the sound of a pneumatic drill, an auditory metaphor for the torments awaiting the unholy. Like Lot’s flight from the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah, the contrast prophesies Harry’s eventual escape of industrial mayhem into a forest haven at Bog Onion Road.

THE ROAD TO EDEN The three-stage metamorphosis in Bliss casts Harry Joy in interlinking cameos. Anecdotal melodramas occupy “different worlds, layer upon layer, as thin as filo pastry” (Carey, 1981, 12). Like fraternal triplets, the original advertising mogul gives place to a binary remake, the atoner who shuns vice in himself, his wife, and his son and daughter, David and Lucy Joy. Seeking expiation for shady business ethics, Harry grasps at being a “good bloke” with the enthusiasm of a child reaching for a treat (ibid., 13). To assure comprehensive surveillance of his household, he records data in a notebook as though setting up an accounting system for urban family vice. He creates a tripartite demography of Hell, which comprises Actors like his family; evil-doers like drug kingpin Abe da Silva, whom he calls “Those in Charge”; and Captives, the class to whom he and penitent employee Alex Duval belong. The ongoing fact collecting “[throws] the whole emotional balance of the household out of kilter,” a necessary chaos preceding Harry’s personal, professional, and familial restructuring (ibid., 55) For yin and yang, the allegory conjures up a lurid history to contrast Harry’s eventual salvation. He blames himself for encouraging the traffic in chemical dreck along a river as black as the Styx: “Barges carried their carcinogens up river and neon lights advertised their final formulations against a blackening sky” (Carey, 1981, 79). To exonerate himself and his company, Joy, Kerlewis & Day, from selling cancer sources like pesticides, saccharin, and tobacco, Harry fires Adrian Clunes, a two-million-dollar client heading Krappe Chemicals, producer of “something like eighty thousand totally new organic compounds every year” (ibid., 124). The company sports a droll name for the makers of toxic formulae that breed tumors in human tissue. The single act characterizes the protagonist’s intent to cleanse himself of contributions to a cancer map. A postmodern Dantean schematic,

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the chart depicts “the epicentre of Hell,” a riveting mosaic of hot red, vermillion, crimson, day-glo orange, and lethal yellow, “like some deadly pin-ball machine” (ibid., 125, 262). In the style of Australian poet A. B. “Banjo” Paterson, Carey leads his protagonist toward redemption in the wild, ironically, the environment that Australia’s first European settlers declared hostile and unlivable. The novel progresses to Harry’s rebirth as a tribal storyteller, a totemic role as mythographer and sage in the Australian outback. Like an organ prelude, the falling action departs the jog-trot litany of misdeeds of earlier passages and swells into a wave of idyllic lyricism honoring the newly indigenous. In a reprise of prehistoric contemplation of seasonal change, from digging and planting to a Dionysian harvest, hibernation, and reawakening, the pastoral tableau depicts a primal enthusiasm for nature at Bog Onion Road. Harry legitimizes his new self by becoming a bush guru. For parishioners, he ministers to a random collection of the disaffected —“refugees of a broken culture who had only the flotsam of belief and ceremony to cling to or, sometimes, the looted relics from other people’s temples” (Carey, 1981, 291). Carey riposted to negative charges that Bliss “was in some way not intellectually rigorous, so it was a copout” and a national embarrassment (Eustace, 2006, 109). In his plotting, the retreat to the wild reinvigorates Harry, thus rechanneling his skills at salesmanship and at misrepresenting carcinogenic products into uplifting the outback community through native oracle. He enhances their celebration of life and freedom through do-it-yourself ritual, a “sapphire, or blue bread made from cedar ash” (Carey, 1981, 291). Critic Graeme Turner allegorizes the evolution of the liturgist as a “model for the writer within the Australian culture, providing fictions, Australian dreams, for a culture ‘hungry for ceremony and story’” (Turner, 1986, 441).

DEFINING UTOPIA To shield the plot from Pollyanna-ism, Carey begs the question “What produces contentment in paradise?” He juxtaposes innocence with a workable level of conflict and individualism, a scenario that prefigures the lawn service of Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone and his autistic brother, Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone, in Theft: A Love Story (2006). According to critic Graham Huggan, Carey accounts for a symbiosis between city and commune that requires Damian and Honey Barbara to glean annually from the sullied underside of urbanism. For reality’s sake, beekeeper Honey Barbara admits that the forest holds its own horrors and that “the night was a less innocent place than it had once been,” a suggestion of encroaching evil (Carey, 1981, 136). The novel retains the character idiosyncrasies of hermit Jerusalem John and woodlands grifters like Crystal, Garry, Margot, and Paul Bees, whose rapacity produces more humor than crime. Taking up the themes of three stories from 1974 —“American Dreams,” “Report on the Shadow Industry,” and “The Puzzling Nature of Blue”— Carey strings out a picaresque extended family and a tribal tale into a surprisingly benevolent ending. He fulfills what Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Sand (1975) describes as the replotting and retelling of essential human stories in unending layers throughout time. Harry’s Krishna-like pose derives from his mediation between woodlanders and the inevitability of death, which he has twice eluded in the style of Melquíades, the gypsy peddler in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). To those who pursue the mirage of the American dream — Betty Joy, her son David, and her lover, junior executive Joel Davis— death is not only grotesque, but also meaningless, as are their pleas-

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ure-oriented lives. David is the most pitiable for his entrapment in suburbia and the mesmerizing effect of easy money from drug dealing. The author introduces the last chapter, “Blue Bread and Sapphires,” with his signature color representing Harry’s transfiguration as solacer to “refugees of a broken culture” (Carey, 1981, 291). As his punishment for past sins, at age 75, he falls victim to a widowmaker, a limb that falls on him from a 33-yearold yellow box tree that he planted. His evanescence into a sigh “as thin as gas” leaches him clean of corruption (ibid., 295). The quick demise seems appropriate to a naturalist whose spirit the cosmos reabsorbs. The ambiguity emerged 12 years later in an interview with Canadian writer Eleanor Watchel, to whom Carey admitted his inability to “[imagine] the successful outcome of anything” (Watchel, 1993, 103). Two critics— John Tranter of The Age and Ken Gelder of the Centre for New Research in Literatures in English Reviews Journal— disdained the episodic adventures as a lacklogic and transparent “going bush,” the down under slang term for living in the wild in traditional survivalist fashion. Tranter charged the author with attempting to yoke seriocomic short stories into an uneven whole that “tells us terrible and necessary things about the world we have made for ourselves” (Tranter, 1981, 27). Another analyst graded the novel substandard for its coy “redemptive allegory” (Eustace, 2006, 108). John Ryle, critiquing for the Times Literary Supplement, notes “a little genre-slippage” after Harry eases “into the greenwood” and regrets “the blithe acuity of Carey’s more swart passages” (Ryle, 1981, 1350). In a review for Meanjin, Peter Pierce, a professor of Australian literature at James Cook University, Cairns, demeaned Bliss as “a disappointingly mawkish fable in re-integration” (Pierce, 1981, 526). Other critiques are less caustic. A contrasting view by John Eustace, a writer and English professor at Acadia University, characterizes the withdrawal into nature as a search for respite from a cancer epidemic in the free-form spirituality of a commune. He expands on the characters’ wish to “assume the legitimacy” of first peoples without falling under the whip of the colonizer (Eustace, 2006, 116). To Francis King, a reviewer for Spectator, Bliss evidences “a potentially major talent” (King, 1981, 21). See also Joy, Harry; Joy genealogy

• Further readings Bliss, Carolyn. “Time and Timelessness in Peter Carey’s Fiction: The Best of Both Worlds,” Antipodes 9, no. 2 (December 1995): 97–105. Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. de Launey Tonia. “Review: War Crimes,” 2SER-FM, 1979. Dovey, Teresa. “An Infinite Onion: Narrative Structure in Peter Carey’s Fiction,” Australian Literary Studies 11, no. 2 (1983): 195 –204. Eustace, John. “Going Bush: Performing the Pastoral in Peter Carey’s Bliss,” Antipodes (1 December 2006): 108 –116. Fletcher, Don. “Utopia in Peter Carey’s Bliss,” Social Alternatives 26, no. 1 (first quarter 2007): 39 –42. Hecq, Dominique. “Myth-Taken Paths and Exits in Peter Carey’s Bliss,” Commonwealth 18, no. 2 (spring 1996): 99 –103. Huggan, Graham. Peter Carey. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996. King, Francis. “Review,” Spectator (12 December 1981): 21. Lamb, Karen. Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992. McKernan, Susan. “Recent Fiction,” Overland 88 (1982): 56 –59. Natale, Antonella Riem. “Harry Joy’s Children: The Art of Story Telling in Peter Carey’s Bliss,” Australian Literary Studies 16, no. 3 (1994): 341 –347. Pierce, Peter. “Finding Their Range: Some Recent Australian Novels,” Meanjin 40, no. 4 (1981): 522–528. Ryle, John. “Magic and Poison,” Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1981): 1350. Tranter, John. “Hell without Logic Loses Credibility,” The Age (3 October 1981): 27. Turner, Graeme. “American Dreaming: The Fictions of Peter Carey,” Australian Literary Studies 12, no. 4 (1986): 431 –441.

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Watchel, Eleanor. “‘We Really Can Make Ourselves Up’: An Interview with Peter Carey,” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 9 (1993): 103 –105.

Boone-Leibovitz genealogy The measured account of an artistic family tree in Theft: A Love Story (2006) boils down to money and the possession of the droit moral, the right to authenticate the works of artist Jacques Leibovitz, a fictional ringer for Pablo Picasso. Marseilles tax accountant | wife=Jacques=Dominique Broussard=Honoré le Noël=/=Roger Leibovitz | assistant Neuilly art Martin b. 1876 | strangled, 1967 critic poet d. 1/1954 | in Nice | Grandpa Bones | | | “Blue Bones” Boone=Mum | butcher in Bacchus Marsh | cockney | died of stroke | religious | | fanatic | truck driver=manager | | died of lung | of a coffee | | cancer | shop -----------------------------------| | | | ex-wife=Olivier =Marlene Cook=/=Michael=Plaintiff=Jean-Paul Hugh “Slow Leibovitz from Benalla, “Butcher | artist Milan Bones” b. 1952 Victoria Bones” | art patron Boone advertiser secretary, Boone | b. 1946 in d. 1981 authenticator b. 1943 | Werribee b. 1953 | meat Billy Bones deliverer

See also Butcher Bones; Theft: A Love Story

• Further reading Carey, Peter. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006.

Butcher Bones From the beginning, the tone of Carey’s Theft: A Love Story (2005), a satiric allegory, exudes an abrasive bristle that borders on swaggering confessional. In the year of his own divorce from Alison Summers, the author fills his fictional Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone with a toxic rancor and a pride in the toughness of “the Bones boys” (Carey, 2005, 114). In chapter 11, the angry artist, newly released from a four-year term in Long Bay Prison at Malabar, New South Wales, drives his pickup truck onto art patron Jean-Paul Milan’s lawn. Butcher rages at the loss of “a whole life’s work” to his ex-wife, whom he depersonalizes as “the Plaintiff ” for her monetary success in divorce court (ibid., 64). Fortunately for the reader, Carey in a vile mood is Carey at his most hilarious. Because Butcher rues the loss of his early canvases to his former spouse in chapter 32, he reflects on a good year, 1973, when “the Art Gallery of New South Wales had finally condescended to give me a retrospective” (ibid., 94). In sympathy, his paramour, 28-year-old art authenticator Mar-

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lene Cook Leibovitz, caresses his fingers as though they were “responsible for The Last Supper,” a hyperbole typical of Butcher’s melodrama (ibid., 165). The diverse image enlarges on Butcher’s nickname, his family’s operation of an abattoir and meat business, and the artist’s eventual ruin by his murderous girlfriend. The appearance of the ex-wife shifts Butcher 180 degrees into a babbling, moonstruck lover of the mother of their son, Billy Bones. The second pop-up, the face of art collector Jean-Paul Milan, again rotates Butcher, this time into bargaining mode. Gleefully, he mutters elation at Jean-Paul’s acquisitive nature: “I had him, sans doubt, sans souci, sans fucking question” (ibid., 66). As the multifaceted face-off of Butcher with the art buyer and a police officer gains steam, the protagonist takes a moment to nuzzle his child in arms and ponders, “Dear God why do our children have to carry all this weight?” (ibid., 67). The father protects the innocent boy from civil authorities who “can do what they like to you,” Butcher’s implication of brutality with impunity against citizens, one of Carey’s favorite assertions (ibid., 69). Meanwhile, the neighborhood suffers an onslaught of Asian gangs, perverts, and drug addicts. The protagonist’s bluster frames a character who is less adversary than scornful blowhard. Carey redirects Butcher’s love for Billy and the former wife to an off-kilter family comprised of Butcher, his lover Marlene, and Butcher’s 34-yearold autistic brother, Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone. Richard Eder, a critic for the Boston Globe, characterizes the unlikely romance as a union of outsiders “pitted against an art establishment governed by money and buzz” (Eder, 2006). Although lacking mental acuity, Hugh manages astute commentary on his brother’s liaison, professional reputation, and financial situation.

ART MASTER Butcher’s fiscal quandary is a matter of timing. In the words of critic John Updike, the painter, unlike Vanessa Kellow, the matchbox artist in The Big Bazoohley (1995), is “passionate but passé” (Updike, 2007, 357). When he views his huge canvases at Mitsukoshi gallery in Tokyo in 1981, he ignores minor irritations, such as improper lighting and the Japanese misspelling of his surname as “Bone,” and concentrates on the power of pieces that “could still bite your leg off and spit the crunchy pieces on the floor,” a Gothic observation that links Butcher with Grendel (ibid., 160). Before the arrival of viewers and critics, the artist congratulates himself on selling all nine canvases for a total of $200,000 to an investor, Mr. Mauri. Butcher’s despair at learning of Marlene’s underhanded dealing with the buyer again plummets abnormally low. In verbal overkill, he mourns his luck: “Artists are used to humiliation. We start with it and we are always ready to return to real failure” (ibid., 212). The bathetic whine assures the reader’s awareness that humor and satire override sympathy for Butcher, a comic klutz. In a milieu overpopulated with philistines, Butcher declares himself a champion of art, yet, for all his self-ennobling bluster, he remains unredeemed, even by love. In the estimation of Sharon Dilworth, a reviewer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the problem is internal — Butcher operates with “limited nurturing abilities” toward his mistress and handicapped brother (Dilworth, 2006). Devastated by multiple losses, he retreats into a narcissism so deep that he ravages Jean-Paul’s country home as well as the temporary lodging for New South Wales artists visiting New York City. He illustrates his ability to rationalize fault with twisted logic: “I had supposedly vandalised the coachwood with the Sheetrock screws, but I can’t see how else I could have laid the ply on top of it” (Carey, 2006, 6). In the end of his odyssey to big-city art venues, he appears to take the kind of

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solace found in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), which recommends the contentment found in tending one’s garden. After five years of mowing lawns in partnership with Hugh, by 1986, Butcher settles his urgent need to thrive in art, a visceral drive that subsides with age and experience. In retrospect, he can enjoy notoriety from Marlene’s belated love gifts as his canvases take their place among the best.

• Further readings Adair, Tom. “Review: Theft: A Love Story,” The Scotsman (27 May 2006). Carey, Peter. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. Dilworth, Sharon. “Australian Novelist Continues His Dazzling Style,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (18 June 2006). Eder, Richard. “Murder, Genius, and Art Jostle Together on a Crowded Canvas,” Boston Globe (14 May 2006). Updike, John. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism. New York: Random House, 2007.

Carey, Peter Peter Carey, according to critic Carol Shields, is a “novelist of size,” a sparing description of a prize-winning giant among postmodern writers (Shields, 1995). With his late 20th-century, early 21st-century works, notably True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and Wrong about Japan (2005), he graduated from crafter of stories to a spokesman for his time and milieu. In a review for the Financial Times, critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney described the author as a rescuer of his fellow Aussies from a grand lie: “Carey tends to treat national identity as a grotesque hoax, a self-deceiving lie that replaces Australia’s actual history of colonial violence with a fairytale of plucky exiles starting afresh in a vast empty country on the other side of the world” (Hunter-Tilney, 2008). For his skill at Gothicism and black absurdist comedy, critic Bill Marx dubbed the author “Australia’s Chicken Little” and typified his writings as “corrosive cultural fables, parables of disenchantment in which dreams of transcendence burst like pustules” (Marx, 1992, 346). The transition in purpose and tone began in the mid–1980s, when Carey reached for “emotional richness” through depth of character and theme, especially perusals of the nature of truth and authenticity in Illywhacker (1985) (Baker, 1991, 33). His stretch from the ordinary to the unforeseen produced what Tim Wynveen, an admirer and reviewer for Maclean’s, terms “a cracked esthetic ... the sort of artistry one might expect from the land of the wombat, the kangaroo and the duck-billed platypus” (Wynveen, 1995, 65). Carey cleverly cloaks correspondences— Jack Maggs with Abel Magwitch, Tobias Oates with Charles Dickens, anime robotics with Japanese soldiery, and Efica and Voorstand with Australia and the United States— but his candor with critics exposes the inner workings of writing and the sources of his emotion and motivation. In an interview with John F. Baker for Publishers Weekly, the author acknowledged his growth in acuity and specificity since he advanced from short fiction to novels and experimental metafiction. Carey explained, “I realized I had to do more so that readers could react with the same emotion I felt,” a sharing of responses he achieved with Oscar and Lucinda (1988) (Baker, 1991, 33). For the social and psychological probing that preceded authorship of The Tax Inspector (1991), Carey had to examine the mental kinks of the delusional abductor and would-be rapist, whom he names Benny Catchprice. Each day, the writer pressed into Gothic terror: “There were dark corridors one had to make oneself walk to the end of, even though it was repulsive or frightening” (Heyward, 1992, 8). The stressful process caused him to question whether the novel was worth the effort. To Baker, Carey explained the finite nature of a lethal suspense novel: “In extremis, a reader has to see how it got to

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this point” (Baker, 1991, 37). He admitted to four rewrites of the cataclysm and noted, “It was a more reckless and passionate ride than more of what I’ve done” (ibid.).

CRITICAL RESPONSE In response to the author’s ripening, analysts colored their kudos with left-handed swats and ambiguous observations. To Peter Kemp, reviewer for the London Sunday Times, the author’s stories “go wide-rangingly walkabout,” a puzzling assessment (Kemp, 2008). In an assessment for the Times Literary Supplement, Edmund White preferred the psychothriller to the “tedious post-modernist high jinks undermining the authority of the text,” a delayed slap at Bliss (1981) and Illywhacker (1985) (White, 1991, 21). Grudging praise from A. P. Riemer, a reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, accompanied a crushing critique of The Tax Inspector, an apocalyptic dysfunctional family fiction constrained by classical conventions of time, place, and action. Riemer declared that the author “can be a devilishly good writer, hard, cold as ice, but with an unerring eye for the telling gesture or glance” (Riemer, 1991, 43). The review lists as Carey’s strength his selection of detail, including a husband’s knowledge of birth pangs and breastfeeding and an advertiser’s appreciation for car makes, designer labels, brand names and logos, even vintages of wine. Robert Towers, writing for the New York Review of Books, pegged the pattern of details as turbulence in Carey’s nightmarish imagination. Overall, Carey admirers win out over detractors. In a review of The Tax Inspector (1991) for Southerly, Jen Craig lauds the author’s diminutive, fully conceived characters and his narrators, which tend to be “urbane, fascinated by systems and details ... and also inclined to emotional simplification” (Craig, 1992, 153). Bruce Cook, in a critique for the Chicago Tribune, extends Riemer’s assessment with praise for Carey’s neo-grotesquerie, a subversion suited to the neo–Gothicism of Angela Carter, Michel Faber, Ariana Franklin, and Joyce Carol Oates. The sum of these qualities established Carey as a pictorial author suited to film. In a New York Times symposium on writers, novelist Nell Freudenberger isolated Carey’s success: “His novels seem both meticulously researched and entirely invented; his characters are emotionally authentic” (Freudenberger, 2005). She saluted him for his creation of strange individuals and imaginary countries that reflect on the fakery and decadence of imperialism. See also irony; storytelling; writing

• Further readings Baker, John F. “Interview with Peter Carey,” Publishers Weekly (3 December 1991): 33. _____. “Peter Carey: The Acclaimed Australian Has Moved to New York — And to a New Kind of Novel,” Publishers Weekly (13 December 1991): 37–38. Bradley, John. “Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs,” Meanjin 56, nos. 3 –4 (1997): 657–665. Cook, Bruce. “Misfits and Eccentrics: Peter Carey’s Tale of a Most Peculiar Australian Family,” Chicago Tribune (5 January 1992): 1. Craig, Jen. “The Real Thing,” Southerly 52, no. 1 (1992): 152–156. Freudenberger, Nell. “Symposium: The Hum Inside the Skull, Revisited,” New York Times (16 January 2005). Heyward, Michael. “Australia’s Literary Ambassador,” The Age (25 July 1992): 8. Hunter-Tilney, Ludovic. “The Fugitive’s Lament,” Financial Times (15 February 2008). Kemp, Peter. “His Illegal Self by Peter Carey,” London Sunday Times (3 February 2008). Marx, Bill. “Dystopia Down Under,” The Nation 254, no. 10 (16 March 1992): 346 –347. Riemer, A. P. “Brutish and Nasty,” Sydney Morning Herald (3 August 1991): 43. Shields, Carol. “Voorstand, Go Home!,” New York Times Book Review (12 February 1995). Towers, Robert. “House of Cards,” New York Review of Books (25 June 1992): 35. Wynveen, Tim. “A Stranger in a Strange Land Spins His Tale,” Maclean’s 108, no. 8 (20 February 1995): 65.

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Catchprice-Takis genealogy A failed family, both financially and emotionally, the Catchprices and their four-generation car sales business sink into the hands of Maria Takis, a tax assessor who condemns their personal failings more than their fiscal integrity. Stan=Marcia McClusky | Hughie=Old Mrs. grandparents, Greeks from Letkos | pedophile | Catchprice | | | ----------------------------------------| ------------| | | | | | | Great-Uncle Petros | Daniel Graham Frieda “Gran” =Albert “Cacka” Billie sailor | runaways McClusky | Catchprice | age 86 | pedophile deceased mother=George Takis former shire | deceased 13 years sweatshop | “Ba-Ba” councillor | seamstress | ------------------------------------------------------| | | | | Howie=Cathleen Mortimer=Sophie Jack=/=Maria Takis=/=Alistair=wife Helen McPherson “Cathy” “Mort” | left property tax | tax agent Catchprice pedophile | family developer auditor | age 49 age 45 | age 34 | incest victim -------------infant boy | | “little Benny” Johnny Benjamin “Vish” “Benny” age 18 age 16 incest victim incest victim murdered by Maria Takis

See also Takis, Maria; The Tax Inspector

• Further reading Carey, Peter. The Tax Inspector. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991.

Chubb-McCorkle-Slater-Wode-Douglass genealogy Multiple intermeshings dominate My Life as a Fake (2003), drawing into a Gothic web disparate people. The revelations of a father’s adultery and the bisexuality to his daughter, sophisticated literary editor Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, provokes the observation that children should not peek behind parents’ bedroom doors. Revelations of her father’s duplicity produce “whirling pictures in my head” of Lord William WodeDouglass’s peccadilloes and the suicide of Sarah’s mother (Carey, 2003, 134). father=mother | glove seller | d. 4/1960 | Bob=/=Mrs. Lim Barbara=/=Lord William=Australian=/=John =/=Noussette=Christopher McCorkle widow | “Boofy” | slit her Slater Markson | Chubb mechanic | Wode-Douglass | throat novelist artist | murdered kidnapper | bisexual | summer b. 1910 | |

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| 1938 | ------------------| | | | mother | | | | | Annabelle=/=Sarah Elizabeth Jane pompous brother lesbian “Micks” lover at editor Allenhurst b. 1930 | children near Kew

----dual fathers---| Tina college student b. 1952

See also My Life as a Fake

• Further reading Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003.

Collected Stories (1994) In an anthology of 27 narratives, Carey reprised 24 early stories and continued to probe extremes of emotion and miscommunication in three new works. He included “A Million Dollars’ Worth of Amphetamines,” a story of heartbreak that he issued in Nation Review on December 31, 1975. In a mismating of lovers he reprised in “He Found Her in Late Summer” (1979), Carey characterizes the haven that 22-year-old Julia finds in Claude, a low-end architect who welcomes her as a mistress, a prefiguring of Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone’s adoration of art authenticator Marlene Cook Leibovitz in Theft: A Love Story (2006). A former groupie for a dangerous band of musicians and drug dealers, Julia bears the nightmarish fears of retaliation from Carlos, a lover-enslaver serving time for murdering Jean with a speedball, the simultaneous injection of heroin and cocaine. For Claude’s amusement, she playacts at a Bonnie and Clyde scenario that belies her concealed terror of criminals. The discordant conversations between Claude and Julia produce diametric changes, guiding Julia toward domestic serenity while enticing Claude to abandon his safe life and recover the drug cache named in the story’s title. A reverse of O. Henry’s beneficent surprise ending in “The Gift of the Magi” (1906), “A Million Dollars’ Worth of Amphetamines” is a tale of measured imbalance. The action liberates Julia’s life of eluding a stalker and a possible revenge murder by shifting the target of Carlos’s vindication to Claude. Carey turns Claude’s metamorphosis into a simulated drug experience, an obsession with the untapped amphetamine store that turns him “slightly mad,” a sleepwalker atop a tall building, a beachcomber in a minefield (Carey, 1994, 82). To dramatize the change in Julia, Carey mentions a pale blue mohair sweater she buys for Claude, a symbol of soft warmth and luxury in a color that is one of the author’s trademark representations of contentment. The story implies that complete bliss is a fragile entity that eludes both partners in the love match.

FATE IN ART In a tour de force of metafiction, Carey’s “Concerning the Greek Tyrant,” published in The Tabloid Story Pocket Book (1978), describes the revolt of a character in Homer’s

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Iliad (ca. 850 B.C.) against an ignoble death. Editor Michael Wilding chose the story as a model of experimental fiction that journals often overlook or discount because of the author’s venture beyond standard expectations for narrative. In a dramatization of the composition of the Greek epic, Carey pictures Homer wracked with fever over one of the holes in his story concerning Echion’s fate. The author describes the doomed Greek as a tough, but battle-weary warrior plagued by phantasms of his death to come in the opening of the Trojan horse. To Homer, Echion is “an annoying small coin, but he will not be spent lightly” (Carey, 1994, 106). The statement implies Carey’s personal struggles with harsh depictions of truth about human self-destruction. Unlike the wandering Odysseus, the sailor who caromed about the Mediterranean for a decade after the Trojan War on his way home to Ithaca, the characters of the Iliad loll on a beach in soldier fashion like actors in the green room awaiting their cues. Under surfside wooden pavilions built by locals, the off-duty men romance island girls while combating dreams of hideous warfare with “false laughter,” a token of the omnipresence of grotesque woundings and deaths in a soldier’s experience (ibid., 107). For Echion, the breather from slaughter fails to stanch troubling hallucinations of his death, a free-floating malaise that leaves him edgy and cantankerous. In an existential state of fight-orflight, he tires of constant wariness, a burden of pre-attack alert that grants him no peace. On a universal level, the gnawing discomposure parallels the human knowledge of mortality, the extermination that awaits all people. Only Odysseus, Homer’s wartime survivor, enjoys direct communication with the poet who determines the fate of characters. The godlike knowledge suits the king of Ithaca, the craftiest Greek who designs the Trojan horse. After locating the blind bard stumbling through stony streets, Odysseus elicits the cause of Homer’s fever: Once characters know their fictional fate, “they don’t want to do what they’re told,” a complaint fraught with paternal responsibility (ibid., 111). As Homer begins to dictate the final night of the Trojan War, Odysseus takes down his words in verse, which Echion later reads. Echion’s endof-life hallucination begins with his own encounter with Homer, who reveals an ironic demise lying in wait. Compounding Echion’s bumfuzzled fall down a ladder is the fact that Homer chooses to delete the unglamorous incident from his book. Echion’s fate remains untold until 700 B.C., when it appeared in a lost manuscript, the four-volume Little Iliad, later recounted by the scholar and grammarian Apollodorus of Athens around 110 B.C. Amplifying the dramatic irony of Echion’s plunge down the steps is his attempt to betray the author by clawing a warning in the dust. As blind to the workings of destiny as mortals are to divine manipulation, the soldiers trample the message and surge into the fray that some survive and some don’t. Carey’s image of Echion’s ignoble death and a wasted warning epitomize the futility of war and of Homer’s celebration of carnage.

EATING THE YOUNG First published in Australian New Writing (1973), “Joe,” one of Carey’s earliest stories, required only one draft. It departs from the grand scheme of Homeric epic to focus on a nuclear family. The text, a subgenre that analyst Peter Pierce identifies as a “lost child narrative,” depicts a primal scene in which a tribe ousts one of its own (Pierce, 2001, 74). In his mid-teens, Joe falls victim to an unctuous, goody-goody household. Smug in its Perry Como atmosphere, the family preens over its oneness and purity of values, which involve shared dishwashing, in-crowd jokes, and a sing-along on birthday nights. The insidious lack of the family physiognomy — specifically, a Roman nose — gradually sets

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Joe apart from his sister Doreen, brothers Jack and the unnamed narrator, and their parents. An unspoken awareness that Joe is uncircumcised further alienates him from full family affiliation and draws attention to his genitals, which he uses to inflict harm on Shirley Bush. Psychologically, Joe bears a considerable burden at a turning point in adolescence. Dissociation from the household causes disconnection and hyper-stress, two sources of neurotic excoriation, a compulsive self-injury through the picking of scabs and warts, a psychological disorder known as neurotic self-mutilation. The internal calm that he generates from digging down to live nerve endings relieves his anxiety. Carey propels the story through imaginative naming, particularly the pun on “Harry Bush” and on Joe’s immersion in Modern Motor, a droll reference to the boy’s evolving libido. A more ominous pun in the name “Phil Cooper” suggests filling the coop (jail cell) with a teen who has survived on the outer rim of acceptance. Another reading of the name reminds the reader that “phil” is the Greek root for “love,” a quality lacking among the otherwise harmonious family set.

CAREY UP CLOSE With “A Letter to Our Son,” Carey abandons speculative fiction to contrast himself at age 44 with his eight-month-old son. The author published the reflective essay as a standalone text in 1994 and reprised it in The Granta Book of the Family in 1991. As though telling a bedtime story, he relives the events that surround the conception and birth of Sam Carey, who bore at birth the fragrance of lovemaking. Touchingly forthright in its portrayal of terror and delight, the compressed text juxtaposes fears for Alison’s inexplicable anemia and the joy of seeing and participating in Sam’s arrival after the third hour of labor, superintended by Bushfire, an aboriginal midwife. Before the arrival, the expectant father bonded with the fetus by listening to pre-natal noises, which he imagined as soldiers marching over a bridge, short-wave radio sounds, and the inside of the ocean. The author extolled his fatherhood in sense impressions. He captured his euphoria in the emergence of the baby’s head: “a new country, a planet, a star seen for the first time” (Carey, 1994, 352). He echoed parental qualms in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), The Tax Inspector (1991), and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) and mirrored the father’s joy in procreation in historical fiction — Ned’s letter to his daughter in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). More thrilling than family resemblances to grandparents was the reflection of Percy Carey, who had died the previous year. The author exults in the regenerative power of future scions: “Here, in you, he was alive” (Carey, 1994, 353). The celebration of parenthood concludes with the smell of the newborn, which Carey describes in Illywhacker (1985) as “flour and water,” the rudiments of human sustenance (Carey, 1985, 83). The adoration of father for offspring prefigures the relationship in Wrong about Japan (2005), a quasi-nonfictional travelogue of a father-son jaunt to Tokyo. See also parenthood; Wrong about Japan

• Further readings Bennett, Bruce. “Australian Experiments in Short Fiction,” World Literature Written in English 15, no. 2 (November 1976): 359 –366. Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. _____. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. Daniel, Helen. Liars: Australian New Novelists. New York: Penguin, 1988. Gaile, Andreas. Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.

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Pierce, Peter. “The Problem of Consolation in the Country of Lost Children,” Society for Studies in Religion, Literature and the Arts (2001): 73 –86.

colonialism Through diatribe, satire, myth, and black humor, Peter Carey wreaks vengeance on British colonialism, an irksome history that he attacks in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). His fictional works, from The Fat Man in History (1974) to His Illegal Self (2008), do battle against any rationalization of the usurpation and domination of nations, the inherited burden of postcolonial states. His unblinking scrutiny of Australian history refuses to wink at the horrific past, a candor he shares with authors Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, and Derek Walcott. In an interview with Boswell Magazine, Carey thundered, “We’re the only country on earth, as far as I know, that has its beginnings in a concentration camp, a penal colony. And a genocide, too. That affected us forever” (“Interview,” 2008). As a result to the toxic memory of Australia’s sufferings, he admits to literary monomania: “When you set out on a book you always think you’re onto something new. I’ve come to learn that it’s only years later you discover you’ve spent your whole life doing the same thing” (Wroe, 2008). After his resettlement in New York City in 1989, Carey found himself on a new frontier, but still mired in Australian history. He still relives “a convict economy, a concentration camp, genocide and all of that ... the echo of a defeated culture” (Harford, 2006, 118). Because of his unremitting contemplation of a despised and rejected citizenry, he writes of a colonial despair and failure that “doesn’t get washed away that easily” (ibid., 119). In his scrutiny of the convict’s need to repatriate to England in Jack Maggs (1997), the author noted how Victorian values extended into the Edwardian era because: “Things like that happen when people feel they are exiled from where the center is, or from where home is” (Ho, 2003, 124). In My Life as a Fake (2003), he pictures Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s at the separation point between past obeisance to Britain and a bandit-ridden independence fought to the death in jungle grapplings. The atmosphere of usurpation is “a dark, merciless world where you were not wanted and never would belong” (Carey, 2003, 54). Carey’s compassion for Australia’s transportees takes a romantic turn in Illywhacker (1985). In an interview with the Canberra Times, Carey declared that the text refutes two lies about English imperialists— that they found the land uninhabited and that colonialists left white settlers “proud and free and anti-authoritarian” (“Carey,” 1985, 27). After protagonist Herbert Peter Badgery demolishes a wall, he caresses the thumb print on each brick, a relic of the convict laborers who built the original colony. He instructs his son Charles, “Some poor bugger working at Brickfields a hundred-and-fifty years ago did that” (Carey, 1985, 542). To recapture the pathos of a legal form of slave labor, Herbert observes the unusual markings on some bricks, shapes like clubs and spades that individualize one man’s work. Badgery battles the destruction of Australian uniqueness by ridiculing serving with the British during World War I and “dying like a silly goat” for colonialists (Carey, 1985, 136). To Ian Oswald-Smith, an arrogant outsider, Herbert snorts: “The English are as big a pest as the rabbit.... They come here, eat everything, burrow under, tunnel out” (ibid., 137). The image of the usurper crawling under Australian roots ignites a verbal war between Oswald-Smith and Herbert, who turns the metaphor toward the purpose of his diatribe — the freeing of local industry from British backers. As the confrontation over money worsens, Herbert brandishes a snake as a model of Australia’s fettering: “This snake

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... has been in gaol. It is a mean bastard of an animal and it cannot be bought” (Carey, 1985, 140). The concept of a slithery intruder seizes control of the imagery, remaining dominant to the novel’s futuristic end. The author speaks through Leah Goldstein Kaletsky, an idealistic socialist and hater of “police, bailiffs, armies,” the plight of Australians, whose country the British steal (Carey, 1985, 308). Without referring directly to Aborigines, Leah honors them as the land’s “real owners” (Carey, 1985, 229). She later mourns “the raw optimistic tracks that cut the arteries of an ancient culture” (Carey, 1985, 553). In straightforward repudiation of historical lies, Herbert explains the comfort that Australians took from outright mistruths: “It is why we believed the British when they told us we were British too, and why we believed the Americans when they said they would protect us” (Carey, 1985, 187). In an interview with Richard Glover, writer for The Age, Carey claimed to be optimistic toward the incarceration of Australians in a web of lies: “If the imagination can make prisons for us, it can also pull them down. I do believe people, together with a will and an aim, can make a better future for themselves” (Glover, 1985, 3).

AN AGE OF PROGRESS Confuting the pseudo-technology of Illywhacker, Carey turns to pure science in Oscar and Lucinda (1988) in the title characters’ delight in glass. Of Prince Rupert’s Drop, a glass blob tempered in cold water, industrialist Lucinda Leplastrier marvels at “something almost magical” (Carey, 1988, 108). Her childhood experiences with the glass bauble, like the imperial anticipations for colonial Australia, prove more far-reaching and less controlled than she envisions. After nipping off the tail with pliers, she witnesses an explosion: “A moment before, you had unbreakable glass, now you have grains of glass in every corner of the workshop,” a prophecy of the massive catastrophes wrought by her bankrolling the transport of a glass church to the frontier (ibid.). In the estimation of analyst Robert Fraser, Australian society suffers the consequences after its surface durability becomes fatally flawed, a controlling metaphor for the damage done by white imperialists and proselytizers on the pristine surface and aboriginal society of Australia. The fragility of land ownership takes on pathos in the novel’s exploration of the outback. For the inconsistencies of the trek, Tom Wilhelmus, in a critique for the Hudson Review, classified the story an “anti-expeditionary novel” (Wilhelmus, 1988, 552). Legitimized by the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, a defrocked Anglican priest, and financed by Lucinda, the transport of a convoy of glass and cast iron purportedly delivers to the Reverend Dennis Hasset a church for the Christianizing of the heathen of Boat Harbour. Carey builds irony from the selection of a sadist, Mr. Jeffris, as expeditioner and cartographer. Jeffris composes in his journal his intent to make a name for himself by sketching the topography of northern New South Wales and naming landmarks, places that the aborigines have long ago identified in their own language. Incursions with natives result in outright slaughter, a depletion of landholders to leave open Ballingen Heads for British settlement. Surviving the British lies about conquest and religious conversion are the stories of Kumbaingiri Billy and of Bob, the third generation of Anglo-Australians and the first to demand accountability from historians for past falsehoods.

FANTASY ISLAND With The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Carey speaks boldly the Australian’s postcolonial plight and of the ruse of imposture as a nonviolent form of resistance. The

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daring two-nation microcosm caused reviewer Marie Maclean to refer to his “dazzling book” as “a sprawling, sensual, rambunctious marvel of a novel” on a par with Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner (1968) (Maclean, 1994, 8). From the perspective of immigrant actor Felicity “Flick” Smith née Smutts, the 18-island cluster of Efica belongs to “laconic, belligerent, self-doubting inhabitants of the abandoned French and English colonies, descendants of convicts ... grandchildren of displaced crofters and potato-blight Irish” (Carey, 1994, 9). Of her own kind, she laments, “We’re northern hemisphere people who have been abandoned in the south” (ibid., 117). When her son Tristan visits the Sirkus, he views evidence of arrogance in clowns wearing “cast-off uniforms of conquered nations ... ragamuffin POWs set free in Great Voorstand,” a performance that the boy describes as propaganda (ibid., 165). The author indirectly criminalizes the world’s colonizers with such details as immigrants to Saarlim City identified as prisoners of war and an artwork by De Kok called “Crucifixion in the New World” (Carey, 1994, 404). He inserts into a footnote a gesture of solace to the Australian Aborigine, “the ‘lost’ Indigenous Peoples (IPs) of Efica. The names of these long dead people litter our islands— tombstones in a lost language” (ibid.). The text batters the reader with a more corrosive vision of usurpage in chapter 9, when the title figure declares that British and French colonizers “murdered its indigenous inhabitants, set up dye works and prisons, and then abandoned us as being an unsuccessful idea” (ibid., 32). Carey blames the imperialists for leaving the convicts and dyers to starve. A final fillip notes that both colonizer and colonized speak roughly the same language. For his verbal slash at Australia’s captor, in 1996, he netted from critic David Griffin of the New York Review of Science Fiction an insulting review dismissing the text as “a squeaky lecture on nativist imperatives” and labeling Carey priggish and petty in defense of “a land of mingled mysticism and mediocrity” (Griffin, 1996, 15, 16). Griffin charges the novelist with a misperception of cultural resiliency, adaptability, and permeation by foreign influence.

RETURN TO THE MOTHER COUNTRY In Jack Maggs (1997), his second neo–Victorian novel written in Dickensian style, Carey attains a radical vengeance on Australia’s conquerors. He pictures writer Tobias “Toby” Oates as the fabulizer, “who ‘made’ the City of London ... named it, mapped it, widened its great streets, narrowed its dingy lanes, framed its scenes with the melancholy windows of his childhood” (Carey, 1997, 182). Critic Sigrun Meinig dubs the portrait of Great Britain’s hub “the imaginary geography of imperialism” (Meinig, 2000, 60). Ironically, London’s squalor replicates the colony’s skank. As described in a trope by F. S. Schwarzbach, “The entire city is like the prison — both are places which systematically incarcerate and dehumanise their inhabitants” (Schwarzbach, 1979, 189). The narrative wields irony throughout as a wry reminder of incongruency. Carey sends 15-year-old Jack to Australia aboard the Enterprise, a name that honors England’s glorification of its global holdings at the same time that it hints at the transportee’s eventual pardon and self-salvation. At a moment of agape in the relationship between parasitic Toby and ex-con Jack Maggs, Jack clasps his nemesis in a forgiving embrace, forcing Toby to inhale “the prisoner’s smell— the odour of cold sour sweat” (Carey, 1997, 265). The juxtaposition of sensationalizer and subject forces Toby into realistic contact with evidence of survival in the hellhole of Morton Bay, the white penal colony of New South Wales. In the estimation of critic Alice Brittan, Carey’s novel attests that “England, not Australia,

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turns out to be the haunted land. England is the Hades of vengeful spirits” (Brittan, 2004, 54). Carey’s text concludes with a personal gesture of defiance against Charles Dickens as spokesman for the English and against the British Empire for demeaning the former prisoners who colonized Australia. Mercy Larkin Maggs, a former house maid debauched by her employer, Percival “Percy” Buckle, destroys seven pages of a novel based on her husband’s life entitled The Death of Maggs, ostensibly published in 1861, three years after Jack Maggs’s demise. The pages include a dedication to Percy as “A Man of Letters, a Patron of the Arts” (Carey, 1997, 328). Her repudiation of Toby Oates’s scurrilous fiction comprises a female comeuppance to a despoiler of women as well as a rejection of lies perpetrated by the mother country against Australia, personified by Jack.

HOSTILE OUTCASTS Carey’s prickly anti-colonialism crops up where bigotry and prejudice lurk. In a diatribe against the British publishing industry incorporated into his acceptance of the 1989 Miles Franklin Award, Carey snorted, “We never had a revolution to kick the British out of Australia” (Carey, 1989, 17). In “Tristan Smith,” Carey enlarges on colonialism. In the words of reviewer Carol Shields, “Mr. Carey makes clear that imperialism is not limited to nation-states. The healthy colonize the weak and deformed; parents hold hegemony over their children; everyone is drugged by a bland, pervasive popular culture, which is mindlessly conceived but expertly transmitted” (Shields, 1995). Two decades later, on January 28, 2009, Carey challenged Australian writers to demand autonomy from global control. He described the contretemps in colonial terms: “Should we put a very, very high value on ourselves and who we are? After all, we do already have a lot to be ashamed of in our history. We already have enough to rectify, to compensate, to restore” (Carey, 2009). Through the class war in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Carey speaks the anguish of the Irish deportee before a British government that “could bankrupt or hang you as they pleased” (Carey, 2000, 47). Ned Kelly, the memoirist, reflects on “the tortures our parents suffered in Van Diemen’s Land — Port Macquarie — Toongabbie — Norfolk Island — Emu Plains,” all monuments to imperial cruelty (Carey, 2000, 35). The destruction of the spirit is so lasting that John “Red” Kelly, after jailing from 1862 to 1865 in Avenel, lacks the pluck to soldier on. He retreats to his hut. Ned recalls, “His eyes was lost and lonely and angry in the middle of his swollen face” (ibid.). At Red’s death in late June 1866, Ned attributes his infection to “all the poisons of the Empire his skin grey and shining in the gloom” (ibid.). Although John deserves little mourning, Ned regrets the death of his sire. Ned accords a similar respect for a salesman, Ben Gould, whose palm officials brand with a T for “thief ”: “Though he were not Irish he carried the same sort of fire I mean that flame the government of England lights in a poor man’s guts every time they make him wear the convict irons” (Carey, 2000, 163). As Ned leans from honest labor in a sawmill toward a life of raising stolen horses on Bullock Creek, he takes pleasure in outraging the rich squatter who “did not own that country he never could” (ibid., 202). Personal honor and reputation stand at the center of underclass concerns. A colonial debate arises in November 1868 as Ned, Mary Hearn, and the gang gather in a hideaway at Sandy Flat in the King Valley. Because Steve Hart and Dan Kelly wear drag, Mary refuses to honor cross-dressing as an Irish rebel tradition. Lest the men involve Dan in transvestism, Mary rages that the gender switch does nothing to improve Irish status among British usurpers. She reasons that, if masking and cross-dressing were effective, “then Ire-

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land would be a paradise on earth and all the Kings of England have burnt in Hell” (Carey, 2000, 286). She makes her case with storytelling about an incident in 1867 involving the dressing of Lord Hill’s horse in hat and cloak. In a post-narrative gibe, Joe Byrne declares that, to Australian politicians, the gang members are “weevils in their flour” (ibid., 291).

• Further readings Anderson, Hephzibah. “There Was Once a Poet from Down Under,” Guardian (14 September 2003): 18. Bergfelder, Tim, and Sarah Street. The Titanic in Myth and Memory. New York: I. B. Taurus, 2004. Bradley, James. “A Slippery, Ripperty Thing: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s Tristan Smith,” New York Review of Science Fiction 9, no. 5 (1997): 17–19. Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Fraser, Robert. Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction. Manchester, U. K.: Manchester University Press, 2000. Griffin, David. “Review: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” New York Review of Science Fiction 97 (1996): 14 –17. Ho, Elizabeth. “Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and the Trauma of Convictism,” Antipodes 17, no. 2 (1 December 2003): 124 –132. “Interview: Peter Carey,” www.powells.com/authors/carey.html, accessed on November 25, 2008. Maclean, Marie. “Carey Goes Cybersurfing,” Australian Book Review 164 (19 September 1994): 8 –10. Wilhelmus, Tom. “Knowing,” Hudson Review 41, no. 3 (autumn, 1988): 548 –556. Wroe, Nicholas. “Between Two Worlds,” The Guardian (19 January 2008), www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/ jan/19/fiction.petercarey, accessed on November 20, 2008.

coming of age Carey spotlights the shadowland of puberty as the introduction of the uninitiated into the quagmires of adulthood. The motif colors “Joe,” an early story published in Australian New Writing (1973), as well as the paternal essay “A Letter to Our Son” (1994), the emerging manhood of Sam Kellow in children’s quest book The Big Bazooley (1995), the legend of a 12-year-old head of household in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), and Wrong about Japan (2005), a postmodern travelogue of Carey’s journey to Tokyo with a Japanophilic son, 12-year-old Charley Carey. In “American Dreams” (1974), the protagonist, who advances from age 12 to 21, examines from a boy’s perspective the Australian reverie of living like affluent Americans. Coinciding with his coming of age is the maturing of his rural hometown, where Mr. Gleason, a recluse, gulls nosy neighbors by building a scale model of the area. Complete with portrait figures, the miniature village at first delights citizens with a profitable tourism, which quickly sours the town spirit, a commentary on capitalism that dates to medieval tales. After revealing a scenario of adultery in one of the tiny houses, a symbol of moral decay, the protagonist begins his coming to knowledge about desire and satisfaction. Seduced by visitors who expect him to remain forever a youth, he loses his innocence to boredom with re-enactments and disillusion with wish fulfillment. Like an Australian Opie Taylor forever playing son to Sheriff Andy’s father in Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show (1960 –1968), Carey’s protagonist gains a nightmarish glimpse of the down side of adulthood. The Gothic stories “Joe” and “American Dreams” anticipate the author’s continued concerns over parenting and rearing responsible children. In a postmodern nightmare in Illywhacker (1985), Carey’s satiric novel, grandson Hissao, the third generation of Badgerys, constructs a steel-and-glass menagerie in which to display living models of Aus-

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tralia’s citizenry. The overblown satire serves the author as a criticism of the Aussie exploitation of its strangeness as an enticement to tourists. Another coming-of-age nightmare, the apocalyptic The Tax Inspector (1991), views the advance of a sexually abused child into manhood through the psychotic misadventures of Benny Catchprice, a 16-year-old abductor and would-be rapist. His twisted views of family, self, and career encompass the worst of punk culture and pre-criminality. Carey concludes Benny’s bleak life with acts of compassion and cruelty. After delivering the child of tax assessor Maria Takis, Benny confers his name on the baby boy. The nightmarish birthing scene and the confinement of Maria for nefarious purpose exonerates her for clubbing Benny, ostensibly to death with one blow to the head, thus ushering in a new life to replace the failed maturation of a monster. A warmer, more endearing image of parenting, Carey’s Wrong about Japan dramatizes the author’s relationship with his elder son, 12-year-old Charley. At the magic moment when a boy turns into a teen, Charley exists in the clammed-up world of the New York City skateboarder and punk rocker. Literature becomes the link of the middle-aged male parent with his child when Charley expresses delight in manga and anime, the faddish action comics and cartoons from Japan that father and son buy at Forbidden Planet, a comics dealer in Manhattan. As a source of maturity, Carey’s discussion with Charley about the one-sided violence against Japan during 1944 and 1945 enlightens the son to the father’s growing-up years, when Carey, in his pre-school years, turned the cash of Japanese occupation troops into play money. An unsettling text, the narrative unites lessons in traveler courtesies and in Japanese capitalism with the author’s grim-edged hope for a new generation born free of world war. The sharing of interests, however tenuously linked, tightens the bond that Carey seals with Charley. Simultaneously, the pre-teen establishes his own levels of expertise at pathfinding and buying tickets for the Tokyo subway.

• Further reading Carey, Peter. Wrong about Japan. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2005.

confinement Cultural, economic, and personal restraints underlie Carey’s most poignant human tragedies. Claustrophobic settings include drowning in a glass chapel in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), house breaking and prison lashings in Jack Maggs (1997), imprisonment and hanging of folk hero Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), memories of bomb shelters during World War II in Wrong about Japan (2005), and the immurement of a child from public curiosity and news of radical students at Harvard in His Illegal Self (2008). In a review of The Tax Inspector (1991) for the New York Times, critic Francine Prose pictures the setting as an “airless bell jar,” a suitable scientific landscape on which to view family dysfunction (Prose, 1992). The author advances from a general perception of Australia as a nation ensnared in self-deceiving stories of freedom and autonomy. To interviewer Lisa Meyer of the Chicago Review, he wryly states a postcolonial truth: “Our freedom is as long as the leash” (Meyer, 1997, 84). In the description of Michael Heyward, a reviewer for New Republic, the author’s “hapless characters [are] trapped in eerie, claustrophobic landscapes,” such as the under-stage cubby in which the title figure of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) immures himself to recover from the sorrow and shock of losing his mother to Voorstand Intelligence Agency assassins, and an autistic man’s retreat into a wombat burrow in Theft: A Love Story (2006).

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name

work

type(s)

Alex Duval Anna Bart Benny Catchprice Carla Charley Carey Che Selkirk Christopher Chubb Crabs Dennis Hasset Dial Echion Elizabeth Warriner Emma Badgery Frieda Catchprice Goon Tse Ying Harry Joy Herbert Badgery

Bliss “He Found Her in Late Summer” “War Crimes” The Tax Inspector “The Chance” Wrong about Japan His Illegal Self My Life as a Fake “Crabs” Oscar and Lucinda His Illegal Self “Concerning the Greek Tyrant” Jack Maggs Illywhacker The Tax Inspector Illywhacker Bliss Illywhacker

Honey Barbara Hugh Boone insurance agent Izzie Kaletsky Jack Maggs Joe Julia

Bliss Theft: A Love Story “Room No. 5 (Escribo)” Illywhacker Jack Maggs “Joe” “A Million Dollars’ Worth of Amphetamines” Oscar and Lucinda Oscar and Lucinda

commercialism isolation cocaine basement room, fantasy attractive body tatami-sized room house arrest, kidnap bicycle shop Star Drive-in Theatre assignment to Boat Harbour crime combat hallucinations pregnancy zoo cell family business; old age racism commercialism Rankin Downs Gaol; pet emporium; old age; lies poverty; prostitution folding chair house arrest vengeance prison, criminality, memories alienation stalker

Kumbaingiri Billy Kumbaingiri Billy’s aunt Leah Goldstein Lucinda Leplastrier Lucy Joy Maria Takis Marlene Leibovitz Mary Oates Mercy Larkin Miriam Chadwick Molly McGrath Ned Kelly Nile Oscar Hopkins

Illywhacker Oscar and Lucinda Bliss The Tax Inspector Theft: A Love Story Jack Maggs Jack Maggs Oscar and Lucinda Illywhacker True History of the Kelly Gang “Peeling” Oscar and Lucinda

Peggy Kram

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Peter Carey Phoebe McGrath Rose Kaletsky Sam Kellow shepherd

Wrong about Japan Illywhacker Illywhacker The Big Bazoohley “Life & Death in the South Side Pavilion” “A Windmill in the West” Jack Maggs “The Fat Man in History”

soldier Tobias Oates Teddy Finch

racism concubinage disabled husband Victorian mores anarchy pregnancy lies and felonies marriage sexual compromise poverty madness poverty, slander, crime shame, guilt poverty; compulsive gambling; glass chapel agoraphobia; fanaticism; cultural theme parks tatami-sized room pregnancy, motherhood; birdcage cancer financial uncertainty; hotel room hopeless herding desert assignment poverty; notoriety; adultery social disapproval; poverty

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name

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Tristan Smith

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Vincent Vincent Theroux Wally Paccione

“The Puzzling Nature of Blue” The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

congenital deformity, garbled voice; Bruder Mouse suit; cubby under the stage blue stain marriage poverty

The critique of John Bradley characterizes Carey’s literary microcosm as “dreamscapes where patterns and images of transformation and imprisonment recur” and where “characters ... move restlessly in search of escape” (Bradley, 1997, 657). Bradley cites as examples Herbert Peter Badgery’s network of lies and deceptions in Illywhacker (1985) and the cantilevered glass chapel in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), a dual symbol of pride and downfall created on equipment built by Chance Brothers, a symbolic image of fate. Long before Lucinda agrees to structure the iron marvel for transportation to the outback, she finds herself immured in a cultural box. In a critique for the New York Review of Books, James Bradley notes, “In escaping the strictures of her own culture, thin as it is, she finds that culture has already marked her irreparably,” a social blight unacceptable to her mother’s old friend, novelist George Eliot (Bradley, 1997, 19). However clever the lockups, Carey permeates his resolutions with glimmers of opportunity, such as a Genetic Lottery offering new bodies in “The Chance” (1974), escape from crazed hotel guests in The Big Bazoohley (1995), the enduring legend of Ned Kelly that keeps his lore alive in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), career advancement for a hasbeen painter and ex-con in Theft: A Love Story (2006), and a runaway child in His Illegal Self. One method of escaping the grimness of confinement is through storytelling, an antidote to fear and hopelessness. For Harry Joy, telling stories creates union and purpose among forest dwellers of Bog Onion in Bliss (1981), a tale of reclamation through rural values. For the title figure in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), escape takes the stripping of a robot and the stuffing of a deformed actor into a comic suit to mimic the antics and tales of Bruder Mouse, a mytho-religious figure in fictional Voorstand. For Jack Maggs, the stylistic antithesis of Illywhacker, Carey personalizes restraints on the title character. According to Melissa Bellanta, reviewer for the Australian Public Intellectual Network, Jack’s “shoes are too small, his coat too tight, his sensitivities wounded by British Disdain ... his fierce loves and loyalties barely kept in check; lying beneath the surface of the novel like the Antipodes of the soul” (Bellanta, 2003). His liberation requires a return to the convict’s nemesis, Australia, where marriage, a dynasty, and free enterprise treat Jack to a contented life.

• Further readings Bellanta, Melissa. “Review: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” Australian Public Intellectual Network (April 2003). Bradley, James. “A Slippery, Ripperty Thing: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s Tristan Smith,” New York Review of Science Fiction 9, no. 5 (1997): 17–19. Bradley, John. “Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs,” Meanjin 56, nos. 3 –4 (1997): 657–665. Heyward, Michael. “Parallel Universes,” New Republic 212, no. 15 (10 April 1995): 38 –41. Meyer, Lisa. “An Interview with Peter Carey,” Chicago Review 43, no. 2 (1997): 76 –89. Prose, Francine. “Would You Buy a Used Car from This Family,” New York Times (12 January 1992).

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egotism In short and long fiction and in the memoir 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001), Carey scrutinizes the dangers of ego preening by individuals and whole populations. In “Crabs” (1974), a character study pictures the faux strutting of a 118-pound mechanic nicknamed Crabs as he advances from puberty to manhood. Because the mask of machismo lacks actual virility, the boy ends up carless and girl-less after the walling in of his date Carmen and a borrowed 1956 Dodge in the Star Drive-in Theatre, a dystopian world shrouded in darkness. For “War Crimes” (1978), a disaster fable, Carey offers a more powerful tale of the downfall of adults, two punk businessmen who destabilize and destroy a factory that produces TV dinners. Contrast in the partners’ outlook and behavior reveals the pitfalls of sybarism. Bart, a Hollywoodized cowboy decked out in polished books, swaggers about a factory north of Nebraska, where he avoids stepping in polluted sludge, a metaphor for corrupt business practices. He absents himself from day-to-day management to dabble in drugs and showmanship. Unlike the insecure partner, an accountant who suffers dire dreams of mutilation in factory machinery, Bart inflicts harm on others by running his Cadillac Eldorado over two pedestrians and by shooting a hungry boy who steals a frozen dinner. In a model of poetic justice, Bart decimates himself in symbolic fashion by channeling profits into cash for expensive wine and cocaine, the short-term pleasures that preface fiscal decline. More seriously maimed by success than his partner, Bart has himself to blame for living in the moment and pleasuring himself on illicit escapism. Longer fiction produces a more illuminating scrutiny of ego, ranging from the reserved restaurant table and perks demanded by Harry Joy, the silk-shirt-wearing advertising mogul in Bliss (1981), to the verbal gymnastics of liar and faker Herbert Peter Badgery, the humbug who dominates Illywhacker (1985). In both instances, the protagonists stroke their superiority with the daily rewards of self-approval and personal kudos, which give them permission to neglect family duties and to violate common courtesies and laws. Both men suffer the buffeting of loss and comeuppance for lives that exploit the outside world, i.e., Harry’s schmoozing with Krappe Chemicals, who sell toxic products, and Herbert’s softening of yokels for the purchase of Model T Fords. For Herbert, advanced old age finds him still addicted to boasting and lying, the two faults that further his remarkable career as a grifter. In Harry’s case, he repents of narcissism and retreats into the wild of Bog Onion Road to regain personal worth through service to woods folk as the in-house sage. In a retrospect of Carey’s boasters, critic Andreas Gaile accuses the author of stereotyping the bombastic male: “Carey plays around with the cliché that masculinity is inseparably connected with egoism and autonomy” (Gaile, 2005, 132). The charge proves true in the cases of career-obsessed actor Bill Millefleur in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), of Tobias “Toby” Oates, the philandering novelist who hypnotizes the title character and steals his story in Jack Maggs (1997), and of Irish bushranger Harry Power in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), in which he nicknames the neophyte Ned “Your Ignorance,” a slur at the boy’s apprenticeship in outlawry (Carey, 2000, 78). However, the cast of Bliss proves Gaile wrong. Harry’s wife, Bettina “Betty” Joy, another exemplar of megalomania, resembles “a decoration on a poisonous cake ... like the great bloated whale of a Cadillac that sat on the front lawn and consumed energy and enthusiasm and interest” (Carey, 1981, 239). Rather than die of cancer contracted while writing ad copy for a marketer of toxic petrochemicals, Betty sets herself aflame with three bottles of fuel at the

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eighth-floor boardroom of the Mobil Research Department. Even in death, her conflagration in a white linen suit and a large white hat bears the panache of a self-aggrandizer.

ACTING OUT, ACTING UP Alcoholism and tantrums serve another of Carey’s egotistic protagonists, Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone, a has-been painter and ex-con in Theft: A Love Story (2006). Critic James Bradley, writing for The Age, describes the novel from its epigraph onward as “raging, almost scatological grandiloquence of its egotism, misanthropy and self-doubt” (Bradley, 2006). A seething self-promoter, Butcher exonerates himself for his faults, which cost him a four-year term in Long Bay Prison in Malabar, New South Wales, for larceny. He bays at the world for the loss of home, wife, eight-year-old son Billy Bones, and a collection of early canvases, which the divorce court awards to “the Plaintiff.” Self-absorbed to the exclusion of others, including his autistic brother, Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone, Butcher mourns his own hurts while minimizing the grief following the drowning of Hugh’s puppy in a flood. The artist encourages a romance with the love of his life, art authenticator Marlene Cook Leibovitz, even though she is an amoral felon married to investor Olivier Leibovitz. In assuaging the art bug that gnaws at his contentment, Butcher rationalizes stapling of canvases to the hardwood floor of his patron, Jean-Paul Milan, as well as the fakery of a painting allegedly completed by famed artist Jacques Leibovitz, Marlene’s deceased father-in-law. Carey creates a two-legged conscience in Detective Amberstreet, Butcher’s Inspector Javert, who follows the couple to their illicit love nest in a hospitality suite rented by New South Wales for visiting dignitaries. For Marlene, the comeuppance to her egotism is “some bastard in a London Fog [serving] a writ on her, an action for divorce,” a hitch in her misuse of the powers of authentication, which she acquired through marriage (Carey, 206, 236). The two messengers from officialdom hasten the novel’s falling action. Carey creates an alter ego and a mirrored conceit in Hugh and art expert Milton “Milt” Hesse, Marlene’s mentor. Echoing Butcher’s arrogance is Milt’s vanity, which takes the form of misappropriation of documents. In offering Milt historic letters, Marlene questions the need for permission. With narcissistic vainglory, he blusters, “Permission! Bullshit. Just borrow them, doll-face. No sense making a fuss if they’re worth nothing” (Carey, 2006, 154). The strutting of Marlene, Milt, and other big-name art dealers and buyers results in murder and damaged self-respect. In the end of a dash from Australia to Japan and the art galleries of New York City, in 1981, Butcher finds himself reduced to mowing lawns, a job that levels his egotism while renewing ties with his handicapped brother, a humble man who functions on the level of a child. Five years later, Carey rewards the artist with showings of his late collection in London, New York City, and Cologne, Germany, a fruition of his career that redeems Butcher from self-abnegation. See also belonging

• Further readings Bradley, James. “Peter Carey’s Latest Novel Is an Excursion into Fraudulent Art,” The Age (8 April 2006). Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. _____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. War Crimes. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979. Gaile, Andreas. Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Hassall, Anthony J. “Telling Lies and Stories: Peter Carey’s Bliss,” Modern Fiction Studies 35, no. 4 (1989): 637–653.

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Updike, John. “Blood and Paint,” New Yorker 82, no. 15 (29 May 2006): 84 –85. Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996.

The Fat Man in History Peter Carey’s first short fiction anthology, The Fat Man in History (1974, 1979), a collection of 12 stories, turns shapeshifting, political satire, and the grotesque into tools for examining basic assumptions about society, illusion, and the usurpation of power. Reviewers admire the work for innovation, imagination, and unity of tone. According to critic Karen Lamb, these elements succeed because of “a cross-pollination of the techniques of advertising and fiction writing” (Lamb, 1992, 20). Bruce Clunies Ross, in an article for Australian Literary Studies, lauds Carey for controlling the urge to experiment and for maintaining a “formal integrity and economy which gives all his work ... an autonomous quality, almost like fairy tales” (Ross, 1981, 178). Ross describes Carey’s “intricate fables” as a specialty and praises his “finely crafted very brief pieces” (ibid.). The metafictional style is both startling and confrontational, an enlargement of short fictional parameters that revived and redirected the genre. The author explained his method of engaging readers: “I took a dozen or so hypotheses and asked what would happen if...” (Morton-Evans, 1984, 8). His facile musings predict a universal appeal that buoyed the author’s works to world-class fiction. In his take on speculative fiction, “By looking forward to the future you’re making a comment on what’s happening now” (Munro, 1976, 5). He received acclaim for a blurring of time periods and for ingenious shifts in perspective on human pain. His stories, which author Thomas Keneally compared to James Joyce’s short story anthology Dubliners (1914), began to develop a cult following for their off beat, on-target style. At his rise to fame, critics embraced him as a spokesman for post-colonialism and for postmodern Gothicism. For “Conversations with Unicorns,” a stagy tableau first published in the Sun News Pictorial on January 3, 1973, Carey draws on the paradigm of Plato’s cave myth, an allegory in The Republic (ca. 380 B.C.). Carey’s narrative examines the set piece in which the messenger who brings enlightenment and potential salvation threatens uninformed masses who bear a strong resemblance to Jonathan Swift’s naive, overly rational houyhnhnms. The satire of a complacent closed society gains drama from an outsider’s caution to unicorns about armed stalkers who collect unicorn heads. Only by executing a volunteer can the savior make his case for self-preservation. As a fable surveying conclusions based on limited experience, the story illustrates the author’s skill at isolating human failings on a small canvas for detailed study. By placing the male unicorns in a cave opposite a ridge, Carey implies the “rigidity” of mindset in people who venture too little into the greater milieu and who allow a single academician to undermine their notion of mortality as a blessing. By implication, the author accuses Australians of accepting their colonizers’ world view and of lacking a healthy skepticism about religious, philosophical, and governmental dicta affecting their longevity and survival.

CAREY’S UNDERCLASS In “Withdrawal,” Carey plunges into a favorite milieu, the felonious, smack-addicted lowlife thriving among urban dregs, a challenge he accepted from writer and editor Michael Wilding, founder of the Australian publisher Wild & Woolley. The author defines the atmosphere that frames the Gothic stories as an “ordinariness ... which makes them all

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the more shocking” (Carey, 1994, 117). The action, a satire of unprincipled advertising and indecent commerce, depicts an end-time marked by an unsettling amorality symbolized by rings of fires about Melbourne. The burning suggests the cold flames in John Milton’s hell in Paradise Lost (1667) and prefigures the apocalyptic conclusion in The Tax Inspector (1991), in which a thwarted mother destroys the family car business by igniting charges of gelignite. At the nadir of mercantile probity on High Street in “Withdrawal,” protagonist Eddie Rayner begins negotiations to purchase an amputated hand, which he rationalizes as an investment. To the seller, physician Dean Da Silva, Eddie sneers that ethics “is really all about money. The less ethical it is the more expensive it will be” (ibid., 120). His cynicism suits the Me generation, American novelist Tom Wolfe’s designation of the gross self-indulgence of the 1970s. For maximum repugnance, the plot expands from exhibitionism of death to extreme human taboos— necrophilia and coprophagia. Carey follows his protagonist through phases of daring pandering to secretive collectors of the unspeakable — including one cabinet member — and arrives at Eddie’s first face-to-face survey of death. In viewing an old landlady sitting rigid and lifeless at a table, he replicates a dominant scene from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), the gradual dehumanization of Miss Havisham, a would-be bride who presides over a bogus nuptial reception complete with fraying veil, yellowed gown, satin slippers, and mouse-eaten wedding cake. Eddie investigates the old lady’s life through objects and letters and strips away the voyeuristic appeal of her corpse. The resurgence of his humanity causes him to pity a heroin-addicted pig and to rescue it from cyclical withdrawal symptoms. His own withdrawal from seaminess leaves him pondering the letter from Daphne instructing him on how to euthanize the pig with an overdose of heroin.

LIVING ON THE OUTSKIRTS In 20 staves, the title story of The Fat Man in History, a dystopian fable on scapegoating and cyclical insurrection, moves from the outside world to a pocket of poverty and emotional need, a backwash created by social cataclysm similar in scope to the Russian Revolution of October 16, 1917. Carey pictures the contemplative cartoonist Alexander “Teddy” Finch, age 35, on his way out of a department store with stolen smoked oysters in his pockets and a packet of blue double bed sheets he wrapped for himself in brown paper. In post-revolution times, his obesity, a subject of anti–American satire, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads to paranoia, joblessness, and chronic thievery. By helping to turn “fat” into a pejorative, a synonym for “greedy, ugly, sleazy, lazy, obscene, evil, dirty, dishonest, untrustworthy,” Finch and his five rotund housemates morph into a counter-revolutionary cell battling a despot known only as Danko (Carey, 1993, 11). Carey wields shock against apathy. In the style of the Roman fabulist Menenius Agrippa and his parable “The Revolt of the Parts of the Body against the Stomach” (494 B.C.), the narrative turns the function of the alimentary canal into a trope for refining and subverting fascist extremes. Five of the sextet, forced onto the perimeter of respectability by social rejection of the unlovely, advance from impotence and futility to gorging on one of their own. The Kafkaesque backyard barbecue of their leader Fantoni constitutes a gustatory revolt against a faceless post–Marxist regime. Oddly affectionate and forgiving of underdogs who fight back with their teeth, the fable expresses through whimsy a compassion for the disaffected, the pariahs whom critic Peter Ackroyd calls “unsynchronized”

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(Ackroyd, 1980). The theme of alienation and misdirection proved prophetic of Carey’s entire canon, particularly “Exotic Pleasures” (1979).

TEASING LAYERS The graphic surrealism of “Peeling,” first published in Meanjin in 1972, comments on the writing process. The text reveals the influence of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges on Carey’s creative vision and of a story he heard about a local woman who collected white dolls, a motif that recurs in Carey’s fourth novel, The Tax Inspector (1991). The narrative, which the author began during his first rush of creativity, examines fantasy as an undependable entertainment for the voyeur and an emblematic exploration of the colonial self. Poverty and unemployment generate a severe life change after the repossession of the protagonist’s television and the burnout of the battery in the transistor radio. The dual loss leaves him “timeless” (Carey, 1993, 36). For amusement, he lives in his head and secondguesses the personal and sexual nature of Nile, his upstairs neighbor, an assistant to an abortion provider. To balance the possibilities of the seduction, Carey reprises the images of unwashed milk bottles and drowning in milk as symbols of gloom and defeated motherhood and of blue, the standard color of the Virgin Mary’s cloak, as a sign of hope. His disrobing of Nile for sex goes beyond the oddments of her ragbag clothing to the stripping of her gender and the removal of her human appendages to reveal a shattered doll, a suggestion of the female psyche fragmented by a controlling, self-titillating male. Critics debate the labyrinthine potential for solving Carey’s character mystery. Is Nile a woman stripped of substance by male exploitation? Is she reality itself emerging from shabby, externally imposed myth, like the Nile River overflowing its banks to purify and nourish Egypt? Is she Australia, the colony that England wrapped in odds and ends of social disorder to choke a fragile ecosystem? A feminist reading lauds Nile for escaping passivity by thwarting her seducer’s orderly plan for imposing a selfish sexual dalliance. Like the painting of Salvador Dali, the flexibility of Carey’s symbolism achieves the goal of reading, to open the reader’s mind to multiple views of one scenario, a motif he returns to in the masking of the title character as Bruder Mouse in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994).

THE ARTIST’S AUDIENCE Influenced by the style of Donald Barthelme’s compact, epiphanic short fiction, “The Last Days of a Famous Mime” (1979), first published in Stand, dramatizes through staged tableaux the artist’s extreme actions to inform an audience about fear. Replicating in brief segments the wordless job of mimesis found in “American Dreams,” the narrative illustrates the Aristotelian reverence for drama as a release from pity and fear, a catharsis that connects stage plays with the worship of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, joy, abundance, and fertility. Carey suggests an intercessory element in the mime’s art by describing his dedication to prayer. With the sincerity of Carla in “The Chance” (1977) and the naiveté of the title altruists in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), the mime seeks to be useful to society, another theme reprised in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by circus owner Peggy Kram, a fanatic builder of theme parks in the decaying environs of Saarlim City. Already lionized in print and film by sophisticated observers, the mime incurs rejection in a provincial town, an unschooled backwash where his critics have no background in interpretation. Like the Athenians who poisoned Socrates with hemlock juice, the community infects the mime with a lethal diffidence.

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Oppositions emerge as a result of the mime’s performances. When he romances women, he nets hostility and belittling. In a two-hour stage imitation of love, regret, loneliness, and dread, he arouses in his observers a demand for terror, the emotional extreme he avoids. Carey’s irony mocks viewers, who “fled their seats continually. Only to return” (Carey 1993, 50). His handlers exploit his legend by marketing brown paper parcels at the stage door, a barren commercial gesture that returns his thoughts to prayer and the absurdity of tourists purchasing Muslim devotional rugs as souvenirs. Public vapidity, the cause of the mime’s fatigue and doubt, and his sacrifice of segmented string to the toilet re-enact Christ suffering in Gethsemane, when his disciples fall asleep during his fearful devotions. A foreshadowing of the mime’s self-sacrifice in a river, the water image implies the tidal wave of public misunderstanding that swamps him. In Carey’s terms, the artist destroys himself “because of his inability to take the right steps to achieving his aim” (Nielsen, 1981, 192). Like a bobble-headed pet in a car window, he gives more of himself in interviews and accepts impossible tasks, beginning with flying and ending with drowning. A pseudo–Christ figure who lacks the ability to walk the Sea of Galilee, the mime selfdestructs at the whim of the public who once made him great. Carey creates the sacrificial scene as a bleak commentary on the public rejection of the artist who offers compassion to the undeserving.

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS? Situated west of Yallamby in northeastern Melbourne, “A Windmill in the West” focuses on the disorientation of an American soldier, one of Australia’s desert colonizers. The short story, published in Meanjin in 1972, prefigures a more thorough diatribe against sloppy militarism and the sinister plotting of Gabe Manzini, an imperial spy in Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994). Meticulously detailed, the shorter narrative captures the estrangement of an alien sentry, an outsider as isolated from society and reason as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe. The situation calls to mind the rhetorical question from the Roman poet Juvenal’s sixth satire, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who watches the watchers themselves?, ca. A.D. 100). For sanity, the guard clings to army regulations as a substitute for personal direction. He stands at an uneven cross mark that divides Australian east from American west, a demarcation attesting to the island nation’s disdain for Westernism and its choice of Asia as a pole star. The unidentified locale — an allusion to Pine Gap base at Alice Springs and to a weapons test ground in the Great Sandy Desert — imposes a brain-numbing ennui. As the watchman over a sterile terrain divided by an arbitrary border, the protagonist struggles to maintain order in an empty landscape where scorpions pose his most pressing threat and a windmill mocks the symmetry of the terrain. As in “The Fat Man in History,” the theme of identity within a perplexing clash of sovereignties gnaws at an enlisted man whose daily task requires total obedience to a geographic separation of unseen, unknowable powers. His geometric musings question the outer ends of the fence he guards and the shape of the enclosed territory, whether rectangular or circular. Teasing him with its fickle clatter, the distant windmill, its arms a parody of the intersection of a road with the fence, gyrates at the whim of nature. His dreams spin out like unraveled webbing, a symbol of his emotional anomie. Depersonalized by his senseless posting on a barren frontier, he buries a downed plane, a strenuous chore he accomplishes while wearing full military dress. His floundering psyche represents the danger of situating uninformed soldiers in a tedious no-man’s-land devoid of moral direc-

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tion. More to the point, Carey’s story, like Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Man He Killed” (1917), reduces an international face-off to the basics of war — one soldier who kills a pilot after a meaningless waving of hands. The one-on-one shootout retreats to Homeric simplicity the nature of global hostilities and the price exacted from individual warriors who must kill or be killed.

DUTY VS. LOGIC In a similar dead-end for the peon, “Life & Death in the South Side Pavilion” sets a drama in a deceptively unconfining building that is open on all four sides, a paradox of implied personal autonomy. The narrative dramatizes the plight of a Shepherd 3rd Class, a twin of the windmill watcher. Critic Karen Lamb concluded that the story provided “a false ritual comfort in the midst of ... bizarre and escalating tyranny” (Lamb 1992, 23). Lacking specifics of time, place, and motivation, the cautionary tale alerts the reader to the hazards of a life-or-death dilemma. Driven by a life urge to romance his girlfriend Marie, the shepherd finds himself inhibited by his obligation to dumb animals, the horses that tend to stray into a pool and drown. The management, by ignoring the shepherd’s pleas for help, thrusts him daily into a guilt-generating despair that causes him to dream of retreat to the seashore. Unlike the deadly pool, a man-made trap, the beach offers entrance and exit into a relaxing milieu that he needs to rejuvenate his spirit. A factor that links “A Windmill in the West” and “Concerning the Greek Tyrant” with “Life & Death in the South Side Pavilion” is Carey’s recurrent image of the impassable boundary imposed by a faceless authority. Despite the openness of the pavilion, the placement of a pool presents a constant hazard to innocent animals. Like the border guard, the shepherd respects his employer, yet questions repeated refusals to halt the cycle of drowning horses. Guilt emasculates the shepherd, forcing him to choose normal manhood over blind obedience to a senseless and futile duty. Carey stresses the brutality of “The Company” by dramatizing the delivery truck driver’s veiled threat to the television, which the shepherd does not own, and an examination of travel brochures, which the driver confiscates. Loss of amusement and dreams of travel, like the loss of Marie, menace the shepherd with an even greater dehumanization of his untenable position as Shepherd 3rd Class.

CONFRONTING ILLUSION A semi-autobiographical glimpse of the Carey family, “American Dreams,” published in Nation Review in 1974, makes a Lilliputian survey of small-town Australia. Its seductive illusions of happiness gained from American affluence reflects the author’s memories of Bacchus Marsh: “I just started to flesh it out” from memories of boyhood (Munro, 1976, 8). Set between 1953 and 1964, the fable takes place near Mason’s Lane, a hamlet north of Bacchus Marsh, and Bald Hill, a landmark further north of town. The speaker reflects on an elegiac shift in perspective that coincides with his teen years and a comingto-knowledge about his small-town identity. To enhance a rural atmosphere, he emulates life in Djakarta by having citizens riding bicycles, but yearning for car ownership. Just as the youth is deluded about the stability of his home, Australians nurture false concepts of America through their viewing of Hollywoodized depictions, a subject he expands with circus imagery in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. As Carey asserts in Illywhacker (1985), his second published novel, “People were more easily persuaded to a foreign [American] product than a local one” (Carey, 1985, 61).

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In the style of Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1879), the fable exposes the self-destructive side of greed. Purchased by Gleason, the town hermit, Bald Hill, a name suggesting a barren expanse, rivets local attention like a beacon. Gleason teases citizens during the construction of a ten-foot brick wall by Chinese laborers, a droll miniaturization of the Great Wall of China and a foreshadowing of the matchbox art of Vanessa Kellow in The Big Bazoohley (1995). In a bit of reverse psychology, Gleason exploits local curiosity by backing the gate with a baffle and by topping the wall with broken glass and barbed wire. Carey supplies clues to the ambiguous construction in the surname of the builder, which implies a sardonic jokester, and in the surname “Dyer,” which suggests a life in death for the citizens whom Gleason exposes in a scale model of the town and its vices. At the heart of the conflict, stasis, a crippling image of the past, frames tourist expectations of Australian life much as Pompeii and Herculaneum epitomize the Roman Empire during a disaster on August 24, A.D. 79. In exchange for Yankee dollars, the citizenry attempts to dramatize the realism of Gleason’s hobby town, which flourishes under what critic Tony Thwaites later describes as “the gaze of tourism” (Thwaites, 1987, 408). Critic John Sutherland, a reviewer for TLS, describes the model as “a kind of Australian Disneyland for American tourists” (Sutherland, 1976, 445). Over four years of playacting for visitors, locals recognize that, in posing like museum exhibits, they jeopardize liberty and abandon freedom of expression. Like the figures in John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), they become flash-frozen in time and place much as Jamestown and Williamsburg, Virginia, reflect the American colonial era and Old Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Tombstone, Arizona, capture the atmosphere of the Old West. While grubbing for dollars to buy big American cars and television sets, townspeople lose respect for themselves and their environs. Mrs. Cavanagh’s adultery with Craigie Evans epitomizes the town’s profiteering, a whoring for dollars that shrinks residents to the petty snoops of Gleason’s scale model city.

ANTIQUE WISDOM Carey followed the classic genre parameters for parable in “Report on the Shadow Industry” (1974), a commentary on the writing process and an analysis of the malcontent generated by seductive marketing. With the logic of Plato’s cave myth, a popular excerpt from Book VII of the Republic (ca. 380 B.C.), the story depicts the search of the deluded for the ultimate in diversion, a subject that dominates Carey’s fifth novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. A realistic survey of the shopaholic perusing stores for the latest in amusement, the plot focuses on one narrator’s family, whom disappointment shatters. Like the predictions of the Pythia, the Greek oracle in ancient Delphi, the father responds to disenchantment with a trivial gift. The narrative teases the reader with the cryptic note explaining that the father must leave without expressing his disillusion with the shadows in the gift box. In a poor part of Topanga, home of an art colony west of Los Angeles, California, the mother, eager to receive a Christmas gift, conceals her dissatisfaction with shadows by kissing the giver. Purposely, she deflects their conversation to a lottery winner, a symbol of “one of our own” who eludes daily thwarting through chance. A personal confession of dismay reveals the speaker’s secret pursuit of materialistic fulfillment, a theme that Carey scrutinizes in the envious townspeople in “American Dreams” (1974) and the carnivalesque atmosphere of “Exotic Pleasures” (1979). While pretending to be above the lure of commercial enchantments offered by 24-hour service at discount stores and the psychological lull of Muzak, he puzzles over the production of

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shadows at factories obscured from public view, a suggestion of mysterious evils. Among superior friends, admission of delight in shadow boxes constitutes a lowering of status. The speaker gives a one-sentence hint at his affair with a clever woman named J. and his frustrated hope for a gratifying sexual alliance. The story risks a full revelation of theme in the inscrutable conclusion, a suggestion that the author, like T. S. Eliot in “The Hollow Men” (1925), deems life’s profound longings inaccessible to the human species. Like Eden before Adam and Earth after the end-time, joy exists in the absence of humanity.

PSYCHIC SHAPESHIFTING “Crabs,” an anarchic fantasy and one of Carey’s earliest stories, represents the author’s mounting pessimism, which reached fruition with the character of Benny Catchprice in The Tax Inspector (1991). “Crabs” creates a metaphor of the untried Australian venturing out of the British commonwealth and away from American values. First published in Overland in spring 1972, the narrative pictures the rapid transformation of urban society into a squalid refugee camp ostensibly devised to demobilize and control delinquent youth. While a 118-pound mechanic nicknamed Crabs advances from puberty to manhood, he becomes obsessed with legitimizing himself as a rugged, liberated male. The Bildungsroman ridicules his rigid standards for maturity and self-respect based on mythic Hollywoodized heroism. Beginning with dreams of muscularity and prowess, the laboring-class youth longs to drive a Ford V8 tow truck for Allied Panel and Towing, an ideal that “allies” hardihood with virility. To an undersized male once bullied outside the principal’s window and humiliated by having to drive a Morris Mini, relationships with revved-up American technology offer mastery as well as safety from victimization. Left immobile at the Star Drive-in Theatre after Karboys steal two wheels from his borrowed 1956 Dodge, he suffers a double threat — the diminution of his imagined machismo and a real possibility of bodily injury by the car’s owner, Frank, Crabs’s ego criterion. The caging prefigures similar images of incarceration in Illywhacker (1985) and The Tax Inspector (1991), which Carey set in a fenced-in car lot. Composed after Anthony Burgess’s dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange (1962) appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s screen adaptation in 1971, the allegory took shape intuitively in one of Carey’s “what if ” odysseys, a concept that informed his first children’s book, The Big Bazoohley (1995). The narrative departs from Burgess’s study of violence to a perusal of teen complacency. Amid grotesque cadavers of the masculine muscle car, Crabs’s generation, particularly his girlfriend Carmen, acquiesces to promiscuous sex, junk food, powerful cars, and vapid entertainment. In a reversal of Karel Capek’s cyborg longings in R. U. R. (1921), Crabs, the ambitious dreamer, chooses an outré means of escaping the labyrinth — transmogrification or shapeshifting into a vehicle. The author commented to interviewer Craig Munro how the scarcity of autos and car parts intensified the story’s significance: “It’s less of a jump now to seeing it actually happening, when people are going to be prepared to kill to keep their cars running” (Munro, 1976, 5). The imprisoning roleplaying enables Crabs to flee confinement, but self-reconfiguration thrusts him into a landscape stripped of vehicular transportation. Immured in a Doppelgänger nightmare more fearful than being tied to a fence by shoelaces and kicked in the arse, the mechanized alter ego turns him into a hopeless outsider. To his horror, electrified fences lock him out of the only reality that remains. In the author’s summation, Crabs “spends all his time escaping from something which he finds unsatisfactory only to realize finally that what he’s trying to escape from is the world” (Munro, 1976, 8).

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BORDER ANXIETY Bearing a door designation from a room Carey saw in Portugal during a visit to Iberia, “Room No. 5 (Escribo),” the first work he attempted after returning from London to Australia, echoes the menace of a Spanish-speaking country under martial law. The era suggests the tyranny of Generalissimo Francisco Franco during the late 1960s, when he headed an authoritarian regime that suppressed Basque, Catalan, and Galician dialects. Assuring civil control were his military police, the Guardia Civil (national guard) and the Policia Armada (armed police), a type Carey excoriates more thoroughly in Theft: A Love Story (2006). Like Crabs, the unnamed insurance agent battles an odd collection of threats, notably truckloads of soldiers, closed borders superintended by Captain Jorge, and an unknown dialect spoken by the protagonist’s short-term lover. Because of the tedious I–thou exchange between speaker and lover, the story is one of Carey’s least accessible narratives. A masterwork of dramatic tension, it turns into suspense the woman’s inexplicable smile and uncertain translations of conversations with bankers and border patrols, all conventions of spy thriller novels and films of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), and Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal (1971). The mounting paranoia leaves open to suspicion the relationship of protagonist and lover and her anticipation of a transfer of funds from Zurich, which will pay their way out of the country. Central to the story are repeated forebodings cloaked in laughter and questionable gestures of good will. During a fractious state of the economy, the insurance agent communicates his peril to the head office in an unmailed letter that might be confiscated and misinterpreted. While he and his lover wait out a dangerous period in which strongman Timoshenko teeters on the edge of death, the couple’s escapes into lovemaking and afternoon snacks on yogurt are lame antidotes to free-floating terror. The image of a chicken tethered to a hat stand near a machine gun mirrors the uncertainty of outsiders trapped by a militant milieu. Carey eases the tension with a postscript that pictures the couple at Candalido, literally “white beach,” a respite free of the dark terrors the pair has endured.

MARITAL AMITY VS. CARNALITY In a more upbeat vein than “Crabs,” “Happy Story” presents a Hemingwayesque conversation between mates arguing over the husband’s yen to fly. Carey got the idea for the narrative from something he saw on television and from a good mood when he “just felt nice and optimistic about things” (Munro, 1976, 8). In rapid exchange, the duo express their differences about his discontent and her suppression of his interest in birds and flying. His flying machine forces the issue of an interest they are unable to share. Her acquiescence to flying requires accommodation for the dog. In the final stave, he allows her to make the first choice of destination. The selection of Florence (literally “flowering”) sets an optimistic tone for a shared adventure. To Craig Munro, an interviewer for Makar, Carey described the narrative as a “celebration of dreaming, an escape story” (ibid., 9). Diametric to the tone and atmosphere of “Happy Story,” the carnal relationship in “She Wakes,” his first published short fiction, which appeared in Australian Letters in 1967, dramatizes the opposite of contented mating based on mutual respect. The unidentified lovers, after their weekly Friday night sleepover, part in contrasting moods. Unlike the couple in “Happy Story,” the lovers magnify a faulty basis for intimacy. The man, grinning at glimpses of her breasts and belly, completes a satisfying episode in his exploita-

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tion of a willing bedmate. The woman, fearing the ridicule and warning of other residents, gradually loses her hold on sexual gratification as the reality of her situation grips her for another six days. To Carey, the likelihood of tears epitomizes her emotional awakening to short-changing by a one-response male. See also Collected Stories; War Crimes

• Further readings Ackroyd, Peter. “Review: The Fat Man in History,” Sunday Times (19 October 1980). Aizenberg, Edna. Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Callahan, David. Contemporary Issues in Australian Literature: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2002. Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. _____. The Fat Man in History. New York: Vintage, 1993. _____. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. Dunlop, Nicholas. “Cartographic Conspiracies: Maps, Misinformation, and Exploitation in Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams,’” Antipodes (1 June 2008). Faulkner, William. “The Bear” in The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Penguin, 1977. Hawker, Phillipa. “Dead-End Drive-in,” The Age (15 January 2009). Knight, John. “Noted in Passing,” Social Alternatives 18, no. 3 (July 1999): 82. Lamb, Karen. Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992. Morton-Evans, Michael. “Carey Reaches a Blissful Peak in His Literary Career,” The Australian (26 July 1984): 8. Müller-Zettelmann, Eva, and Margarete Rubik. Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Munro, Craig. “Building the Fabulist Extensions: An Interview with Peter Carey,” Makar 12, no. 1 (1976): 3 –12. Neilsen, Philip. “Authors’ Statements,” Australian Literary Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 191 –193. Pana, Irina Grigorescu. “The Tomis Complex: Versions of Exile in Australian Literature,” World Literature Today 67 (1993): 523 –532. Perrona, Lorenzo. “The Spectral Belongings of Mudrooroo” in The Pain of Unbelonging, ed. Sheila Collingwood-Whittick and Germaine Greer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Pons, Xavier. “Weird Tales: Peter Carey’s Short Stories” in Telling Stories, ed. Jacqueline Bardolph and JeanPierre Durix. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Ross, Bruce Clunies. “Some Developments in Short Fiction 1969 –1980,” Australian Literary Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 165 –180. Sutherland, John. “Division Street,” TLS (9 April 1976): 445. Tate, Trudi. “Unraveling the Feminine: Peter Carey’s ‘Peeling,’” Meanjin 46, no. 3 (1987): 394 –399. Thwaites, Tony. “More Tramps at Home,” Meanjin 46, no. 3 (September 1987): 400 –409. Turner, Graeme. “American Dreaming: The Fictions of Peter Carey,” Australian Literary Studies 12 (1986): 431 –441. Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996.

female persona Carey tends to shape tough, self-sustaining women who tolerate and, at times, supercede the idiocies and machinations of men. In the words of Nicholas Hasluck, a critic for Quadrant, the matchup derives from compliance with political correctness: “The female characters are always strong and creative, the men are generally weak and evasive, crossdressing and androgynous sexual identity is okay ... [and] people on the margin are kinder and truer than those in the centre” (Hasluck, 1994,103). The categories of Carey’s enduring womenfolk cover the spectrum of types: Female Stereotypes Name Anna

work “He Found Her in Late Summer”

type(s) nurturer

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work

type(s)

Bettina “Betty” Joy Caitlin Carla Carmen Cathy McPherson Daphne Dial Xenos Dominique Leibovitz Elizabeth Fisher Elizabeth Warriner Ellen Quinn Kelly Emma Badgery employee Fanny Drabble Felicity Smith Frieda Catchprice Gia Katalanis Grandma Selkirk Henny d’Abbs Honey Barbara Jacqui Lorraine Kelly daughter Kumbaingiri Billy’s aunt Leah Goldstein Lilly Danko lover Lucinda Leplastrier Lucy Joy Lucy Millar Maria McClusky Maria Takis Maria’s mother Marie

Bliss True History of the Kelly Gang “The Chance” “Crabs” The Tax Inspector “Withdrawal” His Illegal Self Theft: A Love Story Oscar and Lucinda Jack Maggs True History of the Kelly Gang Illywhacker “The Uses of Williamson Wood” Oscar and Lucinda The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith The Tax Inspector The Tax Inspector His Illegal Self Oscar and Lucinda Bliss The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith True History of the Kelly Gang Oscar and Lucinda Illywhacker “Exotic Pleasures” “She Wakes” Oscar and Lucinda Bliss Oscar and Lucinda The Tax Inspector The Tax Inspector The Tax Inspector “Life & Death in the South Side Pavilion” Theft: A Love Story True History of the Kelly Gang Jack Maggs Jack Maggs Oscar and Lucinda Jack Maggs Oscar and Lucinda Illywhacker “American Dreams” “American Dreams” My Life as a Fake Oscar and Lucinda Oscar and Lucinda Oscar and Lucinda The Big Bazoohley The Big Bazoohley “The Fat Man in History” The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith “Peeling” My Life as a Fake

siren, betrayer flirt trickster, martyr siren, sybarite dreamer, scold user, destroyer nurturer, intellectual thief, user entrepreneur siren, dupe nurturer, manipulator user, madwoman dupe, avenger drudge, nurturer nurturer, entrepreneur enabler, dreamer bureaucrat, dupe defender, protector drudge, handmaiden siren, nurturer user, spy innocent drudge, sex slave nurturer, savant entrepreneur, dupe dupe entrepreneur siren drudge dreamer, widow bureaucrat, nurturer drudge siren

Marlene Leibovitz Mary Hearn Ma Mary Britten Mary Oates Melody Clutterbuck Mercy Larkin Miriam Chadwick Molly McGrath Mrs. Cavanagh Mrs. Gleason Mrs. Lim Mrs. Trevis Mrs. Smith Mrs. Williams Muriel Mifflin Nancy Nancy Bowlby Natalie Theroux Nile Noussette Markson

siren, felon, murderer nurturer, mate destroyer, user nurturer, dupe snob advocate, nurturer widow, siren madwoman, widow siren supporter, widow widow, warrior, nurturer scold drudge, scold drudge, nurturer madwoman dreamer entrepreneur, siren madwoman siren, dupe artist, siren

95 Peggy Kram

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Phoebe McGrath Rebecca Rene Lorraine Rose Kaletsky Roxanna Wonder Wilkinson Sarah Wode-Douglass

Illywhacker His Illegal Self The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Illywhacker The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith My Life as a Fake

Sonia Badgery Susan Selkirk Takashi’s grandmother Tina Vanessa Kellow wife Yoko Miyagi Yuka

Illywhacker His Illegal Self Wrong about Japan My Life as a Fake The Big Bazoohley “Happy Story” Wrong about Japan Wrong about Japan

female socialite, madwoman, entrepreneur siren, user hippie, enforcer nurturer, widow nurturer siren, nurturer, madwoman entrepreneur, aesthete, madwoman naif radical, socialite nurturer victim, bargainer nurturer, artist mate, advocate facilitator transvestite

The listing of women by character pattern does not deflect from the uniqueness of each or from their range of talents. For example, both Mary Hearn and Ellen Quinn Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) derive from rebellious Irish Catholic stock. Whereas Mary narrates for Edward “Ned” Kelly, her common-law husband, the secretive, violent behaviors of cross-dressing Irish rebels, Ellen Quinn Kelly incorporates in her own dealings with Protestant Celto-Australian police a guile derived from her faith in Old Country values. Like the conservative Grandma Selkirk in His Illegal Self (2008), Ellen intends to rear her family within the social and political code she adopted in childhood, even if she must prostitute herself to keep them fed. Both Mary and Ellen contribute to the strategies and choices that shape Ned’s lawlessness. From Mary, Ned gains the political sophistication to understand his father’s transvestism and to accept that the same behavior in Ned’s younger brother Dan in no way diminishes Dan’s manhood. From Ellen, Ned acquires a respect for the male head of household, a position he tries to maintain during frequent absences by protecting Ned from criminal complicity with a gang and by keeping the peace in the Eleven Mile Creek household, where Ellen acquires mates by whim and circumstance. The stature of both women in Ned’s final days influences his actions and outlook on death at age 26: he composes for Mary’s baby girl a rationalization of criminal acts, including robbery, horse stealing, and murder. For Ellen, he surrenders his liberty and life on a last-ditch effort to free her from Melbourne Gaol and to reunite her with his baby sister Alice. It is Mary who enlightens him to the futility of his mission: “They won’t never let her free Ned you must accept that no matter how you love her” (Carey, 2000, 321). Thus, Ned’s martyrdom validates the Irish concept of womanhood and motherhood, the sturdy center of the nuclear family. See also feminism; marriage; mothering; women

• Further readings Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Hasluck, Nicholas. “Joining the Sirkus,” Quadrant 39, no. 1-2 (January/February 1994): 102–104.

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feminism In his casts of heroes and villains, Peter Carey promotes the roles of self-assertive women. The first models appear in his short stories, including the trickster Carla in “The Chance”; Nancy Bowlby, author of “Revolution in a Closed Society — A Study of Leadership among the Fat” and the sex interest and symbol of authority in “The Fat Man in History”; and the vengeful employee in “The Uses of Williamson Wood” (1974). His first two novels, Bliss (1981) and Illywhacker (1985), feature the ad designer Bettina “Betty” McPhee Joy, prostitute Honey Barbara, actor Leah Goldstein, and rebellious wife Phoebe McGrath Badgery as shapers of their own destiny. In Bliss, Betty escapes from an atmosphere of “selfhatred and the feeling that you might die from lack of air” (Carey, 1981, 239). In self-rescue, she not only wrests a career out of her husband’s domain, a profession indicated by her maiden name McPhee, but she also rears Lucy Joy, their Marxist daughter, to carve for herself a unique niche. By age 15, Lucy is “rational, sensible and, of all of [the family], the least given to hysteria,” Carey’s generous salute to an individualist in the making (ibid., 57). Similarly self-governed, Phoebe, the 18-year-old seductress in Illywhacker, matches the chutzpah of protagonist Herbert Peter Badgery, a pilot and would-be entrepreneur. In their rooftop tryst, he goggles at her naked form poised for the taking: “She was like no woman I have ever known. Please note: I said woman, not girl” (Carey, 1985, 91). The death knell of their three-year marriage, Phoebe’s self-expression in verse empowers more fully than wifedom or motherhood. She exults, “There is nothing else in my life that brings the prospect of so much pleasure,” a satisfaction shared by Vanessa Kellow, the matchbox artist in The Big Bazoohley (1995) and Sarah Elizabeth Wode-Douglass, the journal editor in My Life as a Fake (2003) (ibid., 190). Phoebe’s flight from Herbert and their two children in 1923 suits the tenor of first-wave feminism, the post-suffrage fervor of women to explore other avenues than domesticity or the bootlegging and sexual enslavement by which Ellen Quinn Kelly feeds her family in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). For Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Carey depicts feminist spirit in Elizabeth Fisher LePlastrier, a champion of the Industrial Revolution. In viewing mechanization as a boon to women, she foresees the liberation of women through the acquisition of financial power. In place of male-dominated factories, she envisions “nurseries incorporated in their structure, and staffed kitchen, fired by factory furnaces, that would bake the family dinners the women carried there each morning” (Carey, 1988, 70). With manufacturing at the social hub, she pictures radii carrying nurturing to the nuclear family. Carey raises a contrast between Elizabeth and the Irish women — Mrs. Kenneally, the O’Hagens, the MacCorkals— who comfort the new widow. To Elizabeth, the subservient Irishwomen walk behind their husbands “with their heads bowed like prisoners of war,” an image underwritten with implications of violent bride capture (Carey, 1988, 72). Her determination to rescue New South Wales from the backward Irish infuses her enthusiasm for farming her legacy, Mitchell’s Run, outside Parramatta. After 16 years of toil, she confides in a letter to novelist Marian Evans that locals are “venal, materialistic, corrupt, and, when not corrupt, plain damn stupid” (Carey, 1988, 73). Like Betty McPhee Joy, Elizabeth rears an addition to the next generation of stoutsouled women. While bringing up her willful daughter Lucinda to value work and profit, Elizabeth sets a goal of personal and financial liberation, an aim shared with Honey Barbara, the hippie prostitute and beekeeper in Bliss (1981), and Maria Takis, the pregnant tax auditor in The Tax Inspector (1991). Although solitude and a fear of money unsettles

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18-year-old Lucinda after her mother’s death, she maintains, “She would need the money to have any sort of freedom” (Carey, 1988, 107). She enrobes herself in wealth, which becomes “her cloak, her armour” as well as the beginning of her best friend’s downfall (Carey, 1988, 139). Before Lucinda’s meeting with the Reverend Dennis Hasset, a cultured parish minister in Sydney, Carey reveals a truism about the repressive company of males. Females behave like vapid arm decorations when paired with their mates, “But alone, or with their own sex, they revealed themselves as scientists when it came to the vectors of the human heart” (Carey, 1988, 115). The statement prefigures the presentation of Lucinda’s entrepreneurial ambitions, which she displays with “great pluck” (ibid., 117). However, she admits to the vicar the need to disguise her gender because, in dealing with a businesswoman, men “will act strange” by patronizing her (ibid., 118). She describes the change in men toward a lone woman as a type of voodoo, a folk superstition caused by men who lose aplomb when dealing on an equal basis with a female entrepreneur. By age 22, she strides down a Southampton wharf ensconced in a strength she describes as “power ... primed by money” (Carey, 1988, 169). In her imagination, she rebukes people who stereotype manufacturers as men who “have side-whiskers and smoke cigars” (Crey, 1988, 191). Her credo serves her ends, but will not stretch to cover a female trumpet player from Her Majesty’s Theatre, whom the male glass blowers reject from factory work.

LUCINDA AT SEA Lucinda toys with female liberation by wagering on her inheritance, the source of her emancipation. Among seasoned gamblers on a train, she rattles dice in games of Dutch Hazards and Seventh Man with the racetrack frequenters until they oust her from male company; Mr. Paxton refuses to escort her to a cock fight, presumably out of respect for innocent womanhood. On the voyage aboard the sidewheeling steamer Leviathan from Southampton to New South Wales, she chafes at the social restraints that inhibit the interaction of genders and castes. Among stewards, cabin boys, ship’s officers, and three classes of passengers, she struggles hardest against the “silk rope between her ankles,” the invisible chastity belt that binds women to ladylike expectations (Carey, 1988, 209). Although rid of flounces and whalebone, she still feels “squeezed and blistered, pinched and hobbled” by gendered manners and customs (ibid.). In close contact with the patronizing Mr. Borrodaile, she suffers fifteen minutes of being escorted and handled, the kind of squiring well known to diminutive women trapped among taller, brawnier men seeking her comfort and protection. The source of passenger entertainment is a show of medusae, phosphorescent jellyfish that take their name from the snaky-haired gorgon of Greek mythology. Metaphorically, they remind Lucinda of the inner rage that prevents her from enjoying a display of the sea’s mysteries. True freedom comes in the form of moral choices. Lucinda opts to play poker with the Reverend Oscar Hopkins in the privacy of her first-class stateroom, a double no-no suggesting both monetary profligacy and carnal license. At the emancipation of Oscar from his clerical restraints, she envisions him as “all strapped down like Ulysses at the mast” (Carey, 1988, 222). The allusion refers to the twelfth book of Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 800 B.C.) in which the ship’s captain elects to hear the song of the sirens at the cost of terrible yearning and a struggle to escape and embrace them. The separation of Odysseus from enticing females prefigures the unconsummated love of Oscar for Lucinda, who inadvertently discourages his courtship. As though enjoying a polite cotillion, she salutes her fel-

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low card player “as another woman might have complimented her partner at a waltz” (ibid.).

LUCINDA IN SYDNEY The restraints of womanhood fail to deter Lucinda. Her mother warns her about the anti-feminist backlash: “They hate women like us with a passion you would not believe” (Carey, 1988, 91). However, Lucinda must acknowledge biological and social obstacles that decree she “not be loved, not be wife, not be mother” (Carey, 1988, 249). As a spinster in gendered society, she falls under the scrutiny of her solicitor and guardian, Charles “Chas” Ahearn; chief glass blower Arthur Phelps; even her maid, Mrs. Smith, all of whom adhere to strict rules of propriety for an unmarried woman. Upon purchasing the Prince Rupert’s Glassworks, she must kowtow to worker misogyny by remaining outside the workplace unless pre-announced. On her smart strut through the Chinese gambling den in southcentral Sydney near Darling Harbour at 9:30 P.M., she can’t deny that a rain-sodden oilskin cloak outlines her diminutive size. In her stride through the front room, she feels the “unmaleness” of her small footfalls (Carey, 1988, 247). During her wait for the announcement of lottery winners, she muses over a racial irony — that Chinese males who marry “fallen [white] women, beyond the pale” treat their mates lovingly (Carey, 1988, 248). Her own spinsterhood forces her mind to shut, however unwillingly, against the vision of a happy marriage. Lucinda’s assertiveness counters solitude by choosing gambling as a gender neutral endeavor. Among bettors, the rules are the same for male and female. A woman’s win does not require that she “giggle and simper” to conceal her venture into a man’s world (Carey, 1988, 227). After playing a successful lottery round, she progresses to fan-tan among drunk, foul-mouthed males who make “the missus” feel “her otherness, her womanness” (Carey, 1988, 251, 250). Armed with an empty purse and a hatpin, she retreats from male company at 3:00 A.M. and drives her carriage through the streets of Sydney. More upsetting to the social milieu, she rescues Oscar, now defrocked, from ignominy and poverty and restores him to health at her cottage on Longnose Pointe. Carey expands on the irony of Lucinda’s acceptance of a lone male in her life, a pairing that earns them snubs from the parish priest. Nonetheless, Lucinda rises in status by escaping spinsterhood for local suspicions that she is Oscar’s common-law wife, a social step up from old maid. Further evidence of social hypocrisy toward moral propriety is the arrival of Lucinda’s factory superintendent, Arthur Phelps, at her home on Sunday afternoon to invite Lucinda to visit the glass works. The invitation presumes that Lucinda, now in company with a “lord and master,” should accompany Oscar to her factory to “inspect his new territory” (Carey, 1988, 307). The promotion of Oscar to supervisor of Lucinda’s finances derives from the era’s diminution of unmarried women to the level of children or half-wits. Her unverbalized anger leaves Oscar to assume that she is “over-laced,” the Victorian version of pre-menstrual syndrome (ibid., 308). On retreat to her business office, she “felt humiliated and powerless, like a child dragged down the street by a large dog on a leash” (ibid., 315). It is over two months later before she finds the courage to rebuke James d’Abbs for failing to follow her directions in planning a glass chapel.

MALE TERRORISM Carey pictures rape threat as a trigger to feminist rage. In the falling action of The Tax Inspector (1991), the menace of a 16-year-old psychopath, Benny Catchprice, to tax

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auditor Maria Takis takes on the terrors of Minotaur in the maze as he presses her down stairs to a moldy basement lair. In semi-darkness, Maria faces external and internal pressures— a sawed-off shotgun in her face and the initial pangs of labor as her first child makes its way into daylight. After Benny grasps the newborn boy and dandles him in the air, Maria seizes the outrage of both a mother and a brutalized female and clobbers Benny with an iron bar. Her fury prefigures the instinctive self-protection of Vassar English professor Anna “Dial” Xenos, caregiver to seven-year-old Che David Selkirk in His Illegal Self (2008). She conceals from the boy the truth about his siring and the violent death of his birth mother, anarchist Susan Selkirk, in a bomb blast engineered by Students for a Democratic society. At Radcliffe at age 16, Susan concealed “a teenage pregnancy with fifties shame and shadows, linocut illustrations in a women’s magazine” that set her apart from the conservative values of her mother, Phoebe Selkirk (Carey, 2008, 129). Carey depicts sisterhood as a community effort. Dial’s defense of Susan extends to females in general and herself in particular. Within reach of Jean “John Rabbitoh” Rabiteau, an armed hippie at the Crystal Community outside Yandina, Queensland, Dial refuses to submit to rape and threatens her aggressor with a fallen branch. Carey speaks through the beleaguered woman her contempt for “some shit with a very nasty knife and a sense of sexual entitlement” (ibid., 84). See also female persona; Leplastrier, Lucinda; marriage; mothering; women

• Further readings Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. _____. His Illegal Self. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2008. _____. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. Ferrier, Carole. Gender, Politics and Fiction: 20th Century Australian Women’s Novels. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Neville, Jill. “Review: Bliss,” Sydney Morning Herald (10 October 1981).

food Carey makes judicious use of food preparation and eating, from Honey Barbara’s obsession about healthful meals in Bliss (1981), the spaghetti-eating test in The Big Bazoohley (1995), the pub menu in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001), and the spare table scraps of Irish immigrants in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) to the squid, miso soup, and sashimi that 12-year-old Charley Carey adapts to on a journey to Tokyo with his father in the fictional travelogue Wrong about Japan (2005). Sustenance is the driving force of the fable “The Fat Man in History” (1974), a tale of the ostracism of the obese as scapegoats for society’s failures. As a measure of their self-destructive bumbling, the characters— Fantoni, Finch, Glino, May, Milligan, and an unnamed man — plot an insurrection and celebrate their ineffective revolt by roasting and devouring their leader, Fantoni. Similarly self-devouring, the punk businessmen in “War Crimes” (1978) connive to profit on society’s misery by selling low-quality TV dinners to the unemployed. While operating a revolting factory and polluting a river with dumpings from the plant freezer, the accountant and the advertiser pollute themselves with expensive wine and cocaine. Bart, who addicts himself to Dionysian fare, destroys his brain, the center of logic that drives the corporation to successful profiteering. Carey’s satire on managerial malfeasance chooses the food industry as a model of profligacy. By feeding the jobless on junk meals, the duo walls itself into its fortress-factory. The only escape from advancing armies of

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unemployed is through flamethrowers that burn the bodies that the corporation relies on for commerce. Like the fat men who devour their leader in a backyard barbecue, the entrepreneurs defeat their ambitions by feeding like piranhas off the misery of others. A symbolic force in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), meals energize scenes with personal and religious significance. Lucinda Leplastrier’s relationship with the defrocked Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins develops over social draughts of liquids—cups of tea and restorative ships of sherry. At the crowning moment of their misalliance, she strides from Sussex Street to York Street to the Oriental Hotel. In the dining room, she concludes that she can accept Oscar as a husband “and still be captain of her soul,” an anachronistic reference to the conclusion of William Ernest Henley’s poetic manifesto, “Invictus” (1875) (Carey, 1988, 393). The couple thrash out their murky friendship/courtship over consommé and flounder, dishes imbued with elements of their meeting at sea and the terror of water that twists Oscar into a quivering phobic. The meal, simple and direct in its ingredients and preparation, also predicts Oscar’s arrival on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, by paired lighters up the Bellinger River to Boat Harbour and his subsequent drowning when one lighter takes on water and capsizes.

TWO TYPES OF HUNGER The theme of emotional and physical sustenance in His Illegal Self (2008) stresses makeshift meals and surrogate love, like the chocolate bar that Anna “Dial” Xenos feeds seven-year-old Che David Selkirk on the bus ride to Philly. As Che’s horizons shrink from privileged Manhattanite, he accepts his new identity as “trailer trash” and helps James “Adam” Adamek, a backward Queensland drop-out, harvest vegetables from an overgrown patch four miles out of Yandina at the Crystal Community (Carey, 2008, 114). In good times, the boy climbs trees in the banana groves. He and Dial eat rice and lentils, the vegetarian fare of hippies; wild cherry tomatoes “burst inside their mouths, hot and wet, like vegetables from outer space” in brief sparks of happiness (ibid., 141). Like the subsistence meals in Theft: A Love Story (2006), Che smells a country meal of roasted eggplant, onion, pumpkin, and “spuds” that raises no hope of quelling “a secret buzzing anger quiet inside him, a vibration in his chest that got bigger all the time” (ibid., 115). As though miming the police search for Che and for the dissidents of Students for a Democratic Society who conceal him, Carey pictures the boy’s cat Buck returning from the hunt with a pitta bird in his mouth, a meal that robs the earth of beauty rather than nourishment. At the outback hideout of Trevor Dobbs, Che learns about mulching with waterweed to hold rain around the roots of cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, chard, and beans. The grueling job of “loading black hairy matter onto a sled and dragging it along a path” exhibits the hard truth of the “tune-in, drop-out” society and its daily subsistence from farming, gathering from the wild, and orchardry. Waves of awareness sweep over Dial, who keeps vigil over the child and realizes that “all small forms of life in their wiggling squirming resistance, were like the boy, even the frog that Buck catches and torments” (ibid., 152). Her maternal feelings boil over when she spies Che talking with Trevor while they devour a dripping slab of watermelon, a symbolic heart of man-to-boy affection enlarged by Trevor’s gifts of eggplant, melon, papaya, and pumpkin, from which Dial extracts the basics of a ratatouille. In contrast to Dial’s culinary skills, Trevor, like an Aussie outbacker, eats snacks and a pickup meal of bread, cantaloupe, olives, mangoes, and melon. In a conciliatory gesture after harsh words with Dial, he makes an omelet from eggs, spring onions, and tomatoes. As the ad hoc family gains oneness from trips to the beach, they spend their

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afternoons eating bananas and avocados and their nights searching for sellers of pearl perch and red snapper. An indication of Dial’s acceptance of the hippie life is the start of her own garden and the planting of beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, onions, parsley, peas, rocket, radishes, and spinach. From the hospitable hippies, they receive a suitably sweet acceptance gift, buttered bread coated with honey, a symbol of atonement for the colony’s rejection of its newest members. See also mothering

• Further readings Carey, Peter. His Illegal Self. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2008. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Neville, Jill. “Review: Bliss,” Sydney Morning Herald (10 October 1981). Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Gothic Peter Carey revives English Gothic with a fresh, postmodern style and touches of drollery. With the panache of neo–Gothicists Angela Carter, Michel Faber, and Ariana Franklin, Carey also dreams up exotic appearances— Anna’s shapeshifting in “He Found Her in Late Summer” (1979), the ratty mouse suit through which Tristan Smith seduces theme park investor Peggy Kram in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), the girlish velvet suit and gelled curls that Sam Kellow sports during the spaghetti food fight in The Big Bazoohley (1995), and the walking armor that approaches police lines from the Kelly gang’s lair in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Flesh-eating expresses the ineptitude of the underclass in the fable “The Fat Man in History” (1974), a grotesque social revolt of six disgruntled men against a post–Marxist regime. Although they consider eating a statue dedicated to a despot, they alter their plans by converging on Nancy Bowlby, the rent collector, author of “Revolution in a Closed Society — A Study of Leadership among the Fat,” and half-hearted supporter who represents bureaucratic authority. Their scheme shifts to a self-defeating roasting of their leader Fantoni in a backyard barbecue pit. The nausea and despair that follows cannibalism attests to the recriminations that dog the survivors, icons of bumblers who turn on one of their own. The purpose of Carey’s Gothicism is cautionary. According to an interview in 1985, he believes that evil phantasms exist beyond the borders of fiction: “As long as we think there are no monsters within us, we’re in deep and dangerous trouble” (Summers, 1985, 33). The dissolution of Nile in “Peeling” (1972), the cannibalizing of cars by street thugs in “Crabs” (1974) and The Tax Inspector (1991), the self-immolation of Bettina “Betty” Joy in Bliss (1981) as a death gesture against pollution by the Mobil Research Department, and an autistic man’s fondling of the corpse of a drowned puppy in Theft: A Love Story (2006) illustrate Carey’s deft twists of the ordinary into the bizarre. A more horrifying scenario, “War Crimes” (1978), the cautionary tale of corporate malfeasance run amok, pictures the dispossessed surrounding the factory that produces cheap TV dinners. While the self-indulgent managers overindulge in luxury, wine, and cocaine, the poor, like French stormers of the Bastille in 1789, muster outside the factory gates in despair. A cataclysmic finale pictures Bart, a former advertising mogul, firing flamethrowers at the mob, thus destroying the underclass who buy his products. A cosmic jest based on post–Marxist radicalism, the destruction of both classes denudes society of its victims and victimizers.

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STYLE AND PURPOSE Carey’s skill at Gothic pastiche derives from studied presentation. After the publication of Illywhacker (1985), critic Martin Duwell, in a review for Overland, lauded the author for hybridizing the native tall tale into a rambling “bush Gothic epic,” a freak show laden with bleak humor, cautionary alarums, and despair (Duwell, 1985, 92). A grotesque form of dissection occurs in a satire on the injustices in Australian history after Izzie Kaletsky suffers amputation of his legs at Albury by a train called the Spirit of Progress, a subtle nudge at the price Aussie’s pay for underwriting the rewards of colonialism to the British. Literary analyst Karen Lamb found irony in the celebration of a picaresque tale as the Great Australian Novel “principally because it exhumed a colonial past” and a lie claiming that the British settled unclaimed land (Lamb, 1992, 34). She pictured as “ratbaggy and amusing” a continental saga featuring burlap sacks of snakes, disappearing acts, and an amputated finger of a Chinese herbalist floating in a Vegemite jar (ibid.). Amplifying Carey’s sardonic view of history is the projection of a futuristic tourist trap, a caged Disneyland built on the site of colonial atrocities and filled with incarcerated character stereotypes for which Australia is famous. The stagy Gothicism pictures Australians as victims of their own uniqueness, forever posing for the amusement of imperialists. Accolades for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) affirmed Carey’s flair for the revolting, including the burning of a glassmaker after he inhaled molten glass and the euthanizing of a paralyzed kitten with a poker. Leading up to the Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins’s disembarkation from Southampton wharf on the sidewheeling steamer Leviathan, his father, fundamentalist preacher Theophilus Hopkins, leader of the Plymouth Brethren, carries an unusual gift. Wrapped in a funereal ribbon, his son’s caul — amniotic tissue that helmeted Oscar’s head at birth — allegedly guarantees protection from drowning. The presentation of a folk talisman precedes a strange group prayer and Oscar’s realization that he will never again see his father. The prophecy nudges the narrative toward a quixotic quest and Oscar’s death at age 25, ironically from drowning in a glass model of a church. Before his demise, he stuffs the caul in his jacket pocket, but puts no faith in a withered amulet intended to lessen his fear of water. At the height of a storm at sea off Africa’s western shore, he yanks the caul from his pocket and begs forgiveness for what he surmises is God’s retribution to a gambler, a model of fundamentalist literalism. Carey concludes the dramatic rolling of the ship with stewards hauling Oscar’s inert form to his quarters, an anti-heroic conclusion to an epiphany in his ministry.

THE NUCLEAR FAMILY AS GROTESQUES For the psycho-thriller The Tax Inspector (1991), Carey abandoned the psychological portraitures of Oscar and Lucinda and let his imagination leap over normalcy and plunder distressingly perverted terrain. A subtext compares the shattered family structure and wounded survivors to the abstract figures in Dutch artist Willem de Kooning’s “Woman” series. The expressionist paintings echo Carey’s depiction of dynamic household clashes, violent confessions and reevaluations of pedophilia and child abuse as sources of delusion and escapism. The novel creates its model of imbalance in Gran Frieda McClusky Catchprice, a matriarch who bashes herself for allowing her husband to build Catchprice Motors. In a lament for earlier dreams, she recalls, “I wanted little babies, and a farm. I wanted to grow things” (Carey, 1991, 163). Armed with gelignite and fuses, she initiates the destruction of a business that has become a lockup imbued with “the smell of rubber

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radiator hoses, fan belts, oil, grease, petrol vapour,” symbols of the corruption of her children from Cacka’s lust (ibid., 60). Masking their sufferings, Frieda collects and displays a doll collection as a sterile compensation for the innocence her husband despoils by dressing Mort like an angel and molesting him. In a metaphoric resolution, Carey pictures Frieda’s demise in the blossom-shaped gouts of blood that drip from her wounds to the concrete foundations in recompense for knowing about Cacka’s pedophilia and remaining silent rather than defend her daughter and sons. Analyst Anthony J. Hassall characterizes the pictorial close-ups as a “gritty, police-court realism” (Hassell, 1994, 144). Guarded, even antagonistic summations of the novel preceded a stage of Carey’s career when fans deserted, questioned his intent, even reviled him. One analyst, Eden Liddelow, called the novel melodrama and sneered at the conclusion as “pretty ho-hum horror-show, trivialising Sydney’s vast social problems” (Liddelow, 1991, 97). Robert Towers, a critic for the New York Review of Books, remarked on reader bemusement at leaps of tone from comedy and amusing eccentricity to sentimental romance, depravity, and horror. He upholds the author’s ghoulish scenarios and apocalyptic conclusion: “These juxtapositions and disparities seem entirely justified in the updated gothic atmosphere Carey has created” (Towers, 1992, 35).

TRISTAN AND BRUDER For The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Carey recycles Gothic convention to emphasize jangling juxtapositions. As explained by Richard B. Woodward, a reviewer for the Village Voice, Carey “has a weakness for the grotesque and the picaresque and for extended, leisurely, 19th-century form” (Woodward, 1995, 59). In the words of April Bernard, reviewer for the New York Times Review of Books, Carey’s “densely populated novels zoom about from the macabre to the comic to the romantic to the raunchy to the horrific [with a] framing fairy-tale tone ... a world in which the familiar and the preposterous coexist,” an inclusive summary of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (Bernard, 1995, 44). The deformed title figure reared at the Feu Follet, “the seedy little theatre in Gazette Street,” by a troupe of actors and acrobats reaches an apotheosis during his first trip to the Sirkus (Carey, 1994, 404). His adoption of the mask of Bruder Mouse draws on the folk tradition of shapeshifting by transforming him into the expressive actor he longs to be. The addition of the costume of a robot and a voice modulator in the snout retrieves the handicapped 23-year-old from ignominy and draws an audience for his capers. In the clutches of Mrs. Peggy Kram, a 30-year-old agoraphobic and owner of five Sirkus Domes, he recedes into a dark room of her Saarlim City penthouse “in the incense-rich dark, listening to the noises of my breathing inside the mark, my squittering heart, my acid-wash belly,” a token of his unfamiliarity with seduction (Carey, 1994, 396). Carey energizes the plot resolution with parallel acts of stalking. A mock suspense supercharges Tristan’s imagination as a ghostly figure approaches and initiates Tristan’s first bedroom tryst. To ease the tone and atmosphere toward a week-long sexual fling, Carey slips away from Gothic convention to a sight gag of Tristan reveling in the fact that Jacqui equipped his mouse suit with a zipper. Simultaneously, Gabe Manzini, the spy and hitman for the Voorstand Intelligence Agency, tracks Tristan and intimidates Bill with threats of having him exported if Bill fails to reveal his son’s whereabouts to Agent Deveau, the eliminator, who bears the serio-comic name “of veal” in French. The dual danger reflects the status of “a corrupt and decaying city,” a hopeless place where “something bad [may] happen after dark” (Carey, 1994, 407, 408). In a review for the Times Literary Sup-

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plement, novelist Jonathan Coe referred to traversing the bleak extremes as “a positively Spartan experience” (Coe, 1994).

NED KELLY AS DEMON In True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Carey imagines the shapeshifting of a young, semi-literate Irish-Australian farmer and horse wrangler into a demon. The alteration, according to critic Susan K. Martin, makes the protagonist “almost hyperreal” (Martin, 2004, 305). After the bedevilment of Edward “Ned” Kelly by Protestant English squatters and corrupt Victorian police, he turns to murder at Stringybark Creek on October 26, 1878, to stop a posse from killing him and from returning his corpse belted to a packhorse. Upon visiting his common-law wife, 19-year-old prostitute Mary Hearn, at Kelly’s Selection, Ned witnesses the distortion of his true self in a savage response to horse impounding and the jailing of his mother and relatives by Protestant authority figures. According to newspaper cartoonists, Ned is “the Devil the Horror of the Ages,” a Catholic pariah against whom the media cultivates fear and hatred as a form of anti-immigrant stereotyping (Carey, 2000, 368). Yellow journalism takes on the conventions of Gothic fiction with accounts of body mutilation of the corpses of Sergeant Kennedy and two other shooting victims. In the style of legend, the stories morph into long-lived frontier lore of the Australian outback. Shapeshifting turns the resolution into an outlandish face-off between the police and the Kelly gang, a re-enactment of underclass Australian humiliation. Carey explained to interviewer Donna Seaman the threat to the nation’s social dregs: “The convict seed is meant to be some sort of curse over the land, and we are meant to be cast out and second-rate, the descendants of convicts” (Seaman, 2005, 50). Before Aaron Sherritt conspires with traitor Joe Byrne to inform on Ned to Constables Hare and Nicolson, the gang leader already has in mind a crude armor formed from quarter-inch steel. For raw material, he needs the moldboards from plows, an invention of the Middle Ages for turning furrows and a symbol of Australia’s agrarian roots. Ned muses theatrically, “Thus did the dragon collect its scales,” a suggestion of the feats of St. George, the English slayer of monsters (Carey, 2000, 340). Like a seamstress with a dress pattern, Ned shapes shoulder and chestplates on stringybark with charcoal outlines of his “machine of war” (ibid., 347). To the posse behind Bald Hills, Ned chides the British imperialists for failing to recognize colonial ingenuity capable of manufacturing “our 1ST Monitor” (ibid., 341). Like the Greek voyager Jason sewing dragon’s teeth to raise an army, Maggie and Kate recruit men abused by the government and by jailers. Ned describes the volunteers’ hate-filled hearts as sources of courage and loyalty. To cap the somber muster, the men take a bible oath to rebel against unjust law. The match-up resembles the universal battle of good against evil found in the Koran and at the siege of Masada, a one-sided battle that Hebrew historian Flavius Josephus described in History of the Jewish War (A.D. 75)

CONTEMPORARY TERROR With Wrong about Japan (2005), a pseudo-nonfictional travelogue, Peter Carey turns to a 20th-century battle between good and evil forces. He holds up to scrutiny the dread of international combat and its effect on the most vulnerable of citizens. While introducing his 12-year-old son Charley to the artistry and marketing of Japanese manga and anime, the father suffers free-floating visions of the Pacific war of the mid–1940s, when Australia suffered occupation by Japanese troops. Threading in and out of perusals of animated

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galaxy warfare, the father’s thoughts turn to the alienation of nerdy computer buffs from daily human contact and face-to-face friendships. A series of questions to experts about the purpose of giant robotic vehicles housing individual fighters raises Carey’s concerns over isolation and its effect on the immature psyche of kids like Charley and his Internet chatroom pal, 15-year-old Takashi. The insertion of an eyewitness account of Mr. Yazaki’s escape in 1945 at age 12 from a napalmed temple and his self-preservation from the firebombing of a Shitamachi ordnance foundry darkens the text with images of the strafing and dismemberment of fellow child laborers. Distraught at the lack of sanctuaries, Yazaki understandably returns to the burning capital to an end-of-the-world scenario, a standard feature of neo–Gothic sci-fi like Cormac McCarthy’s fearful father-and-son thriller The Road (2006). For effect, Carey balances a series of Gothic and comic word pictures. To the image of 3,000 casualties from the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, he appends the risqué posturing of Yuka, a cross-dressing anime fan who makes a ridiculous comparison between fear of public nudity and terror of werewolves. Situational ironies— Takashi’s embarrassment at being seen in his Mister Donut uniform, Charley’s amazement at the inn’s gushing wooden toilet, the introduction of 13-year-old Japanese boys to samurai regiments, a humorous reference to Charley’s mom’s loss of a penis, and an anatomical chart of slices that warriors make with their swords on condemned prisoners— jolly the tone to horrific extremes and back to normal curiosity. The father’s bumbling retreat to the airport for the flight home completes a broad mix of memories that he and Charley take home to Manhattan. The undercurrent of unease about children and their access to cartoonish warfare remains hanging in the aftermath, leaving to the reader’s surmise what Carey meant by the title Wrong about Japan. See also irony; superstition; symbolism; vengeance; violence

• Further readings Bernard, April. “Un-Efican Activities,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 15 (10 April 1995): 44 –48. Carey, Peter. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. _____. Wrong about Japan. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2005. Coe, Jonathan. “Principia Efica,” London Review of Books 16, no. 18 (22 September 1994): 5. Duwell, Martin. “The Lie of the Land,” Overland 101 (1985): 92. Hassall, Anthony J. Dancing on Hot Macadam. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Hensher, Philip. “Heaven, Hell and Disneyland,” Guardian Weekly (23 October 1994): 28. Lamb, Karen. Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992. Liddelow, Eden. “New Model Carey,” Scripsi 7, no. 2 (1991): 93 –100. Martin, Susan K. “Dead White Male Heroes” in Imagining Australia, ed. Judith Ryan and Chris WallaceCrabbe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Seaman, Donna. Writers on the Air. Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2005. Summers, Alison. “Candid Carey,” National Times (1 November 1985): 32–33. Towers, Robert. “House of Cards,” New York Review of Books (25 June 1992): 35. Woodward, Richard B. “Out of Efica,” Village Voice 40, no. 9 (28 February 1995): 59.

healing and health Whether the dissolution of Nile in “Peeling” (1974), the soul hunger of the author for his native land in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001), or septicemia in a drug addict’s leg and chronic stomach upset in protagonist Che David Selkirk in His Illegal Self (2008), the state of health in Peter Carey’s characters identifies for the reader

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emotional and spiritual afflictions. In Theft: A Love Story (2006), wry satire pictures the assistance of a retarded man, Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone, to Jackson, a campus guard at a retirement home during the “shit and wander” shift, a reprise of slack supervision of Alice Dalton’s Merry Lands asylum in Bliss (1981) (Carey, 2006, 157). To assess the warped values of pop culture in The Big Bazoohley (1995), Carey chose a non-threatening case of chicken pox as a means of sidelining Wilfred from the Perfecto Kiddo contest and of pushing the boy’s competition-crazed parents, George and Muriel Mifflin, to kidnap a ringer, Sam Kellow. A similar benign condition in Maggie Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) pictures her sitting on a rock cairn squeezing thistle sap on her warts, a folk treatment that succeeds by the action of polyphenols on a dermal virus. Less benign is Annie Kelly’s clicking knee joint, a suggestion of rickets, a disease of the malnourished. In an early story, “Peeling” (1972), a commentary on the writing process, the author discloses a sick spirit in Nile, the assistant to an abortion provider who bears the guilt of fetal souls. To assuage accumulated grief, she collects dolls; removes their clothing, hair, and eyes; and paints them white to neutralize any lingering humanity. Her one-person games of Monopoly suggest a shuffling of play money to atone for the stanching of potential lives in pregnant patients. In Carey’s second short fiction anthology, the apocalyptic fable “War Crimes” (1978) characterizes poor health as a symptom of a diseased mind. The protagonist, a punk dropout who rescues a TV dinner manufacturer from failure, bears the unhealthy complexion of a man sick in body and spirit. A proof of the Roman satirist Juvenal’s regard for “Mens sana in corpore sano” (a healthy mind in a healthy body, Satire X, ca. A.D. 115), the accountant’s longing for sleep illustrates his decline from years of worrying that factory machines amputated his father’s hand. Physically and mentally phobic around the assembly line, the accountant gradually loses ground. The withering of his health, symbolic of the decadence of the American managerial class, leaves him too sapped to counter hordes of jobless who threaten to topple the corporation. Like the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the onslaught is irreversible.

SPIRITUAL WELFARE The tug of war in Oscar and Lucinda (1988) between Anglican morality and obsession illuminates motives and methods in the title characters. Manufacturer Lucinda Leplastrier, a gallant independent, relies on her agrarian roots for spunk and self-healing from the sorrow of orphaning. By risking her inheritance on a Sydney factory, Prince Rupert’s Glassworks, she extends the compulsion to gamble at cards to earning a living from industry, an uncommon venue for women of the 1860s. Her compassion for a hypersensitive outcast, the Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins, a “sacked clergyman,” takes in his fear of water, evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting after his mother’s death (Carey, 1988, 290). With the compassion of a fellow orphan, Lucinda pities his depleted health, which declines after he loses his parish over scandal arising from unchaperoned card games with Lucinda at the vicarage of St. John’s, Randwick. He describes his addiction to gambling like the lure of opium, a foreshadowing of his subsequent forced dependence on laudanum. The drug soothes his fear of water during the transport of a glass church along the Bellinger River to Boat Harbour on the northern frontier of New South Wales. The evolving comradeship of the title characters bears elements of the Greek concept of Philios. The humiliation of defrocking leaves Oscar adrift, emotionally overtaxed, physically wracked by tics, and spiritually anxious and despondent. Out of guilt and sympa-

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thy, Lucinda provides him shelter at her home in Balmain, New South Wales, where he lies abed sucking the sheet and making himself unobtrusive. In a lengthy letter to his English patron, the Reverend Hugh Stratton, Oscar summarizes his mental torment after five weeks’ hiatus of gambling as a “state of mad intoxication” (ibid., 285). To Lucinda, Oscar’s jumpy behavior — his “nervous scuttling about the house”—corroborates her choice of “Mr. Crab” as a suitable surname for him (ibid.). Ironically, the title figures alight on a single gamble to cure their insecurities. In the diagnoses of Neil David Isaacs, a licensed therapist treating pathological gamblers, the pair displays “distinct pathologies: the one (Lucinda) compelled to lose to attain a specific defined goal, the other (Oscar) obsessed with the action to avoid or contain the anxiety of his fears, foibles, and fidgets” (Isaacs, 2001, 96).

INTIMACY AND CHILDBIRTH In The Tax Inspector (1991), Carey impacts the bedroom intimacies of Jack Catchprice and Maria Takis with mutual concerns for safe sex, particularly as coitus applies to the welfare of an unborn child. Jack adds to his seduction the promise to use a condom, a hallmark of heterosexual relations in fiction of the 1990s. In the estimation of analyst Elizabeth Benedict, “Safe sex is both serious and playful in a way that accurately reflects the degree of danger these characters feel,” particularly as coitus applies to the unborn. (Benedict, 2002, 90 –91). In the third chapter, the couple awakens from a night of romance in Jack’s bed with concerns for their continued relationship. Out of a tender unease for Maria’s late-term pregnancy, Jack promises to get a blood test and post the result to her immediately by courier. The voluntary testing heightens Jack’s deliberate pose of “scrupulousness, integrity,” the qualities he chooses as a basis for a loving relationship with him as the provider for Maria and her baby (Carey, 1991, 215). The theme of motherhood and infancy dominates Carey’s next novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994). The title character’s shocking dwarfism at birth introduces anomalies— malformed jaw, clubbed feet, twisted ankles, pale skin, convoluted digestive tract, and “little muscle tissue to develop”— that threaten his comfort and survival (Carey, 1994, 152). His mother, actor-theater manager Felicity “Flick” Smith, abandons her reliance on “homeopaths, naturopaths and iridologists” to demand a “straight” doctor for her endangered son, a “child with Special Needs” (Carey, 1994, 62, 69). The first-person memoir of being held down at 11 months for surgery enhances the terror of a small child at inexplicable torture: “They had catheters up my porpoise, tubes down my throat, drips in my arms” and took samples of his body effluvia (ibid., 62). Seven months later, he endures marrow removal, which reduces the toddler to shrieks and pleas for mercy. Over his first decade, he weathers three cardiac surgeries to repair a hole in his heart. Wally Paccione, his father in residence, triggers a gag reflex by forcing medicine down Tristan’s throat. Felicity intervenes in the advice of “straight” physicians when they stray from curing Tristan to performing cosmetic surgery on his rag-doll lips. The medical gauntlet elicits pity in Tristan’s extended family, causing Vincent Theroux to murmur to “mon pauvre petit” (my poor little one) and the rest of the acting troupe to treat Tristan like “an amiable sort of pet” (ibid., 65, 71). At age ten, when Tristan returns to Mater Hospital against his will, the satire of medical cruelty takes on new menace and, ironically, new comfort. Dragged by male attendants to the casualty ward, the boy tries to escape once more. Kind-voiced nurses have the opposite effect on Tristan, who claims, “When people in a hospital tell you, ‘It’s OK,’

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it’s the same as when they say you’re going to feel ‘some burning’ or ‘some pressure’ ... that will hurt like hell” (ibid., 137). The introduction of Tristan in the Burns Unit to a ring of handicapped people infuses him with a more mature reality, that he “was meant to be here” for plastic surgery to make him more normal (ibid., 154). Carey pictures Tristan transformed in an instant of acceptance into the willful runaway who “would not be looked at in that way” (ibid., 155). On a five-story slither down the hospital drainpipe, Tristan performs a miracle of self-healing by declaring himself, “Mark Antony, Richard the Third, the Phantom of the Rue Morgue,” his theatrical ego ideals (ibid.). The flash reverses as he nears the ground and sees in the eyes of spectators his monstrous self and hears himself called a “Phantome Drool” (ibid., 157). At the crux of Tristan’s disillusion and suffering, on January 20, 382 C.E., the 11-yearold discovers his mother’s corpse dangling from a green rope, the work of Voorstand Intelligence Agency insurgents seeking to end her left-wing candidacy for parliament. The boy retreats into an infancy of insecurity, grief, and fear of assassins. Another ad hoc member to his peripatetic family, Roxanna Wonder Wilkinson, rescues him with mothering methods— rocking, bathing, oiling, and amusement with face paint. Tristan calls her “a nurse, a nun, someone finally to look up to” (ibid., 235). In addition to picnics, she prays for his recovery and attempts to restore him to normalcy with a frolic on the beach. His tantrum, which concludes with a roll on broken glass in the back of a truck, illustrates who deeply wounded the assassination leaves him. Post-traumatic self-healing requires Tristan, at age 23, to repackage his midget body in a scruffy Bruder Mouse suit and to project his talent and ebullience through mimed antics, sexual dalliance, and vocal storytelling enhanced by a high-tech modulator. Reclaimed from despair and protracted infantilism, Tristan abandons the rodent suit and sets his own path into the future.

LIFE ON THE LAM The hard riding and dodging in Carey’s frontier epic, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), subjects Edward “Ned” Kelly and Harry Power, his mentor in crime, to questionable diet, little rest, and constant surveillance. A victim of bowel complaint, Harry relies on Ned Kelly’s gathering of blackberry root, a tannin-rich herbal curative in ancient China, Greece, and Rome revered for curing bladder incontinence, bloody gums, dysentery, hemorrhoids, impotence, and kidney disease. Subsequent makeshift treatments for gunshot wounds, chronic intestinal pain and diarrhea, and respiratory illness require cautery on Dan’s shoulder, opium for Joe’s sneezing and itchy legs and gut spasms, and a eucalyptus croup tent for baby George’s mucus-choked chest and fever. Taking the time to let Mary and George rest and recuperate at their camp at Sandy Flat in the King Valley, Ned declares it necessary to “keep watch over my family” (Carey, 2000, 283). In the depths of despair, he sprawls on a rock and bathes his wrists and hands in the King River, a treatment “like a poultice drawing out all the ancient poisons” (ibid., 292). The same cold water soak lowers George’s fever just as similar dousings once treated Ellen Kelly’s children. Reprising the rigors of running from vengeance, Carey returns to issues of mental instability in My Life as a Fake (2003), a novel replete with dark obsessions. He imbues the Malayan jungle with biota nurtured in fetid jungle humidity and urban filth. The pursuer, Christopher Chubb, suffers a string of discomforts, insect bites, fungi, ulcerations, hunger, and assaults and views his tormentor, Bob McCorkle, as a relentless tapeworm. After years of mental misery working at a Sydney ad agency, Chubb slips back into Kuala Lumpur to view the sufferings of his enemy, who lies in a curtained bed like “a grub in

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its cocoon” (Carey, 2003, 252). Symptoms of Graves disease — sweating, a coppery odor, jerky eye movements, emaciation, and a phlegmy cough — prove that Chubb’s infliction of poison by a stab to McCorkle’s buttocks set off a series of affronts to health later diagnosed as leukemia. For the author’s research, he chose Malay Poison and Charm Cures, which explains how poisoners stain only half a fruit. Posing as rescuer, Chubb bears the antidote, propylthiouracil protected by a hunk of dry ice. Like the mad scientists of filmdom, he bears the medicine through a crowd of Malaysians who marvel at the clouds of carbon dioxide exuding from the box. After the coroner’s examination, superstitious Malays claim that Chubb was a ghost who “sucked the blood from Mr. Bob” (ibid., 258). See also abortion; madness; mothering; superstition

• Further readings Anderson, Sam. “Losing His Voices,” New York Magazine (10 February 2008). Benedict, Elizabeth. The Joy of Writing Sex. New York: Owl Books, 2002. Carey, Peter. The Big Bazoohley. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995. _____. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. The Tax Inspector. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991. _____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Coad, David. “Review: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” World Literature Today 70, no. 3 (summer 1996): 757–578. Isaacs, Neil David. You Bet Your Life: The Burdens of Gambling. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Rees, Jasper. “A Writer’s Life: Peter Carey,” Daily Telegraph (17 September 2003).

His Illegal Self Carey packs into his psychological thriller/love story His Illegal Self (2008) the terror of international abduction and connections to radical bombers who bungle a child kidnap plot. In the assessment of Michiko Kakutani, reviewer for the New York Times, the pell-mell episodes follow the style of Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988), True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), My Life as a Fake (2003), and Theft: A Love Story (2006), which “tend to feature improbable undertakings, sudden reversals of fortune and elaborately manufactured or forged identities” (Kakutani, 2008). Woven into a mystic recreation of the Australian outback are autobiographical elements of the author’s life, particularly his retreat to a commune. Meeting in spring 1973 on East Sixty-second Street in midtown Manhattan, seven-year-old protagonist Che David Selkirk and newly hired Vassar English professor Anna “Dial” Xenos, a hippie he misidentifies as his mother, bond beneath a welter of verbal flak from Grandma Phoebe Daschle Selkirk. The encounter poses what James Wood, a reviewer for the New Yorker, deems a “hive of misunderstandings” (Wood, 2008). A patrician WASP, the elderly woman, the child’s legal guardian, hurls angry gibes at Communism and the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) counterculture, a hypocritical radical front and terrorist cell that critic James Ley, writing for The Age, describes as “self-important and ruthless” (Ley, 2008). Carey sorts out the three-way encounter in favor of family affection: “The boy was deaf, in love,” a sense lapse that betrays his longing for birth parents (Carey, 2008, 7). The contrasting worlds of grandmother and mother divide on Lexington Avenue, where Grandma hails a cab and his pseudo-mother, an “SDS goddess” leaping like a kan-

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garoo, teaches the boy to run and duck under the subway turnstile to sneak a free ride (ibid., 182). The flight from Grandma introduces Che to “real life” over a route by subway and Trailways bus to a flophouse in Philadelphia, then by air to an Oakland motel and the Best Western in Seattle, where Dial has Joel the barber cut and dye Che’s hair black as a disguise. To the adventurous child, the buzz cut is a form of liberation, a connection with the hippie alternate lifestyle of the 1970s. With $30,000 in SDS funds, the pair set out to San Francisco and Honolulu and reach landfall at a squat in Sydney before striking out for Brisbane (ibid., 15). Along the way, they encounter the rogues, grotesques, deadbeats, and ragtag hangers-on of the counterculture, marginal figures lacking in sociability, one of whom is Che’s unidentified birth father, David Rubbo. Like a homing device, the boy gathers hints at his identity: “He had to listen through the wall — his history in whispers, brushing, scratching on the windowpane,” a Gothic image fraught with unspecified terrors he has yet to encounter in the flesh (ibid., 28).

MOTHERING ON THE LAM For heavy drama, Carey sends his pair of runaways north from Brisbane past Caboolture toward Yandina, Queensland, to ride out a cyclone in a trailer park. The weather parallels Che’s apprehensions, “punched and hammered so unpredictably, with such force, it seemed this thing might really kill them” (ibid., 51). The tumbling shelter, like an anchorless womb, jolts its passengers, causing Dial to murmur mom-fashion, “We’re OK, baby,” a solace that becomes her mantra (ibid., 52). Extending the impression of tender regard for innocence, Carey presents Che a kitten, which he dubs “Buck,” an emblem of strength from the dog hero of Jack London’s survivalist novella The Call of the Wild (1903). To end the harangue over Buck’s endangerment of birds at Crystal Community, Dial ties a bell to his neck, a dramatization of Aesop’s fable “Belling the Cat” (ca. 575 B.C.), originally called “The Mice in Council,” a satire on the triviality and non sequiturs of the outpost’s council meeting. Insubstantial shelter parallels the anxiety of a child far from home and from familiar relatives. Che rejects the “crooked hippie house” that Dial provides for them, a looseboarded hovel lighted by a propane lantern and stabilized with blackbutt timbers in a style that Carey calls “alternative architecture,” a makeshift hideout suited to the sensuous, humid rainforest (ibid., 172, 162). Enhancing the discomfort are yellow-tinged piped-in water and a kitchen shelf that Dial nails up on a slant. On a visit to survivalist Trevor Dobbs’s compound, Dial and Che travel a perilous track past a burned-out Volvo in a tree and arrive at “a bit of gray among the big trees, a sort of nothing” (ibid., 147). The third member of the ad hoc family lives on the dodge from arrest for shoplifting, petty theft, and concealing a gelignite charge to ward off police. Carey extends the “nowhere” feeling with details of Trevor’s theft of a hay shed on December 31, 1967, and his transport of its dismantled materials in a “borrowed” truck (ibid.). Reassembling the parts on a concrete and dirt floor, he creates a “lair, a compound ... a barn, a hut, a garage, a fort,” a rambling description suited to a raffish renegade lifestyle (ibid.). See also Selkirk, Che; Selkirk genealogy

• Further readings Anderson, Sam. “Losing His Voices,” New York Magazine (10 February 2008). Carey, Peter. His Illegal Self. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2008. Kakutani, Michiko. “Dickensian Happenings for a Child of the ’60s” New York Times (5 February 2008). Ley, James. “Review: His Illegal Self,” The Age (28 January 2008).

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Schillinger, Liesl. “Child of the Revolution,” New York Times Book Review (10 February 2008). Wood, James. “Notes from Underground,” New Yorker (3 March 2008).

Hopkins, Oscar As scraggly and fidgety a character as George Eliot’s myopic weaver Silas Marner or Washington Irving’s schoolteacher Ichabod Crane, the co-protagonist of Oscar and Lucinda (1988), the Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins, is the postmodern motley fool, a naïf whom analyst M. D. Fletcher identifies as “the innocent abroad” (Fletcher, 1994, 145). Oscar suffers a quarter century of alienation and isolation from missed opportunities to share thoughts with others. Myopic and “tangle-toed,” Oscar is a girlish figure of fun who ducks such taunts as “the little botanist in skirts” (Carey, 1988, 308, 162). Like other of Carey’s clergy, he exhibits a blend of religious fervor and worldly vice, which takes shape in childhood with the eating of Christmas pudding and a game of hopscotch as a form of divination. At a breach with his beloved father Theophilus, an evangelical preacher for the Plymouth Brethren, Oscar incurs a parental smack to the head and a seizure of his neck. The attack compromises the boy’s enjoyment of the yuletide holiday, a symbol of his abrupt and lasting disavowal of a religious fundamentalism and of the self-involved father whom a domestic condemns as a “black loveless bastard” (ibid., 12). Oscar’s eccentric interpretations of scripture fill his life with panic. The narrative depicts him learning the combinations and permutations of gambling from racetrack touts. Out of guilt, he conceals from his English benefactors, the Reverend Hugh and Mrs. Betty Stratton, the source of ready cash. Further degrading betting as a monetary investment is the revelation of his choice of “a filly named Nigger Princess,” evidence of the racism at the heart of British imperialism (ibid., 123). Despite the ignominy of a Devon-born student of Oriel College, Oxford, gambling for religious profit, he registers his illicit activities in a coded journal and files his ticket stubs for future reference. He spends the money on “holy profligacy,” including his education and the parish poor-box, but he continues to deny vanity and to dress in second-hand clothing, “a symbol of his incorruptibility” (ibid., 153). By the time he settles on Oxbridge Road, London, and joins the staff of John Colville’s School for Boys on Greyhound Row in northwestern London, the Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins fills 16 clothbound volumes with horse racing details from 525 races. Melody Clutterbuck, fiancée of Oscar’s schoolmate Ian Wardley-Fish, the future curate of Hammersmith, dismisses the awkward loner as a “silly little Evangelical”— a “chicken-necked madman” with a “praying-mantis head” (ibid., 161). His actions prove her correct. Wracked by fear of moral corruption, he bites his bed sheet to combat a frenzy for vice that impels him to the dog pits on the Sabbath to watch the killing of rats. In view of his duplicity toward the Strattons, at age 22, Oscar views his soul-sickness as vile. He demonizes gambling as “a monster that must be fed,” even though “he would only bet for a proper godly purpose” (ibid., 151, 150). His plan for redemption is to travel to Australia in 1865 aboard the sidewheeling steamer Leviathan to serve the Church Missionary Society in New South Wales. Carey creates irony out of a subtextual comparison of Oscar in the ship’s belly to Jonah in the whale. The claustrophobic images prefigure Oscar’s horrific drowning in a see-through church, a symbol of the sham of Church of England dogma.

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OSCAR IN SERVICE Oscar’s compulsive behaviors impact his work as a water-phobic Anglican minister. At dinner aboard ship, he prides himself on being a peacemaker. His dilemma compels him to hear Lucinda Leplastrier’s confession — an “act of love”— while forcing him to remain on a red settee on the promenade deck out of sight of the sea (ibid., 195). While his dinner companions rush to view phosphorescence from the surf, he retreats to his settee “like a sad and ugly creature in a fairytale, one for ever exiled from the light” (ibid., 208). Because of his self-concealment from views of the waves, he feels more awkward than usual, a “queer bird, a stork, a mantis, a gawk, an Odd Bod,” self-abuse that further undermines his self-esteem (ibid., 211). Unlike Lucinda, the autonomous heiress and model “New Woman,” Oscar remains a maladroit puppet of religious hierarchy in the person of Bishop Dancer. Oscar becomes what critic Kirsten Holst Petersen terms “a pawn in Bishop Dancer’s power game” (Petersen, 1991, 111). Upon losing his post at Randwick parish in Sydney for gambling for money with a female cardplayer, Oscar accepts Lucinda’s efforts to reclaim him from poverty and shame at her Balmain cottage at Whitfield’s Farm. As he heals from deep depression and the effects of loss, she delights in his renewed energy, but admits that he remains “slightly dangerous, excitable, even self-absorbed” (Carey, 1988, 306). His virtual incarceration at his boyhood home in Devonshire, self-closeting at Oriel College, and a subsequent desk job at James d’Abbs’s clerks room prefigure his eventual imprisonment in laudanum during the pre–Easter mission to the Reverend Dennis Hasset’s compound at Boat Harbour on the Bellinger River.

THE SACRIFICIAL LAMB In a tumble of perceptions, Oscar senses his downfall. He is, according to Margaret Harris, a critic for Southerly, a lost cause, “an organism unfitted to survive,” a statement linking his tragedy to victims of Charles Darwinism (Harris, 1989, 113). In the months preceding his death, he views Jeffris’s boat carriage as “a gallows or a set of stocks,” a mental torment waiting to seize and undo Oscar (Carey, 1988, 363). He slips into a mental Gethsemane and continues to “bet on goodness” (ibid., 364). Upon setting out for the interior in sixteen tumbril-like wagons, he attempts to impose on the frontier his philosophical views of benevolence and truth. He idealizes his mission as that of the Magi, who carried treasures from the east to honor the Christ Child. Failure dogs Oscar like a shadow. Frustrated in his goals and obsessive to the extreme, he confronts the greed and land lust of the private settler, an expedition during which he “had eaten snake and played the missionary” (ibid., 400). He dies in what literary analyst Luke Strongman calls “mock-sainthood,” a drowning death that, unlike the sea-doom of Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), pits a human malefactor against a man-made evil, a travesty of spirituality. Paradoxically, in his final hours, he sires a male offspring before nature swallows him up. In the view of critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, the depressing conclusion suits the terrain: “To be Australian is to be short-circuited by feelings of grievance and guilt” (Hunter-Tilney, 2008). Unlike the virginity of Lucinda, the survivor in the great gamble, Oscar’s parenthood sets in motion the preservation of their mutual story. See also Hopkins-Chadwick genealogy; Leplastrier, Lucinda; Leplastrier-Fisher genealogy; Oscar and Lucinda

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• Further readings Carey, Peter. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. Fletcher, M. D. “Peter Carey’s Postcolonial Australia II: Oscar and Lucinda: Misunderstanding, Victimisation and Political History,” Australian Political Ideas. ed. Geoff Stokes. New South Wales: University of New South Wales, 1994. Harris, Margaret. “Eminent Victorians?,” Southerly 49 (1989): 109 –113. Hunter-Tilney, Ludovic. “The Fugitive’s Lament,” Financial Times (15 February 2008). Lamb, Karen. Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992. Petersen, Kirsten Holst. “Gambling on Reality,” Australian Literary Studies 15 (1991): 107–116. Strongman, Luke. The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Hopkins-Chadwick genealogy The series of family tragedies that forms the narrative of the unnamed great-grandson in Oscar and Lucinda (1988) teems with false starts, contradictions, and ongoing challenge during the Christianizing of the Australian outback. Gillian Beer, an Oxford lecturer, posits that the name “Oscar Hopkins” pairs the unlikely duo of Oscar Wilde and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the London wit with the austere Jesuit poet. The juxtaposition gives new meaning to the oddities of the Hopkins lineage. Theophilus=mother second cousin grandfather grandparents Hopkins | died of | deceased deceased preacher | cancer Hugh Stratton=Betty | | of the | foster parents father=mother Plymouth | hanged himself | dressmaker Brethren | d. 1866 | drowned off b. 1827 | | | Bellingen Heads ----------------------------| | 12/25/1858 | | | | | Percy Sarah Reverend Oscar=/=Miriam Mason Chadwick=Johnny J. P. Hopkins governess Chadwick 1841 –1866 b. 1840 d. 1863 of Anglican missionary | snakebite drowned at age 25 father=mother chemist | | ----------------------------| | | sister brother Bob=wife b. 1920s

See also Hopkins, Oscar; Leplastrier, Lucinda; Leplastrier genealogy; Oscar and Lucinda

• Further readings Beer, Gillian. “The Reader’s Wager: Lots, Sorts and Futures,” Essays in Criticism 40, no. 2 (1990): 99 –123. Carey, Peter. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988.

humor For the sake of social commentary, Peter Carey mines the varied lodes of comedy, producing what reviewer David Griffin calls “hardcover vaudeville” (Griffin, 1996, 14). In an example from the boisterous thriller/love story His Illegal Self (2008), the seven-year-

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old abductee realizes his abductor’s crime in stealing him from his Grandma Phoebe Daschle Selkirk. In the understanding of Che David Selkirk, the pair is “on the lamb,” a pun that implies his naiveté and innocence of wrongdoing (Carey, 2008, 29). The contrast of seedy felons and innocents on the run returns at Remus Creek Road in the delight of James “Adam” Adamek, a scraggly Aussie known as Jimmy Seeds, who conducts Che on a tour of a 14-acre farm four miles outside Yandina at the Crystal Community. Adam and the other renegades in the colony are, according to critic James Ley of The Age, “mumbojumbo spouters, bumbling and ineffectual” in settling the minor issue of a kitten in their commune (Ley, 2008). To Anna “Dial” Xenos, a newly hired English professor at Vassar, the unkempt property is “the asshole of the earth” (Carey, 2008, 103). The tangle of wild tomatoes, fingerling bananas, and a fusty water system escapes Adam’s eyes, which are so myopic that he uses binoculars to examine his property. The near-sighted rube epitomizes the Queensland redneck who undervalues the fecundity and promise of rural property, a topic turned to ribald extremes on T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Drop City (2003). Liam Davison, in a review for The Australian, skewers Adam and his ilk as parochial “B-list hippies ... self-serving fools and paranoid petty criminals” who “speak like Hobbits” (Davison, 2008). The author favors deft turns of phrase, in print and in conversation. He undercuts his own profession with the stereotype of the literati: “I’m a writer, and you either go to the gym or you go to lunch” (Wyndham, 2006). With candid introspection, he explained to analyst Philip Gourevitch the impetus toward the comic: “I am a pessimist. But my pessimism has an indecent amount of energy and humor in it,” a contention he proved in the mixed topics and tone of 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001) (Gourevitch, 2007, 528). A shield to parental concerns for his son Charley, the comic comebacks in Wrong about Japan (2005) balance the telling moments in which Carey overlays a family vacation in Tokyo with glimpses of wholesale immolation during World War II. Although Charley is safe from world cataclysm, the author pictures him sucked down into the charybdis of nihilism. The seductive power of print manga and electronic anime widens the foreseeable gap between father and son as the teen years loom for Charley. On the final day of their jaunt, Carey closes out the adventure with a hollow chuckle, an insider joke about misperception that applies to Japanese culture as well as adolescence.

COMEDY AND CHARACTERIZATION Perceptive criticism detects Carey’s humanistic comedy. Paul Gray, a critic for Time Magazine, summarizes: “Carey specializes in comic compulsiveness, the obsessions that lonely people in underpopulated landscapes create to give some center to their lives” (Gray, 1992, 55). He introduces a ghastly comedy in an early short story, “The Fat Man in History” (1974), a two-toned fable that opens on a Laurel-and-Hardy scenario before morphing into a horrific barbecue of Fantoni, the leader of six men sharing a dilapidated rental property. Of his sources of black comedy, the author explained to interviewer Janet Hawley, “I try to write like a cartoonist — I look at things that exist, and push them to their ludicrous or logical extension” (Hawley, 1981, 26). He concludes that hard shoves into the beyond result in uniqueness and originality, for example, the “Best Pet Shop in the World” in Illywhacker (1985), a display venue for Australia’s eccentrics—“lifesavers, inventors, manufacturers, bushmen, aboriginals” (Carey, 1985, 443, 599). For maximum jest, he passes ownership from the American firm Gulf & Western to Mitsubishi, thus satirizing Australia’s economic bondage to the United States and Japan.

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For Bliss (1981), his first published novel, Carey creates drollery with animal images. When protagonist Harry Stanthorpe Joy’s colleague, Account Director Alex Duval, is misidentified as Harry and committed to Alice Dalton’s corrupt Merry Lands mental asylum, the patient enjoys a respite from wife Martha Duval. In a dream picturing a cat devouring the leg of a crayfish that claws its fur, Alex puzzles over the identity of the figures: “It was a portrait of his marriage. Who was the cat? Who was the crayfish?” (Carey, 1981, 75). Like the scorpions tormenting a murderer’s mind in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (ca. 1603) or the ragged claws scuttling the sea floor in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), the pincers suggest a reciprocal misery. To Alex, the mutual giving and receiving of hurt becomes normal marital payback. The author adapts a stale joke about the elephant that sits on a car, the type of salesman’s anecdote mastered by con artist Herbert Peter Badgery in Illywhacker. When a circus pachyderm reputedly crushes the hood of Harry Joy’s Fiat, the dialogue passes the event to two observers, Aldo, the waiter at the Milanos Restaurant, and a circus employee, Billy de Vere, a name derived from the Latin for “true.” Billy describes the accident as “life imitating bullshit” (Carey, 1981, 70). Because police officers Box and Hastings reject the story as fiction, Harry makes up a parable about Little Titch, a spur-of-the-moment lie that gains Harry’s release. Hastings dismisses the investigation with an unprofessional “you better piss off now” (Carey, 1981, 79). The author uses the episode as a postmodern musing on the comparative worth of truth and fiction.

TIMING AND VIGOR Carey’s comedic skills produce scenarios that require a full parsing. In Illywhacker, he plaits pathos with broad humor based on the shifty character of Herbert Peter Badgery and the assorted picaros he encounters. After his departure in 1947 from a ten-year term in Rankin Downs Gaol to his son Charles’s house on Pitt Street in Sydney, Herbert views the “Best Pet Shop in the World,” a model of exotic birds and reptiles (Carey, 1985, 443). Significant to the satire is a motley collection that critics Ronald Blaber and Marvin Gilman declare “extraneous to the accepted northern hemisphere wildlife of Western society ... a sideshow entertainment for wealthy tourists” (Blaber and Gilman, 1990, 58). Herbert, a scamster in good spirits, displays his aging body as part of the show. He winks at Leah Goldstein to share the joke of their sleeping apart at the behest of Charles. His health compromised by cell time, Herbert catalogs the nighttime miseries that tune up like orchestral instruments: “First the low grumbling oboe of my back, then the violin sciatica in my leg. Teeth and kidneys arranged themselves and I greeted my afflictions by name” (Carey, 1985, 523). The acceptance of old age miseries, like sounds from an orchestra, suggests how Herbert lives to 139 years. The alternation of jocularity with pathos in the Booker Prize–winning novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988) offers insight into religious symbolism and extreme Gothic behaviors. Theophilus Hopkins, father of protagonist Oscar Hopkins, earns the sobriquet “theoholius” for his evangelical posturing, which leads him to damn novels as Satan’s words (Carey, 1988, 49). To his rude question about personal salvation of cook Lucy Millar, he receives a snippy “mind yourself ” (ibid.). After his son Oscar develops handicapping skills, he spends his four years in theological training at Oriel College, Oxford, filling 16 notebooks with horseracing data. Carey quips that the collection overshadows the expertise of Pittsburgh Phil, the punnish nickname of American gambler and track speculator George E. Smith (ibid., 148). The revelation of Oscar’s compulsion to gamble occurs in a below-

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deck discussion of laborers on the Leviathan, where a dialect exchange describes Lucinda Leplastrier as ruined by close and constant association with Oscar. Master Smiggins personalizes the gossip: “Course I bloody compreyvous. I got a sister, ain’t I?” (ibid., 220).

HUMOR AND RESOLUTION The Oscar and Lucinda relationship explodes romantic formulae into a parody of traditional courtship mocked by games of chance. At a climactic point, a parishioner’s trespass and voyeurism infringes on Oscar’s privacy at the vicarage. Mr. Judd, the peeping tom, finds himself and his stout wife invited through the window, a sight gag that follows them into the parlor. The author falls back on his alter ego, a great grandson who warns the reader of a peeping tom’s discovery of gambling: “Well, you know what he saw” (ibid., 260). The discussion of Mr. Judd’s snooping caroms out of logic as the subject of Oscar’s gambling intersperses with charges of dressing like a scarecrow and failing to schedule the annual performance of Handel’s Messiah. Lucinda gathers up shards of sense to reach a sensible conclusion: the Judds are rude and uncivilized by committing a sin worse than the vice of gambling for money. With “patrician arrogance,” she dismisses the intruders from Oscar’s vicarage the same way they arrived — through a window (ibid., 266). For the shy vicar, Lucinda’s mocking laugh, even more than inhaling cigarette smoke in mixed company, reveals her mischievous qualities. Her residence with Oscar at her cottage in Balmain leads to an amicability “as near to a sister as [she is] likely to get” (ibid., 305). The relationship requires camaraderie, the sharing of housekeeping chores, and abstinence from gambling, which she fantasizes as a “sweet consummation of their comradeship” (ibid.). Carey’s humor can be obtuse. From a scenario of flight and double dealing, it is difficult to extract the misconception in Jack Maggs (1997) that Richard Cosway’s portrait of King George IV in youth is Henry Phipps. Mordant humor overlays English royalty with the priggishness that has altered Phipps from a charitable four-year-old orphan to a full-grown snob. While fleeing in a boat down the Severn River with Tobias “Toby” Oates, Jack jettisons the author’s ink and quill and forces him to burn the spurious beginnings of The Death of Maggs. The idealized likeness of Henry, itself a laughable hoax, enhances the pathos of trickery that lures Jack back to London at the risk of hanging to reunite with a duplicitous foster son. Jack’s connection of Henry with the British Empire deepens at this first view of his foster son in uniform, that of the 57th Foot Regiment, the unit that brutalized transportees at Morton Bay, New South Wales. The coming to knowledge triggers sense impressions of institutionalized torture — the smell of rotten meat and the feel of leather bindings on wrists and ankles before the lash.

BLACK COMEDY In a shift from his previous tone and style in Bliss (1981), Carey attacks family perversion in The Tax Inspector (1991), a hyper-real saga that critic Bill Marx terms “a hyperbolic vision springing from a social conscience betrayed” (Marx, 1992, 346). For satire on yuppies, Hare Krishnas, and self-help study tapes, Carey sets his absurdist fiction in Franklin Heights, a model of suburban sprawl southeast of Sydney, New South Wales. Of its tone, he stated to interviewer Donna Seaman that “humor really was the book’s life force,” a reference to such scenes as Gia Katalanis and Maria Takis’s bumbling attempts to override a tax office computer, Granny’s hospitality to the tax inspector, and Benny’s midwifery (Seaman, 2005, 55). Critic Paul Kane corroborates the author’s classification

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of genre by describing the novel’s mordant humor as “almost a parody of a dysfunctional, repressive family” of social defectives. In a burst of Gothic chaos, they collapse within a self-generated apocalypse fueled by sticks of gelignite planted around the periphery of Catchprice Motors and activated by the family’s petrol tanks (Kane, 1993, 520). Chief among Carey’s methods is visual incongruity, especially the failing matriarch, 86-year-old Granny Frieda McClusky Catchprice, prizing her bride doll collection and her purse stash of gelignite with fuses. Her grubby, inept grandson, 16-year-old Benjamin “Ben-Ben” Catchprice, ricochets from comic diversion to grotesquerie by abandoning his Judas Priest T-shirt and Doc Martens combat boots for a punk haircut, bath, tattoo of angel wings, and a $300 silk suit meant to transform him into a parodied stereotype of cartoons, the slick car salesman. To assure his self-reclamation from diffidence and shame, he invests $495 in a self-help program, the cassettes Actualizations and Affirmations, which provide him with catchphrases to launch him in a respectable career as super-salesman and family savior. A take-off on Dale Carnegie’s bestselling How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), the audio propaganda falls on sterile soil too perverted to see the logic of courtesy and self-confidence. Overriding Benny’s pathetic attempt at advancement is his retreat to a hellish cellar glowing red from electric radiators that illuminate the cover of the Dictionary of Angels, a stash of pornographic literature, and scrawled names of angels, an inchoate protest of his family’s censure. Like the bunker in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Benny’s moldy dive under the lube bay rescues him from threat, specifically, from “Old Kissy Lips,” his pedophiliac father, Mort Catchprice (Carey, 1991, 104). The boy’s flight from molestation takes on disturbing overtones of a return to the womb, an ironic reference to his mother Sophie’s failed rescue of the boy and her disappearance from the family after she shoots Benny in the shoulder. In his suffocating lair, he plots revenge against the company’s new salesman and against Maria Takis, the tax auditor who threatens to disclose irregularities in the family’s business. Carey turns the uterine image into a new beginning after Maria gives birth to a premature son on Benny’s sofa and murders Benny by smashing her abductor in the forehead with a tire iron.

PLAYFUL SATIRE Using a fantasy setting suggestive of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1735), Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) overlays humor with pathos and Gothic terror. In the words of Richard B. Woodward, a reviewer for the Village Voice, the author is a “genial soul whose comic tone often oxidizes on the page into something dark and strange. His seriousness sneaks up on you” (Woodward, 1995, 59). He introduces the text with mock scholarship and invents an Ur-text, Jacqueline Bardwell’s A Long Way from Anywhere, a jest skewering Australia’s isolated location in the South Pacific. A footnote on the first page, a parody of supercilious scholarship, refers the reader to an introduction to the 18 archipelagos of Efica as described in “Efica: from penal colony to welfare state,” a spurious reference work (Carey, 1994, 5). He darkens the jest with a source, “Nez Noir University Press,” which translates the island name of “black nose,” an allusion to the black aborigines whom imperialists displaced (ibid.). Posing as a teacher, the title figure refers to juggling and tap-dancing as classroom methods, then reveals that, however amusing, his antics conceal a broken heart. The glossary adds more touches of humor, as in the translation of “penis” and “cigarette” as “baton” and “cancerette” (ibid., 417). At a suspenseful moment in the life of ex-con and stage man-

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ager Wally Paccione, Tristan’s foster father, Carey inserts another wry dig after Wally proposes a stage act of toucans: “This is Efica. We’ve got to be realistic” (ibid., 221). A pun in mid-text —“Mammon became my maman”— oscillates between tragedy and humor to express the orphaned Tristan’s need to manipulate stocks to replace the security of a loving parent (ibid., 233).

SITUATIONAL JEST Carey makes the most of situational irony as commentary on individuals and officialdom. In Theft: A Love Story (2006), he envisions the ouster of a renter from a property adulterated by a septic tank too close to a riverbank. With plotted puns, the protagonist mutters, “Why would I give a shit? It wasn’t mine” (Carey, 2006, 53). In a review for the London Telegraph, critic Siddhartha Deb refers to such bursts of comedy as an “existential muzzle-flash ... the braggart talk showing us the provincial thrusting his way through the urban world” (Deb, 2006). In creating a different professional scenario in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Carey relies on rural deadpan, convict sarcasm, and the muscular cynicism of seasoned outlaws. In his ingenuous boyhood, legendary highwayman Edward “Ned” Kelly puzzles over the manner in which his mother receives outlaw Harry Power and other male callers and how she profits so steadily as a laundress. Upon first view of Harry’s hideout on Bullock Creek in the Wombat Ranges, Ned, then 14 years of age, refers to the “sour evidence of mice who have found food and blankets and think themselves in a position to begin a family,” a subtextual comment on the poverty of Irish Catholic immigrants in Australia (Carey, 2000, 78). After months of association with Harry, the boy faces his first coach robbery during which threadbare passengers complain about mistreatment. Ned wearies of his mentor’s blather and confides to the reader “his little speech about how he were forced to crime I will not trouble you with it here” (ibid., 85). Upon the boy’s arrest by Constable Alexander “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick, Ned chortles, “He begged me cooperate so I sent him cooperating against the wall” (ibid., 225). Another wealth of humor, anti-church satire abounds, as in flies on meat “as thick as priests at a wedding feast” (ibid., 219). Blasphemy takes the form of hyperbole following Ned’s bare knuckle fight against Isaiah “Wild” Wright. Ned’s win earns him community honors as “Jesus Christ Almighty even Father Duffy come to worship you” (ibid., 189). The genial banter undercuts an historic injustice from Protestant Victorian police who profile Catholic immigrants as thieves and grifters. While Carey builds to an inevitable death scene, he dots in blasphemy and sexual slang as relievers of textual tension and unremitting pacing. While Ned romances 17-yearold Mary Hearn, his common-law wife, the police set on the rest of the gang, who black their faces with still-glowing stove ash that burns skin in their haste to create a disguise. They set the scene for pell-mell comedy by grabbing dresses from a woman’s closet and ripping them open to become “Sons of Sieve,” a fictional reference to the Irish tradition of outlaw crossdressing. The woman’s anger takes both verbal and physical flight, resulting in swacks with a stick of stovewood and “all those curses Irish women use when they wish not to offend their Saviour” (ibid., 278). On the upswing from a hard night, Carey returns to a sight gag with a squib from the Melbourne Argus picturing the police mistakenly capturing a possum they thought was the Kelly gang. The mockery of authorities in the media illustrates the use of wit and ridicule by the underclass as an accessible weapon that costs them nothing.

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DIALECT WIT In My Life as a Fake (2003), Carey flourishes at the picaresque, his specialty. To ridicule the snobbery and self-delusion of the literary elite, he creates a manic quest novel bent on unmasking the patricians and poseurs who authenticate quality writing. Terrence Rafferty, a critic for the New York Times Book Review, observes that the author “has demonstrated, time and again, a congenital aversion to predictability, a considerable affection for oddballs and scoundrels,” including storyteller Harry Joy in Bliss (1981) and scammer Herbert Badgery in Illywhacker (1985) (Rafferty, 2003, 12). To maintain momentum, Carey ramps up the pace in the style of cops chasing Ned Kelly, a rhythm that Rafferty calls “that impatient, get-on-with-it quality, the giddy sense that the novel is making itself up as it goes along [in] ... a desperate, almost feral sort of urgency” (ibid.). Tom Templeton adds his own delight in “the chaos of fiction and its ability to crash through the defences of prudes” (Templeton, 2004, 18). For hooks into the reader’s imagination, Carey relies on mystery, suspense, teasing, and melodrama. The cast, comprised of liars, crazed killers, and connivers, outdoes itself at trickery, jealousy, and petty backbiting. The duplicity of writer-seducer John Slater takes subtle form in the observation by Australian poet Christopher Chubb that John drinks coffee like “some maharoger” (Carey, 2003, 140). The mispronunciation of “maharajah” combines the colonial arrogance of the interloper with the humor of the slang “roger,” meaning “to fuck over, to traduce.” Chubb’s verbal faux pas enhances his clownish incongruity, which Hephzibah Anderson, a reviewer for the Guardian, describes as “an almost comical mix of pride, pomposity and powerlessness” (Anderson, 2003, 18). The madcap quality of the concluding gallop churns up a dark humor that results in a horrendous murder on a par with the death by dinner fork ending T. Coraghessan Boyle’s East Is East (1990).

RELIGION IN DOWN STYLE In Theft: A Love Story (2006), Carey brandishes the belligerent rumblings of rogue artist and ex-con Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone. In a perpetual snit, according to critic Tom Adair of Edinburgh’s The Scotsman, Butcher “pontificates and fulminates, despising the hand that feeds him, the Philistine art investors and their lackeys” (Adair, 2006). Contributing to his comic monologues are Carey’s conceits, for example, “as familiar with that cul-de-sac as with my own pajamas” and a race through a cemetery “down with the Anabaptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I might as well have been a dog running for a stick” (Carey, 2006, 64, 79). The text juxtaposes Butcher with his 34-year-old younger brother, Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone, the story’s moral center. Both bear punning names based on the similarity of bone/Boone with implications of cannibalism and reduction to skeletal basics. Hugh delights in simple conveniences, particularly meals of fried sausages and sitting in his folding chair, which he places on the sidewalk for watching traffic go by. Through his meditations, Carey intersperses religious phrases and imagery from “The Good Samaritan,” indications of a good-heartedness that forms an alter ego to Butcher’s grumpy rationalizing. Magnifying jollity in chapter 26, Hugh pleads for his fractious brother, “Forgive him, Lord, a dickhead in your sight” (Carey, 2006, 141). In his retribution against Butcher for leaving him behind during the brother’s art show in Tokyo, Hugh finds a job at a retirement home. The recovery of an abandoned baby carriage saddens Hugh, but he treats himself to a strolling cooler by filling the buggy with ice to chill his daily picnic, a Coke and a chicken sandwich. The absurdity of his behaviors and his adop-

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tion of psychedelic glasses endears him to police officers, who offer him a disposable diaper to absorb condensation from his drippy drink bottle. At the height of New York City claustrophobia, Hugh buys organic brown eggs to strafe passing taxis, but discovers that they bounce rather than shatter, a droll redux of the pelter to purchaser of organic foodstuffs and urban litterer. Carey pursued his saga of the Bones brothers through vigorous storytelling that Ali Smith, reviewer for the London Telegraph, describes as “lyrical and foul, biblical and crude, in the now trademark Carey fusion of expertise and wonderful blaggery” (Smith, 2006). Charles Matthews, in a critique for the Houston Chronicle, summed up the effects as “scamming, fakery and double-crossing” (Matthews, 2006, 16). The text envelops Butcher in the cavalier self-approval of an artist who seeks nobody’s imprimatur. In Tokyo, following a brilliant success at marketing his nine canvases, the painter seeks out the brochure maker, Mr. Utamaro, and enjoys a lengthy visit. Butcher excuses his second dose of scotch as a cultural failing: “Well, fuck it, I was Australian. What else was I meant to do?” (Carey, 2006, 162). After a lengthy evening of drinking and groveling, Butcher bows to Utamaro from a seated position, “[hoping] that would be polite enough for a hairy barbarian” (ibid., 164). The surly attitude derives from memories of decapitation of Australian prisoners of war in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, during World War II. In the typically Careyan mix of “mess and discipline, bombast and quietness,” the novel amuses and enlightens the reader through the comeuppance to an egotist, a retro stripping of the emperor’s new clothes (Smith, 2006). See also egotism; irony; language

• Further readings Adair, Tom. “Review: Theft: A Love Story,” The Scotsman (27 May 2006). Anderson, Hephzibah. “There Was Once a Poet from Down Under,” Guardian (14 September 2003): 18. Blaber, Ronald, and Marvin Gilman. Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian, Canadian and Indian Fiction. Springwood, NSW: Butterfly, 1990. Buffington, Sean. “Review: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” Boston Book Review (May 1995). Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. _____. His Illegal Self. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2008. _____. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. Jack Maggs. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997. _____. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. The Tax Inspector. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991. _____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Davison, Liam. “Carey’s Radical Diversion Inspires a Tale of the Familiar Seen from Afar,” The Australian (26 January 2008). Deb, Siddhartha. “The Genuine Article,” Telegraph (18 June 2006). Gourevitch, Philip, ed. The Paris Review Interview, II. New York: Picador, 2007. Gray, Paul. “Australia’s Family Ties,” Time 139, no. 3 (20 January 1992): 54 –55. Griffin, David. “Review: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith,” New York Review of Science Fiction 97 (1996): 14 –17. Hawley, Janet. “How an Ad Man Found Bliss,” The Age 26 (September1981): 26. Heinke, Jörg. “The Resistance of Being (Em)Braced: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and David Malouf ’s Johnno,” Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English, ed. Dunja M. Mohr. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Heyward, Michael. “Parallel Universes,” New Republic 212, no. 15 (10 April 1995): 38 –41. Kane, Paul. “Postcolonial/Postmodern: Australian Literature and Peter Carey,” World Literature Today 67, no. 3 (1993): 519 –522. Ley, James. “Review: His Illegal Self,” The Age (28 January 2008).

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Marx, Bill. “Dystopia Down Under,” The Nation 254, no. 10 (16 March 1992): 346 –348. Rafferty, Terrence. “Never Mess with a Poet,” New York Times Book Review (9 November 2003): 12. Seaman, Donna. Writers on the Air. Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2005. Smith, Ali. “The Business of Art and Love,” Telegraph (28 May 2006). Taylor, D. J. “A Ventriloquist’s Tale,” New Statesman 130, no. 4519 (8 January 2001): 42. Templeton, Tom. “Hoax of the Century,” Guardian (23 May 2004): 18. Thomson, Margie. “Oops, My Fake Came to Life” New Zealand Herald (17 August 2003): 28. Woodward, Richard B. “Out of Efica,” Village Voice 40, no. 9 (28 February 1995): 59. Wyndham, Susan. “A Love-Hate Story,” Sydney Morning Herald (1 April 2006).

Illywhacker In composing Illywhacker (1985), an adventure romance, Peter Carey examines the colonial fog that clouds the Australian perception of historical truth, a topic he returned to with My Life as a Fake (2003). In a description true of both books, reviewer Margie Thomson, in a critique for the New Zealand Herald, asserts, “The truth is always uncertain, ignored, reconstructed or unbelievable” (Thomson, 2003, 28). In the summation of critic John Charles Hawley, the text “subverts the traditional Australian-celebratory novel by questioning the truth of national mythology” (Hawley, 2001, 54). Feigning the masks of the salesman, protagonist Herbert Peter Badgery exudes jolly fraud. Much like the title drifter of the Old West in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), Herbert debunks the glorification of New World expansionism by turning it into a freak show with himself as ringmaster. His scams branch into a framework for a nationalistic overview of Australian history, which he examines right down to thumb prints on convict-made brick, snake dancing, and the dismantling of a motor bike. The ultimate victory of the usurper over the colonist is Herbert’s native exoticism, a stereotype that Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez declares derives from the expectations of European imperialists. During his rearing by a surrogate father, herbalist Goon Tse Ying, Herbert learns to make himself invisible, a trope for the elusive lifestyle of Chinese-Australians during racist attacks. Goon practiced the art of invisibility on June 30, 1861, when some 3,000 gold miners robbed, beat, and ousted Chinese laborers from Lambing Flat, Burrangong. More dangerous to Herbert’s future than rioting is his mastery of lies, which Goon calls “dragons” (Carey, 1985, 220). Carey’s notion of truth derives from the belief that the liar is both manipulator and manipulated. As described by critic Luc Herman, Herbert is “ripened by the events he relates” (Barfoot & d’Haen, 1993, 110). Like supine clay, he allows others to shape visions of his character and motives. To first wife Phoebe McGrath, he is a stubborn, willful dreamer; her father, Jack McGrath, forces Herbert to perpetuate behaviors that suit Jack. Like an oyster layering grit into a pearl, his untruth gains “creamy coats of credibility” (Carey, 1985, 60). During the formation of a four-member family on Western Avenue, Herbert adds more details to his verbal house of cards, which strains under the digressions. In an era marked by fascination with manufacturing wizardry, he attempts to draw investors into his plan to build the nation’s first airplane factory. If he attempts otherwise, his efforts to be himself cost him Phoebe’s love and Jack’s respect. Thus, the narrator must wear the lying tattered self that enwraps him like a prison garment. His fabrications become a legacy to his children, who are “spawned by lies, suckled on dreams, infested with dragons,” an allusion to Herbert’s failure to introduce Australia to its native capabilities (Carey, 1985, 359).

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CAGING AND FREEING Carey developed Illywhacker from a single image, the pet emporium. Incarceration, the novel’s controlling metaphor, reflects a psychological construct of the persona as it is mirrored by the outside world. The individual tends to accept the opinions and standards of family, friends, and associates. Therefore, the ring of people around a single person serves as one big mirror of behaviors expected of the person at center. Carey employs the concept of surrounding models by picturing Herbert influenced by Phoebe and Leah’s families and neighbors and by his son Charles’s extended household. Metaphorically, the ring of people becomes an imprisoning environment that dictates Herbert’s responses. When others accept and encourage his lies, he feels compelled to continue lying, for example, by selling American Fords rather than Summits, Australian cars. Leah captures his phony persona as “the flashy talk and loud opinions of Herbert the urger” (Carey, 1985, 351). In Carey’s increasingly imaginative prisons, immurement worsens for Herbert. The motivation for prevarication is his yearning for a family and for the love of Phoebe McGrath. For her, he ends his homelessness by building one of a series of makeshift residences out of chicken wire, mud, galvanized iron sheets, wood crates, silk airplane wings, and wire nails clipped from stolen fencing. His ramshackle construction method mimics the history of his homeland, which lacks a substantial mythos. In defiance of his search for an Australian identity Leah mocks him with sarcasm: “You think you can put up some shanty and that makes it your place, but you can’t, and it never will be” (ibid., 307). Thus, impermanence forces him into a tramping lifestyle that feeds his stock of vignettes and anecdotes.

TRADING IN LIES Low-grade storytelling condemns Herbert to the bottom rung of social respectability, the rogue romancer who trades dignity for cheap laughs and bold imaginary exploits. When Herbert tries to extricate himself from the tangle of lies, he identifies with the king brown snake, a symbol of menace that Carey reprises in The Tax Inspector (1991). The snake becomes Herbert’s prop for gags: “There is no doubt that the greatest mistake I ever made in my life was to keep that Geelong snake a prisoner in a hessian bag, to starve it, to use it for tricks” (Carey, 1985, 231). Herbert’s sudden sincerity in negotiations with Cocky Abbot, Cocky’s pretentious son, and with English investor Ian Oswald-Smith costs Herbert financial backing for Barwon Aeros, the dream factory he shares with Jack McGrath, Phoebe’s father. Once more, the tale-teller must rely on a peripatetic lifestyle financed by yarning. According to critic Anthony J. Hassall, the tripartite narrative results in self-constructed lockups, each more confining than the last: cage Herbert’s selling cannons with his father Herbert’s living a lie with the McGrath family Phoebe Badgery’s iron and chicken wire cage for king parrots reliance on Leah Goldstein, star of Badgery & Goldstein Leah tending her amputee husband Izzie Kaletsky

place Punt Road Western Avenue Balliang East Dudley’s Flat

date 1896 November 1919 1919 1920 –1923

segment Book I Book I Book I

Bendigo

1931-1936

Book II

Bendigo

1936

Book II

123 cage Herbert’s transfer from Grafton Gaol to Downs Prison Charles Badgery’s pet emporium Emma Badgery’s retreat to a cage Charles’s dispatch of Hissao to boarding school Hissao’s four-story human zoo

injustice

place Rankin

date 1937

segment Book II

Sydney Sydney Melbourne

1940s 1942 1950s

Book III Book III Book III

Sydney

1980s

Book III

Before his imprisonment, Herbert enjoys a limited odyssey about the Australian bush during the Great Depression, which Laurie Clancy, a reviewer for Australian Book Review, characterizes as “set pieces tenuously strung together” and Peter Goldsworthy demeaned as a “marketable collage” (Clancy, 1985, 15; Goldsworthy, 1985, 57). By 1931, Herbert forms a loving relationship in Bendigo with Leah Goldstein, who mothers Sonia and Charles “Snake Boy,” the children whom Phoebe abandons (Carey, 1985, 403). The domestic idyll precedes what analyst Peter Pierce calls a “lost child narrative,” the episode involving a futile search for 14-year-old Sonia among abandoned mine shafts. Permutations dominate the remaining narrative. Carey once more slices free of his moorings to a substantial saga and sets out for comic absurdity. For the stage duo Badgery & Goldstein, Herbert takes up the cause of hoboes, the true offspring of possessors of the “Waltzing Matilda” (1895), the wanderer’s bundle immortalized by bush balladeer Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson (Carey, 1985, 599). In the final view, Herbert, freed from illiteracy during a prison term, abandons a career with a traveling road show for retirement in a cage alongside aboriginals, shearers, exotic animals, and “the boys from Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club (Carey, 1985, 634). He becomes the prize zoo exhibit for his advanced age and shriveled physique and for the fictional life story that he constructs for himself and his country. See also Badgery, Herbert; Badgery-Goldstein-McGrath genealogy

• Further readings Barfoot, C. C., and Theo d’Haen. Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. Carey, Peter. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. Clancy, Laurie. “Some Beautiful Lies: Our History Mythologised,” Australian Book Review 73 (1985): 14 –15. Fletcher, M. D. “Post-Colonial Peter Carey,” Span 32 (1991): 12–23. Goldsworthy, Peter. “The Novella in Illywhacker,” Island Magazine 24 (27 May 1985): 56 –57. Hassall, Anthony J. Dancing on Hot Macadam. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Hawley, John Charles, ed. Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Lobe, Cliff. “Reading the ‘Remembered World’: Carceral Architecture and Cultural Mnemonics in Peter Carey’s Illywhacker,” Mosaic 35, no. 4 (December 2002): 17–34. Pierce, Peter. “The Problem of Consolation in the Country of Lost Children,” Society for Studies in Religion, Literature and the Arts (2001): 73 –86. Thomson, Margie. “Oops, My Fake Came to Life” New Zealand Herald (17 August 2003): 28. Thwaites, Tony. “More Tramps at Home,” Meanjin 46, no. 3 (September 1987): 400 –409.

injustice Carey’s trenchant battles against society’s victimizers take an ambiguous stance in support of the vulnerable. Examples range from the contestants seeking a $10,000 prize in the Perfecto Kiddo contest in The Big Bazoohley (1995) and the dehumanization of penal colonists in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001) to Japanese chil-

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dren bombed and strafed at the Shitamachi ordnance foundry during World War II in Wrong about Japan (2005) and a hippie commune south of Yandina, Queensland, which police raid without cause in His Illegal Self (2008). In “War Crimes” (1978), rather than uplift the despairing jobless, the author chooses an apocalyptic face-off between factory owners and the underclass, who joust against management in a futile bid for subsistence. Foreshadowing a battle to the death, the opening scenes picture an accountant and an advertiser running over two pedestrians who impede the duo’s Cadillac Eldorado, a gaudy status vehicle among American exhibitionist rich. A reflexive irony implies that the plant superpowers lay waste their market by burning alive with flamethrowers the vagabonds who cower outside the factory gates. The resulting conundrum allots justice to neither side, thus raising the question of the possibility of justice in the midst of class war. More telling than labor disputes, Carey’s literary paeans to convicts draw reader empathy for Australia’s white transportees. In Illywhacker (1985), narrator Herbert Peter Badgery broadens his view of national cruelty and suppression with glimpses of mid-nineteenth century racism, when white Australian miners riot against Chinese immigrants and crush Asians with ax handles at Lambing Flat on June 10, 1860. Leah Kaletsky, Herbert’s longtime love, speaks the anti-capitalist spite for gold mining and its depletion of human compassion in prospectors: “It has made them think that all they need is luck. They have been blinded by gold,” a charge readily applicable to colonialism (Carey, 1985, 229). She blames the deluded Australian for embracing fantasies of a sudden rise above the ruling class to a new-found laborer’s freedom, a theme that undergirds the naiveté and hope of Edward “Ned” Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and the hoaxing of poet Christopher Chubb in My Life as a Fake (2003). Suppressed visions of the British transportee emerge in unforeseen conceits, including a passage about a snake. As though creeping suddenly into view, it resembles “a bolted convict with lash marks on its back, crisscrossed, burned in like a loaf of fancy bread,” a Gothic recreation of mottled snake skin and the wealth that enabled the English sybarites to live high (ibid., 231). The subtle image reminds the reader of the usurpers who protected their motherland by dumping the overrun of jails, poorhouses, and child detention centers into coastal Australian prisons. The protagonist of Jack Maggs (1997) cringes under recollections of whippings at the Morton Bay penal colony in New South Wales. Stalking his dreams, Rudder, the official flogger under the command of Captain Logan, layers indelible stripes over old weals, the colonial burden borne by Australian frontier settlers.

WOMEN AS VICTIMS Carey favors mercy and compassion for the female, particularly the Australian woman. For Oscar and Lucinda (1988), he extends his study of heiress Lucinda Leplastrier in her mid-teens. The victim of Melbourne attorney Charles “Chas” Ahearn, executor of her mother’s will, Lucinda discovers her inheritance compromised and her choices limited to loss of the farm that her father bought and her widowed mother worked. On May 7, 1859, three days before her 18th birthday, Ahearn auctions her land. With the resolve of a survivor, she blames herself that “she had been too weak, had given up her farm too easily, had let herself be bullied into exile” (Carey, 1988, 83). By taking responsibility for a setback, she lays the groundwork for character strengths to come that boost her into an iconic labor leader in the Aussie version of the Industrial Revolution. In True History of the Kelly Gang, the author pictures through the eyes of a gangster the plight of highwayman Edward “Ned” Kelly’s mother, Ellen Quinn Kelly, his fictional

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wife, 19-year-old prostitute Mary Hearn, and their infant daughter. The elder Kelly, Ned’s ideal, sets the tone for vengeance. According to a summary in Publishers Weekly, “Harassed, slandered, provoked and jailed with impunity, the Kellys, led by indomitable bootlegging matriarch Ellen, believe they have no resource but to break the law,” a foreseeable response in the oppressed (“Review,” 2000, 83). Carey explains the visceral nature of resistance: “The historic memory of unfairness were in their blood,” a residue borne by past ancestors before the Kellys’ immigration from Ireland to Australia (Carey, 2000, 312). Critic Lisa Fletcher explains the need for the addition of wife and daughter to the Kelly mythos as a “preference for remembering the past by turning it into a heterosexual love story,” a fictional ploy that Dan Brown applied to the life of Jesus in the mystery-detective novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) (Fletcher, 2008, 147). Created to supply a human dimension to the bushranger, Ned’s baby girl adds another level to the three-stage Kelly genealogy and remains susceptible to the father loss that Ned experiences at age twelve. He enlarges on his vision of an orphaned daughter learning about “the injustice we poor Irish [suffer] in this present age” (Carey, 2000, 7). Upon viewing a prosperous farm with fat, healthy cattle, Ned delights in “proof of what contentment the colony might provide if there is ever justice” (ibid., 112). He begrudgingly honors highwayman Harry Power, his mentor in lawlessness, for defending the Irish dirt farmer. Of a Robin Hood–style reciprocity, Ned explains, “As the poor pay fealty to the bushranger thus the bushranger pays fealty to the poor,” the perpetual victims of corrupt Protestant police (ibid., 116). Offsetting Harry’s character strengths, Ned contrasts the Beechworth constables who stoke “a hankering to make their reputations with [Harry’s] neck” (ibid.). The official self-aggrandizement further elevates Harry as a prize catch and symbol of justice for the underdog, a scenario replicated in His Illegal Self .

PEONAGE In contrast to the lionizing of thieves and stickup men, Ned recognizes that Australia is “a colony made specifically to have poor men bow down to their gaolers,” a two-sided caste system dating to ancient times (ibid., 157). At the core of daily persecution are “traps,” the peasant name for police, who confiscate herd animals and dispossess farm families (ibid., 153). Because of his family’s ongoing sufferings, Ned eventually enjoys stealing from rich men like squatters James Whitty and R. R. McBean, “who picked the eyes out of the country with the connivance of the politicians and police,” a grotesque image of blinding suggestive of crows pecking at the eyes of corpses (ibid., 204). Ned castigates Superintendent Nicolson, a two-faced deal maker who exchanges Ned’s confession for a warrant against the traitor Tom Lloyd. Ned responds with sarcasm: “So is the law administered in the colony of Victoria,” a political entity named for the empress herself (ibid., 144). When the ruse involves Ellen Quinn Kelly, she roars a peasant aphorism, “Nothing is as low as trading a man’s life for money,” a motto her son embraces (ibid., 145). Nicolson and Hare continue their illicit negotiations by repudiating the charge of robbery against Ned, who describes how they “played with justice they pushed it pulled it made it hop & jump” as though manipulating a toy (ibid.). Even though Harry Power doesn’t deserve Ned’s loyalty, Ned takes the ethical high road by maintaining his stance against informing to the police. Repeated violations of police ethics attest to Ned’s belief that he has no choice but turn lawless, the same rationalization that painter Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone applies to stealing back his canvases from his ex-wife in Theft: A Love Story (2006). In the words

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of Wendy Morgan, a critic for Social Alternatives, Ned transforms himself from man of the household to “a daredevil who’d take the mickey out of the pompous police and selfimportant burghers” (Morgan, 2001, 72). The worst offender, Constable Alexander “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick, turns on Ned and intimidates Mary Hearn by implying that she will lose her infant son George if she doesn’t expose her lover’s whereabouts. Superintendent Brooke Smith grabs baby George as a human shield during a raid on the Kelly hut. Detective Michael Ward heightens the infant’s peril by tossing him into the air. During the imprisonment of hostages at Faithfull’s Creek Station on December 9, 1878, Ned uses the opportunity to substantiate claims against Constable Fitzpatrick and to exonerate Ellen Quinn Kelly for attempted murder. With encouragement from the hostages, Joe Byrne composes the second letter to Donald Cameron, member of the legislative assembly, revealing police malfeasance against the citizenry. Corroborating Ned’s claims about unjust police is the arrest of 21 men on January 4, 1879, solely because of their friendship with Ned. One of the detainees, Jack McMonigle, discovers “what it were to be slandered & perjured and he were handcuffed & herded on to Benalla Railway Station & shoved into a box car like he were nothing but a daggy sheep” (Carey, 2000, 317). The action winds down to its foreseeable end, which an unnamed reviewer for the Economist refers to as “a gloomy inevitability to his progress from the cradle to the scaffold” (“The Wizard,” 2001, 82). Carey leaves unclear the cause of the other crooks’ demise, either bullets or immolation after police torch the Glenrowan hotel. Before a gnarly executioner, a prison volunteer, Ned intones his stoic death wisdom of everyday injury to the downtrodden: “Such is life” (Carey, 2000, 368). See also Maggs-Larkin genealogy; social class; vengeance; vulnerability

• Further readings Carey, Peter. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. _____. Wrong about Japan. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2005. Fletcher, Lisa. Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. James, Jamie. “A Legendary Fugitive Rides Again,” Wall Street Journal (5 January 2001): W8. Morgan, Wendy. “Treading a Fine Line?: Carey’s Kelly,” Social Alternatives 20, no. 1 (January 2001): 71 –72. “Review: True History of the Kelly Gang,” Publishers Weekly 247, no. 46 (13 November 2000): 83. “The Wizard from Oz,” Economist 358, no. 8205 (20 January 2001): 82.

irony Carey’s ease with human absurdities and paradoxes produces ironies of motivation, intent, and action. His incongruities range from a child’s rescue of his gambler father from bankruptcy in The Big Bazoohley (1995) to the contentment of a former convict in his return to Australia in Jack Maggs (1997), an expatriate’s fascination with landing at Kingsford Smith Airport in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001), the passage of an obsession from a hoaxer to editor Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass in My Life as a Fake (2003), and the unerring eye for art in Detective Amberstreet in Theft: A Love Story (2006), who, unlike critics, art scammers, investors, and dealers, recognizes real skill. In an early story, “Peeling” (1972), a commentary on the writing process, an elderly retiree intent on a drawn-out seduction of his neighbor Nile ignores the guilt she suffers from aiding an abortion provider. In his disrobing of Nile, he loses control of the process and deconstructs her to rubble, a jolting turn of events that ruins his plan to satisfy a sex-

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ual itch. In a double twist on fantasy, the dismemberment rids Nile of self-torment by turning her into a shattered doll like those she depersonalizes in her free time. Irony directs plotting in Carey’s signature evasions of reality. Through a supernatural shift from humdrum life to fairy tale, the opening death scene of Bliss (1981), his first published novel, frees protagonist advertising magnate Harry Stanthorpe Joy of earthbound subjectivity and positions him in a floating superstratum to gain a truer view of reality. Thus, on a detached plane, he learns more about himself and his career in ad campaigns than he knew when he lived. In a double irony, as he migrates from his former self, his wife, Bettina “Betty” Joy, slips into his former career and ends up immolating herself in the eighth-floor board room of the Mobil Research Department. In Harry’s last incarnation as a woodlander on Bog Onion Road, the widower rids himself of workaday angst and becomes one with the forest and with members of a rural commune. He realizes that his emotions are “blended with wonder and made volatile with some lighter spirit,” a Zen experience that paradoxically creates wholeness in Harry after disburdening him of family, work responsibilities, and materialism (Carey, 1981, 283). For the author, a former ad copywriter, Harry’s metamorphosis and Betty’s suicide are both droll and redemptive. The fable encompasses Harry’s death from a falling limb, when his being floats upward as his corpse falls to the ground. Rid of his former bluster, he dies with a sigh, the breath of the storyteller who gives insight and wholeness to a fragmented people.

IRONY AS DRAMA To dramatize the doomed love of title characters in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Carey sets up similar ambiguities of attraction and frailty between a pair of tender, over-imaginative neurotics. Like Betty and Harry Joy, both Lucinda and Oscar recognize their eccentricities, which include nonconformity to social dictates and an addiction to gambling. Both struggle with a rigid social order that smashes like a Prince Rupert’s Drop the possibility of a propitious marriage, shared life, and offspring. In planning the fabrication and delivery of a glass and cast-iron church up the Bellinger River to Boat Harbour, New South Wales, Lucinda intends to stretch her creative gifts toward excellence, a miniature Crystal Palace, a hallmark of Industrial Revolution wizardry that glorified the Great Exhibition of 1851. Oscar, a hydrophobe who mistakenly assumes that she loves the Reverend Dennis Hasset, honors her by agreeing to a hare-brained expedition that condemns him to convey the fragile edifice via a lengthy water passage, the source of scientific wonder to Oscar’s father, marine biologist Theophilus Hopkins. Attesting to Oscar’s devotion to his love is a willingness to challenge the longstanding dread that brought him and Lucinda together on the sidewheeling steamer Leviathan. The ship’s name contributes a droll suggestion that the doomed couple risk a huge threat on a par with Jonah in the belly of the whale. Contributing to the irony of a cross-country convoy delivering boxes of glass to the frontier is the duplicity of Mr. Jeffris, a self-embellisher who envisions his actions as contributions to the history of South Pacific exploration. Although he lacks religious fervor and dislikes the idea of a see-through church in Boat Harbour, he manipulates Anglican proselytizing to validate an expedition that “would slice the dust covers of geography and reveal a map beneath, with rivers, mountains, and names, the streets of his birthplace, Bromley, married to the rivers of savage Australia” (Carey, 1988, 445). In his arrogance, he commits the standard gaffe of colonizers in particularizing places with titles imposed by white outsiders, often placing their surnames in prominent cartographic positions. Thus, Urunga, the site of his downfall, appears on maps as Bellingen Heads. In a scenario

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reminiscent of Sacajawea’s guidance of the Lewis and Clark mission, Carey depicts Jeffris’s mangled body preceded by Kumbaingiri Billy’s aunt, a cyclical rape victim held captive at a Urunga pub, as she points the way to a burial spot in a cesspool. Critic David Brown, a professor of divinity at Duke University, observes in the gesture a paradox of manners: “The native population consistently behaves better than the white immigrants” (Brown, 2004, 96).

MOTHER ENGLAND The continuing postcolonial drama in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) draws energy from ironies of place and culture. In a satire on London, as the title character, on a secret excursion from Efica, enters the outskirts Saarlim City on highway E1, the crumbling infrastructure and abandoned vehicles along the verges alarm him. To the reader, he divulges the secret reaction of an Ootlander to colonizers: “Madam, Meneer, you are part of our hearts in a way you could not dream.... We grow up with your foreignness deep inside our souls” (Carey, 1994, 292). For examples, he cites epic poetry, British history, hagiography, music, and the lore of Bruder Mouse, a religious icon. He admits that, even under duress from the motherland, colonials still admire Britain’s Christian ideal. For added satire, Carey stresses that the vehicle for religious lore is the Sirkus, a razzledazzle high-tech entertainment medium fraught with myth, violence, and death. The neo–Gothic novel Jack Maggs (1997), Carey’s next swipe at British imperialism, comes closer to defining what critic Robert L. Ross identifies as “the elusive meaning of ‘Australianness’” (Ross, 1999, 122). Perhaps because the title figure immerses himself in the seaminess of London’s criminal class, he is more able to demythify caste distinctions and the pretensions of the landholding class, some of whom profit directly from colonial enslavement, land usurpation, prison torture, and genocide. Early on, Carey returns Jack to his foster mother, “Ma” Mary Britten, a self-styled healer and abortionist who conceals under fake proprieties her lure of troubled girls and wives into taking “Dr Britten’s Cock Spur Pills for Female Disorders” (Carey, 1997, 5). The abortifacients prove lethal to both mother and fetus, a reflection of England’s tossing of criminals and pariahs into the wastelands of Australia. According to Gary Krist in a critique for the Hudson Review, the reality of the English drawing room is a fraudulent gentility in “no less brutal a place than the streets around Pepper Alley stairs, even if its brutality is well hidden behind expensive draperies and polished furniture” (Krist, 1998, 624). A subtler irony in the second sentence depicts a sign at the Golden Ox inn —“a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him,” a metaphoric depiction of a vigorous Australia freed of imperialism and eagerly wreaking vengeance against Britain’s wealth and social superiority (Carey, 1997, 1). See also names

• Further readings Brown, David. God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. _____. Jack Maggs. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997. _____. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994. Harris, Margaret. “Eminent Victorians?,” Southerly 49 (1989): 109 –113. Krist, Gary. “Classics Revisited,” Hudson Review 51, no. 3 (autumn 1998): 623 –630. Natale, Antonella Riem. “Harry Joy’s Children: The Art of Story Telling in Peter Carey’s Bliss,” Australian Literary Studies 16, no. 3 (1994): 341 –347. Ross, Robert L. Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1999.

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Jack Maggs In Jack Maggs (1997), his first neo–Victorian fiction since Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Peter Carey ventures from wide-lens debunking of Australian history to the minutiae of the microscope. The meta-novel is his most precise, cohesive satire. In comparing it to My Life as a Fake (2003), Blake Morrison, a critic for the Guardian, pictures both works as “fast, furious and fantastical stuff ” (Morrison, 2003, 16). As described by literary historian John Charles Hawley, the novel “[examines] the working of colonialism, its legacy, and possibly the liberation from it” (Hawley, 2001, 54). Carey adopts for his tale of imposture a popular metafictional mode — prequels, sequels, or literary parallels derived from classic novels. Compared to John Irving’s The Cider House Rules (1985), Carey’s Dickensian retrospect reprises a classic Victorian pairing of child abandonment alongside poverty and criminality, a duo that undergirds the strength of ex-con and stage manager Wally Paccione, the surrogate father of the title figure and garrotter of an assassin in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) and that of Bob McCorkle, desperado father of Tina in My Life as a Fake (2003), and Dial, renegade English professor from Vassar and abductor of seven-year-old Che David Selkirk in His Illegal Self (2008). The author’s shifting of perspective from Philip “Pip” Pirrip to his rescuer and sponsor, Abel Magwitch, a transportee and prosperous Australian stockman in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860 –1861), examines the financial hub of the British Empire from a bicultural point of view. In the estimation of critic Joseph J. Wiesenfarth, Carey’s work gives Great Expectations a “creative afterlife” (Wiesenfarth, 1999, 70). Marc Carnegie, reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, honors Carey for devising “a way not only of one-upping his idol Dickens but also of making a claim for Australian independence, literary and otherwise” (Carnegie, 1998, 1). The action focuses on the former convict’s effort to reunite with his foppish foster son, Henry Phipps, whom Jack first encountered by a forge when the four-year-old offered him food. The literary conceit of furthering adventures of a classic literary character serves a variety of respected sequels and prequels— Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a postcolonial glimpse of the background of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847); Tom Stoppard’s absurdist drama Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), an alternative view of expendable characters in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ca. 1599); and John Champlin Gardner’s Grendel (1971), a retelling of the mythic Beowulf (ca. 600) in the words of the monster. Jack Maggs anticipates Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning March (2006) (based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868 –1869); Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), a character enhancement of the second wife of Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid (19 B.C.); and John Edmund Gardner’s thriller Moriarty (2008), a study of the villain in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. Carey’s revisionist novel, according to Marc Carnegie, moves beyond Dickens’s perspective to expose the Victorian underside: “Much that Dickens kept hidden in the pockets of Victorian morality — the abortion racket, homosexuality, child prostitution — here clatters loudly to the floor” (Carnegie, 1998, 1). Janice Carlisle notes that Carey castigates London, the heart of imperialism, by linking it with a pervasive stink. Carey “cannot imagine a Victorian world or even a modern version of one that is not rank with openly deplored, disgusting odors,” a sensory equivalent of moral rot (Carlisle, 2004, 18).

A PARENTING MOTIF Carey applies a discovery method to the action of Jack Maggs, which debates how a pampered and debauched ward avoids a conflicted reunion with his benefactor, a topic

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that the author surveys on the personal level in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). Like a reverse Bildungsroman, the text pictures Jack as a patriotic homelander returning after a quarter century to a London that refutes his English ideals. His memories shiver with nightmares of life with abortionist “Ma” Mary Britten of Islington and her mate, master thief Silas Smith, who engineers fearful slides down flues of mansions to be burgled by a team of child housebreakers. Both confinements prefigure Jack’s eventual transportation at age 15 to the ultimate in claustrophobia, a prison at Morton Bay, New South Wales, a white penal colony for England’s surplus felons. The action encompasses a complex household next door to Phipps, where grocer/fried fish seller Percival Clarence “Percy” Buckle lives the luxury of the nouveau riche. Symbolically, Jack nets a position as Percy’s second footman and wears ill-fitting shoes that restrict his movement, recalling his descent into chimneys in boyhood to rob the wealthy of silver. Carey’s deft ironies mock the social system that elevates Percy to the level of gentry without legitimizing him with appropriate manners, socialization, and taste, the accoutrements of a gentleman that Jack provides Henry via tainted money. The novel turns Jack’s mental anguish into a visible nerve spasm, a psychosomatic crippling that resets prison lashings in the effete dining room of Percy Buckle. During the onset of tic doloureux, Jack falls under the care of novelist Tobias “Toby” Oates, a parody of the young Dickens, the “smarmy bastard” who longs to map “the beast within,” his stagy term for the criminal anima (Carey, 1997, 110, 47). Oates describes chronic facial agony as Jack’s phantom, which “[pulls] with his strings inside his face,” a cruel puppetry that Oates himself usurps as a source of easy cash (ibid., 323). The pairing of mesmerist with patient poses what Marc Carnegie terms “a complex and often comical game of cat-and-mouse,” a pre-psychoanalysis that tags the psychosomatic cause of Jack’s chronic facial pain. (Carnegie, 1998, 1). According to Carey, through a quack hypnosis cure, Oates raids and “[burgles] the soul of his subject” (Koval, 1997, 671). Oates gleans from Maggs’s babblings the subconscious rudiments of a potential fictional potboiler, The Death of Maggs. In a model of literary venality, Oates deliberately misrepresents Jack’s life story as a means of marketing a Gothic caricature based on lies. A vain self-adulator, he boasts, “I write that name, Jack, like a stone mason makes the name upon a headstone, so her memory may live for ever. In all the empire, Jack, you could not have employed a better carver” (Carey, 1997, 182). The text wrings irony from the image of the headstone as a dual symbol of identity and death. Although Carey depicts Oates as a debt-ridden opportunist, the literary parent of a criminal stereotype, the novel echoes Dickens’s concern for English urchins lured into crime. A coded letter to Henry describes Jack’s rescue by scavengers three days after birth from the mud flats under London Bridge, his purchase by Silas Smith and the infant’s adoption by “Ma” Britten. To legitimate Jack’s anguish, Carey creates two damaged females. Jack’s paramour, Sophina Smith, is the daughter of Silas, a mentor into the art of housebreaking. The romance of convict with gallows bait declines into sorry spectacle, Ma’s slicing and aborting of Sophina’s five-month fetus, which lies trashed in a cess pit. The hopeless teen marriage concludes with 15-year-old Jack proclaiming his guilt to free Sophina from a death sentence for a burglary on Frith Street in London’s privileged section. The two merit England’s pitiless dooming of the poor and underprivileged.

THE COLONIAL OTHER Carey wrote his version of Great Expectations through nested stories as a means of getting at a murky truth, including Jack’s rise to respectability as a brick manufacturer

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and his illegal entry at Dover “on the wink” (Carey, 1997, 141). In the complex dealings between venal writer and unsuspecting dupe, ironically, Oates steals a thief ’s success story. Thus, Jack Maggs becomes a bully pulpit from which Carey celebrates Australian resilience and defuses centuries of recrimination, denial, rage, and sorrow borne by a lost people rejected, plundered, and alienated from the motherland. Set in late April–May 7, 1837, some six weeks before Queen Victoria’s coronation and the year that Dickens published Pickwick Papers, Carey’s text poses Jack Maggs as larger than life — a model of the crude, menacing, but well-meaning survivor of colonial dehumanization at Morton Bay and eventual solid citizen of Wingham, New South Wales. In casting Jack as the prototypical forebear of the Anglo-Australian, Carey refutes colonial mislabeling by depicting his protagonist as a self-redeemer, a testament to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. On return to Regency London, Jack, in his mid–40s, impresses his viewers with powerful shoulders, arms, and thighs, yet he falls victim to the English class system and to imperialist lies about the transportees to Australia. The prevailing false impression leaves Oates wondering if he is to be “stabbed, cudgelled, suffocated” by an escapee from a lurid prison system (Carey, 1997, 256). To ensure safety in the Buckle household, Jack instigates house arrest and nails shut windows and doors, a reversal of his incarceration at Morton Bay. As analyzed by writer Jörg Heinke, Jack is a victim of “partial knowledge about convicts and about his former trade, and on rumours that he might also be a murderer, all aspects of the discourse of convict-otherness” (Heinke, 1994, 212). Carey subverts Dickens’s Abel Magwitch by placing Jack in charge of the colonial scenario. Rather than ponder how to elude English immigration officials, Jack takes the Australian pioneer’s view: “What am I to do with you all?” the core question of Carey’s parallel novel (Carey, 1997, 141). Jack’s sterling character, shaped in the rough and tinged with compassion for the underdog, contrasts his ward, the citified Henry, a self-important, amoral twit whom London’s elitism has debauched. With an eye toward destroying stereotypes about Australia’s founding fathers, Carey legitimates Jack’s character development as “an oyster working on a pearl” (ibid., 25). In contrast, the author denies progeny to Henry, but rewards the protagonist with a long life, a solid reputation, an exemplary wife, and a dynasty of seven children. For depicting the Australian mindset of stoic endurance and recovered identity, bestowers of the Commonwealth Writers honored Carey’s Jack Maggs a prize of £10,000. See also Maggs, Jack; Maggs-Larkin genealogy

• Further readings Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997. Carlisle, Janice. Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Carnegie, Marc. “Dickens World Upside Down,” Wall Street Journal (4 February 1998): 1. Hawley, John Charles, ed. Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Heinke, Jörg. “The Resistance of Being (Em)Braced: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and David Malouf ’s Johnno,” Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English, ed. Dunja M. Mohr. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Koval, Ramona. “The Unexamined Life: Peter Carey Interviewed,” Meanjin 56, nos. 3 –4 (1997): 667–682. Miller, Karl. “Late Expectations,” New Republic 218, no. 16 (20 April 1998): 40 –41. Morrison, Blake. “Damaged Beast of the Antipodes: Peter Carey’s True Story of a Hoax Is Fast, Fantastic and Flawed,” Guardian (13 September 2003): 16. Ross, Robert. “Expectations Lost and Found,” World & I 13, no. 7 (July 1998): 250 –257. Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon. New York: Continuum, 2001. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “Phillip Pirrip’s Afterlife, or Great Expectations Again ... and Again,” George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 36 –37 (1999): 70 –84.

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Joy, Harry To personify capitalism’s rot, in Bliss (1981), a fable of punishment, atonement, and redemption, Peter Carey creates the double metamorphosis of Harry Stanthorpe Joy, a half–American protagonist and the first in the author’s fiction to elude the urban cesspool. His confident speech rhythms and American sounds have a calming effect on listeners to his sales spiels. Readers see in Harry’s manic drive the ebullience of Voltaire’s Candide, the obsessions of Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, and the comic ineptitude of characters created by satirists Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Eudora Welty, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Critic Karen Lamb defines Harry, an advertising magnate and visionary, as guilty of “the small personal conceits and deceits that help professionalise corruption,” a motif that Carey returns to in My Life as a Fake (2003) and Theft: A Love Story (2006) (Lamb, 1992, 26). Harry makes his living composing and marketing lies, a career that Carey undertook upon leaving college. To win Bettina “Betty” McPhee as his wife, Harry relates the anecdotes of his father, Vance Joy, about New York City, a metropolis that eventually lures Betty to an operatic suicide at the Mobil Research Department board room to avoid slow death from cancer caused by urban the pollutants she promotes. Before a transforming neardeath experience from heart attack, Harry pictures himself as a shifty, aggressive “tell-uswhat-you-want-and-I’ll-do-it-for-you pragmatist” (Carey, 1981, 217). Betty despises his business associates as “this conspiracy of men, this almighty brotherhood of frauds” (ibid., 14). Ironically, the complaint precedes her supplanting of Harry as breadwinner via her meteoric rise as an advertiser. Carey conflates the trickery of advertising with the false domestic bliss of the Joy household, a nuclear family dysfunction that the author overcasts with a three-generational sexual abuse in The Tax Inspector (1991) from grandfather to father to sons and daughter and the press for abortion of a grandchild in His Illegal Self (2008). To reviewer John Ryle, the text of Bliss replicates “a truly striking vision of the dark side of the family romance and the fraught times that engender it” (Ryle, 1981, 1350). When Harry’s children, David and Lucy, reach their mid-teens, the father perceives insincere home affections as a sham cover for acrimony and serious corruption. Not only is his wife sexually involved with adman Joel Davis, Harry’s junior partner, but the Joy children engage in incest as Lucy’s payment for David’s drugs. The motif of amelioration establishes Harry’s resolve to alter a lifestyle that he condemns as “worthless, so loathsome, shallow, hollow as to be worth nothing” (Carey, 1981, 207). In place of shilling for corrupt capitalists, he flees the city and searches out “the relative merits of Goodness and Originality,” a quest that delivers the kiss of death to his business (Carey, 1981, 89).

ESCAPE TO PARADISE In the style of fantasists Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, Carey redirects his protagonist from an action figure to an observer and commentator similar to Douglas Spaulding in Dandelion Wine (1957) or Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Harry Joy, like the allegorical figure in Everyman (ca. 1485), becomes an expiatory wanderer by traversing hell on earth, a purgatorial progress down the rungs of Dante’s inferno that whisks Harry from a Hilton Hotel suite to Alice Dalton’s Merry Lands asylum. Involuntary commitment, which his treacherous son David arranges for $5,000, divests Harry of his identity and, simultaneously, cleanses him of multiple secular sins. After abandoning his nuclear family, he imagines a “tin-roofed hut with candles flickering in their safe magic

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circle” and allows lover Honey Barbara Harrison, a former prostitute, beekeeper, and pantheistic healer, to “[drive] out his devil” (Carey, 1981, 181). Exorcism of the demon, the residue of commercialism, leaves Harry free to enjoy an eco-friendly environment, epitomized by the pure influence of rain, trees, and river. Like the peripatetic evil that Christ casts out of victims in Luke 8:30, Mark 5:9, and Matthew 8:28 –34, the advertising bug leaps on Betty, sending her rapidly to perdition, a vengeance she earns for carrying on a blatant affair with Joel Davis. Carey redeems his protagonist only after Harry performs atonement and establishes an earnest change of heart, a theme that the author revisits on a personal level in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). Following Honey Barbara to a bucolic commune at Bog Onion Road in the final stave, Harry, in his early 40s, receives the “Good Samaritan” treatment that eases spiritual aridity. He accepts from Honey’s father, Paul Bees, a drink of water and sleeping arrangements on a dirt floor that “felt softer than anywhere he had lain for days” (ibid., 271). An allegory of human caution in a dangerous world, the story pictures him under a protective “green canopy” treading leafy terrain over “fine vine trip-wires which were best proceeded through without haste” (ibid., 278, 277). Slowly, he wins Honey’s love by planting the “brush box, stringybark, red flowering gum” that keep her bees producing a year-round supply of honey, the tangible evidence of communal bliss (ibid., 279). The narrative draws on neo–Zen philosophy to picture the paradox of getting by giving away. Simultaneously, Harry advances/regresses to a revered position. Crouching alongside his audience in Neanderthal informality, he becomes the preliterate around-the-fire storykeeper, a mellow narrator devoid of the adman’s capitalistic cant. Carey dismisses as literary license Harry’s retelling of his father’s stories, a recycling that Honey Barbara’s legalistic nitpicking describes as plagiarism. Listener Paul Bees validates the narratives for their emotive link to human libido, a life force that he and other forest dwellers express through vegetarianism and druidic tree veneration. The raconteur, who is “not interested in newness,” imagines the purloined stories as reshaped building materials, “just as you pick up rocks scattered on the ground to make a cairn,” a folk grave marker (ibid., 284, 67). Carey blesses the story man with Harry’s absorption back into nature to become part of “the lightning, the trees, the fire ... bees and blossoms,” the elements of earth’s “joy” (ibid., 296). See also Bliss; Joy genealogy

• Further readings Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. _____. Bliss: The Screenplay (with Ray Lawrence). St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1986. Edwards, Page. “Review: Bliss,” Library Journal 107, no. 4 (15 February 1982): 472. Lamb, Karen. Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992. Ryle, John. “Magic and Poison,” Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1981): 1350. Tranter, John. “Hell without Logic Loses Credibility,” The Age (3 October 1981): 27.

Joy genealogy A hybridized clan of American and Australian urban and bush strands, Harry Stanthorpe Joy’s family exudes energies and creativity on three continents. They claim Vance Joy, a New York raconteur, as patriarch, and his grandson, drug dealer David Joy, as a martyr in Colombia. The story follows Harry’s de-urbanization and natural acculturation with vigor and a celebration of his children by beekeeper Honey Barbara.

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Crystal=Paul Bees Patricia=Vance Joy Billy McPhee=former wife | Peugeot Paul lottery | New Yorker gas station | abandoned | beekeeper winner | owner | her baby | | | Honey=/=Harry Stanthorpe Joy=Bettina “Betty” McPhee Joy =/=Joel Davis Barbara | advertiser | ad designer junior partner Harrison | storyteller | suicide by age 26 age 27 | age 39 | immolation suicide hippie | Little Paul | beekeeper | d. age 75 | | -----------------------------------unnamed children | | | twins David Joy=Anna Lucy Joy=/=Ken McLaren dead drug dealer Marxist mechanic age 17 age 151 ⁄ 2 killed in Colombia

See also Bliss; Joy, Harry

• Further readings Carey, Peter. Bliss. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. Ryle, John. “Magic and Poison,” Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1981): 1350.

Kelly, Ned The Bildungsroman of horse breeder and outlaw Edward “Ned” Kelly, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) contributes to Australian crime history a fictional dramatization of poverty and social ignominy among colonial Irish Catholic immigrants. In Carey’s words, they labor under a “deep sense of inferiority,” a product of the convict experience that defines their identity as suspect outsiders (Murphy, 2003). The issue of exploitive labor returns the next year in Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). Through handwritten memoir, the protagonist, a Celtic bush phenomenon, crusades against the forces that “stole my tongue” (Carey, 2000, 328). His charge derives from his parents’ and kinfolks’ experience. In an interview with Jessica Murphy of Atlantic Unbound, Carey explained, “People didn’t come by choice but in terror, having been cast out —flung out, wrenched out. They knew themselves to be abandoned and second rate” (Murphy, 2003). Low self-esteem combined with dispossession and the Protestant police conspiracy against Irish Catholics produced in Ned a defiance worthy of a freedom fighter on a par with Geronimo, Aung San Suu Kyi, or Simon Bolivar. In the opinion of author John Updike, Ned’s feistiness peeks through a “touchingly and comically ingenuous voice,” a far cry from history’s more articulate heroes, such as Che Guevara, Rigoherta Menchu and Nelson Mandela (Updike, 2007, 354). In the style of a semi-literate Mexican corrido, the text pictures Ned as a naive, trusting lad growing up with six siblings. The family survives north of Melbourne on a 20-acre farm at Beveridge on fictional Pleurisy Plain, a grim satire on a common preface to death by pneumonia. Without education or refinement, the family, “ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon,” functions as best it can (Carey, 2000, 278). In the view of critic D. J. Taylor, Ned —“an Irishman stuck at the very bottom of the 19th-century colonial antheap — is capable of providing his own sharply figurative gloss” on Australian history (Taylor, 2001, 42). After the family’s move to Avenel in 1862, Ned, like North American white trash, lives in a bark-roofed, dirt-floored hut at a lower standard than Aussie blacks.

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He recalls “the great number of us packed behind the curtains breathing the same air snoring farting blind and deaf to each other as a newborn litter” (Carey, 2000, 19). Although coarse, the image projects a protective esprit de corps that links Ned and his human littermates with the land and with a career in animal husbandry.

CREATIVE RESISTANCE Like the showdown between Coalhouse Walker, Jr., and the corrupt firefighters of New Rochelle, New York, in E. L Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), Carey orchestrates an underclass us-against-them tension that dominates the social bandit memoir. According to history, the Kelly-Quinn clan chalked up 71 arrests and 26 convictions, the basis of the Kelly legend. Ned attains heroism through daring, trickery, generosity, courtesy, brotherhood, and mythic longevity. Contributing to his self-perception is his defiance of the arrogant Kevin O’Neil, a northern Irelander and Australian police sergeant who slanders Ned’s father, farmer John “Red” Kelly, as a blasphemer, arsonist, and murderer of women and children. From age eight, Ned denigrates himself for the state’s imprisoning of his father for rustling a calf that Ned slaughtered to fend off starvation. Two years later in 1864, the ten-year-old regrets that Ellen Quinn Kelly, his pregnant mother, decks herself in possum skin. She must feed herself and six children on a meager diet — parsnips, potatoes, oatcake, and bread smeared with lard. In the words of analyst Sjef Houppermans, Ned is thwarted by “his ever growing despair and the impossibility for the mother to be what he wants her to be” (Houppermans, 2004, 160). The comment smacks of the stereotype of Irish Catholicism that pictures women attempting to attain the purity of the Virgin Mary. Ignorance stalks the Kelly clan, especially Ned. His experience broadens at age 11 with the birthing of his sister Grace, which requires Ned’s assistance to Ellen in labor and awards him with ignominy for viewing “my mother’s naked bottom” (Carey, 2000, 27). In September, he hears from his teacher, Mr. Irving, that “micks” like the Kellys are less valuable than livestock. At age 12, Ned earns his first view of a bathtub and breakfast menu at the Royal Mail Hotel, Ned’s reward for saving a friend, Dick Shelton, from drowning in Hughes Creek. Like bricolage, oddments of fact and slander wall Ned into a naive, antiauthoritarian mindset that is his glory and his doom. Looking ahead, analyst Carolyn Bliss predicts that Ned “will be executed not so much by the state as by his own failures of imagination” (Bliss, 2001, 47). Bliss’s blame-the-victim philosophy echoes the distaste of British Aussies at the failings of its despised farm class. The text describes experience as the basis of manhood, family responsibility, and resultant civil disobedience. At John’s death from dropsy, the folk term for enlarged heart, on June 24, 1865, Ned charges the loss to “all the poisons of the Empire,” which turn the corpse gray (Carey, 2000, 35). Before Ned achieves adulthood, he and Ellen form what Carey terms a “survival unit” (Seaman, 2005, 53). Ned and his younger brother Dan grieve for their scofflaw sire; Ned rages against his mother’s casual sexual liaisons, a universal form of domestic income that protects poor children from want. As a model of diligence, he reveres paternal lessons: “There would never be a knot I tied or a rabbit I skun or a horse I rode that I did not see those small eyes watching to see I done it right” (Carey, 2000, 39). Ned’s respect for learning endears to him his Uncle Jimmy Quinn, who teaches the boy horse-breaking. The attitude toward breeding and rearing livestock springs from guilt for causing his father’s arrest. Ned declares of farm work, “It were my job to replace the father” (ibid., 41). Fortunately for Ned and his siblings, his mother’s purchase in 1867

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of an 88-acre “selection”— a government homestead — on Eleven Mile Creek relieves uncertainty and restores the family to a semblance of normality under one roof.

NED AND THE LAW Much of Ned Kelly’s impetuosity and struggle aims to control his destiny. He is oblivious to his mother’s decision that he become a bushranger. After unintentionally abetting the Buckland stage robbery outside of Whitfield in April 1868, he admits, “I were already travelling full tilt towards the man I would become,” but he doesn’t suspect that “he’d been bought and sold like carrion” (ibid., 77, 95). Under the tutelage of Irish highwayman Harry Power (1819 –1892), Ned acquires the nickname “Your Ignorance,” a token of the boy’s apprenticeship in outlawry that returns to his mind in November 1878, when he’s “still following [Harry’s] rutted track” (ibid., 78, 298). To his credit, Ned longs to return to the agrarian life, but he listens to his mentor and observes “more bolt holes than a family of foxes ... secret caves and mia mias and hollow trees” and another spot “wrought from green saplings and tin and burlap” (ibid., 79). On a visit to his family in 1869, at age 15, Ned declares himself the man of the house by facing down Bill Frost, Ellen Quinn Kelly’s common-law husband and the father of baby Ellen, her seventh child. The bastardy of Ellen establishes Ned’s inability to govern the family under the tenets of monogamy. The quasi-legal status of Kelly children extends to his own daughter, born in June 1879 in San Francisco under a common law arrangement with teen prostitute Mary Hearn. Carey speaks through his picaresque memoir the overt enmity between immigrants and colonial law. In his mid-teens, Ned lobs sarcasm at justice, especially that administered by the British Empire. After superintendents and the police commissioner of Melbourne contravene fairness with lying and sham deals, Ned speaks his disillusion. When the police drop charges against him for robbing the Protestant English squatter R. R. McBean, Ned receives “the Queen of England’s kind permission to freely walk the 13 wet and windy miles” home to Eleven Mile Creek (ibid., 152). For his loyalty to the family’s code of honor, Ned finds himself shunned by his mother and siblings on the strength of a rumor that Ned informed on Harry. Ned’s reunion with the nuclear family does not square him with his aunts and uncles, who betray him to the court for allegedly stealing a mare. Released in March 1871 at age 17 from six months at hard labor at Beechworth Gaol in north central Victoria, Ned falls victim to police brutality and a false charge of receiving a stolen horse. The newspaper account proves him innocent, but he serves three more years at hard labor to a legal system devoid of justice for the poor. Carey emphasizes the cost to the psyche of a teenager of false imprisonment among hardened criminals.

NED AND DAN The narrative depicts Ned’s dedication to the Kelly-Quinn clan and to his younger brother Dan. As is true of urban teens from troubled homes, Dan becomes raw material for the Greta Mob, which lures him into marauding and public nuisance. After more unjustice from anti–Irish squatters and law officers, Ned admits the source of his family loyalty, his love for Ellen Quinn Kelly: “I knew how deep I loved her we was grown together” (ibid., 200). In her defense, he is willing to steal horses as well as endure jibes from Dan and George King that Ellen is Ned’s true love. The Freudian interpretation of their relationship retains validity throughout Ned’s life. As the law zeroes in on the Kelly gang — Ned and Dan, Steve Hart, and Joe Byrne — an official posse comprised of Consta-

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bles Ernest Flood and Frank Strahan, Officers Thomas McIntyre and Michael Scanlon, Tom Lonigan, and Sergeant Michael Kennedy force Ned to make choices concerning Dan’s safety. In asserting the role of older brother, Ned slips and refers to his sibling as “Danny,” a demotion that the boy resents as unmanly. Without Dan’s knowledge, Ned sinks into ambivalence about attacking the posse, muttering, “I couldnt bring myself to that next step in my life” (ibid., 248). The straightforward comment prefigures Ned’s final confrontation with the law, when he bangs his revolver on his armor-plated breast to prove to Dan that help is on the way from his older brother. Moody and tense with anticipation, the text reserves its final quarter for the grand shoot-out, a convention Australian outlaw lore shares with such Northwestern American works as Martha Canary’s Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane by Herself (1896), Jill L. Crossley-Batt’s The Last of the California Rangers (1928), Charles Kelly’s Is Butch Cassidy Dead? (1938), the autobiography The Life of John Wesley Hardin (1961), and Lula Parker Betenson’s Butch Cassidy, My Brother (1975). Melancholy reigns as Ned, the bandit chief and redresser of social wrongs, relates details of the gang’s spying on the posses and the police scheme to raid the outlaw camp on Stringybark Creek in south central Victoria. The rapid turnaround follows Ned’s shooting Strahan through the eye, a murder Ned calls “the ripe fruit of Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick” (ibid., 250). Although the atmosphere declines to a “forlorn place” with the smell of blood and the buzzing of flies around Tom Lonigan’s remains, Ned notes that Stringybark Creek gains acclaim as a crime scene, where Scanlon lies “lifeless as a bag of spuds” (ibid., 252, 253). Ned caps the scene with a pseudoreligious lament: “Dear God Jesus it were a sorry day” (ibid., 253). The invocation to deity contributes to the overlay of Irish Catholic piety and folk melancholy that surrounds the bushranger’s mythos.

MARTYR AND MYTH Carey intersperses ups and downs of tone, picturing Ned in alternate stances, including disciplinary action against Dan, back-bitten rage at dispossession, and chats with his mare about what he should do next. His actions are swift, his intent transparent. As a gunman and tracker, he overpowers Sergeant Kennedy, then regrets that the victim suffers from an underarm wound. To end the suffering, Ned fires a coup de grace that leaves his flesh “sour with death” and his dream of home ownership “gone to smash” (ibid., 255). During a three-day attempt to cross the flooded Murray River, Ned laments, “God did not see us,” an indication that outlawry has cost the men eternal grace (ibid., 260). The first ray of hope comes, ironically, from a newspaper account about a member of the legislative assembly, journalist Donald Cameron of West Bourke, who questions the unethical conduct of the Victorian police. Premier Graham Berry’s pledge to inquire into police corruption counters less cheerful news from “poison ink” that the gang “could be shot on sight and was entitled to no more mercy than a rabid dog” (ibid., 275). The narrative depicts the underclass as the victims of delayed justice. In the falling action, Carey mimics an ingenuous candor and savagery in a criminal reared in a shack and trained for larceny. As summarized by John Bemrose, a critic for MacLean’s, the peasant class embraces Ned’s legend for its “inherent decency and breathtaking courage,” a subtextual acknowledgement of a peasant code of morality (Bemrose, 2001, 49). The narrative stresses the role of the media in legend-making and folk hagiography by describing the arrival of cops and police sketch artists by train, the same mode of transportation that advanced the Industrial Revolution in England and “brought the

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famine to Ireland” (ibid., 276). Ned’s delight in news of Mary’s pregnancy precedes his handwritten apologia, a first-person legacy to their unborn child. However, the comments about trains prefigure the shootout at the Glenrowan depot and hotel, when 30 police depart from rail cars with 20 horses to battle Ned’s armored battalion. The curtain scene, according to reviewer Alex Marsh, “seems set in stone. [Ned] can drift into chronic criminality and prison, or he can stand up for himself ” (Marsh, 2001). The stoic face-off against the stockmen’s minions elevates Ned in death to more than he can be in life, given his circumstances. The author explains the appeal of the Kelly saga to Australians: “We like the defeats.... We like the follies, the failures, the losses. These are the things that tell us who we really are” (Bemrose, 2001, 49). See also injustice; Kelly-Quinn genealogy; True History of the Kelly Gang

• Further readings Bemrose, John. “Dialogue with a Desperado,” MacLean’s 114, no. 13 (26 March 2001): 48 –49. Bliss, Carolyn. “Imagining the Truth,” Antipodes 15, no. 1 (2001): 47–48. Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Houppermans, Sjef. “Castaway or Homebound” in Living in Posterity, eds. Bart Westerweel and Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen. Hilversum, Netherlands: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004. Marsh, Alex. “Review: True History of the Kelly Gang,” Boston Book Review (April 2001). Murphy, Jessica. “A Living, Breathing Hoax,” Atlantic Unbound (22 October 2003). Rogers, Jane. “Remaking the Myth,” Guardian Observer (7 January 2001). Taylor, D. J. “A Ventriloquist’s Tale,” New Statesman 130, no. 4519 (8 January 2001): 42. Tranter, Bruce, and Jed Donoghue. “Bushrangers in the Sydney Morning Herald: Ned Kelly and Australian Identity,” TASA Conference 2006 (4 December 2006): 1 –12. Updike, John. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism. New York: Random House, 2007.

Kelly-Quinn genealogy By developing the expansive Kelly family in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Peter Carey reflects the diverse influences that shape a fervid, at times, desperate Catholic Irish-Australian household. In a review for the Financial Times, analyst Ludovic HunterTilney declares that the purpose of romanticizing Australia’s favored outlaw is to establish the “authority-defying Australian [as a] founding father” (Hunter-Tilney, 2008). father d. 1870 | -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | | | | James John “Red” Kelly=Ellen=/=Harry Jimmy Quinn Kate=Jack Lloyd Jane Pat=Margaret arsonist from Tipperary Quinn Power b. 1842 | traitor Dubliner d. 1866 b. 1837 outlaw jail, 1857, 1870 | | | | =/=Bill=/=Brigit Cotter -----------| | Frost | | | | boundary rider Tom Jack Jr. | | shot, 2/1870 | | | Ellen Ma=blacksmith at Templecrone | b. 1870 | | d. 1871 ----------------------------| | | | =George King=/=Mary Hearn six sisters

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| | m. 1874 | b. 1861 | ----------------------| | | | | George | Ellen John Alice b. 1877 | b. 1874 b .1875 b. 4/16/1878 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | | | Ned Kelly=/=Mary Alex=Annie=/=Constable Jem Maggie=Bill | Kate=/=Alex Grace b. 6/3/1854 Hearn Gunn b. 1853 | Flood b. 1859 Skilling | Lloyd “Fitzy” b. 1865 bushranger | m. 1868 | m. 1873 | b. 1863 Fitzpatrick | | | jail, 5/1870 | d. 1872 | Dan Kelly d. 11/4/1880 | | b. 1861 | child jail 1877 | b. 1872 d. 6/28/1880 daughter b. 6/1879 San Francisco

See also Kelly, Ned; True History of the Kelly Gang

• Further readings Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Hunter-Tilney, Ludovic. “The Fugitive’s Lament,” Financial Times (15 February 2008). Marsh, Alex. “Review: True History of the Kelly Gang,” Boston Book Review (April 2001).

language Peter Carey’s appetite for authentic ethnic idiom infuses dialogue and description with a native uniqueness. According to Richard B. Woodward, a reviewer for the Village Voice, in the 1980s, Carey and his contemporary fiction writers “reinfused the English novel and language from the boundaries of a defunct empire,” including a range of writings from Australia, Egypt, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, and the West Indies (Woodward, 1995, 59). For the composition of His Illegal Self (2008), James Wood, in a review for New Yorker, admired Carey’s fusion of “crooked colloquialism and poetic formality” (Wood, 2008). Carey creates the auditory jangle of seven-year-old Che David Selkirk’s New York Manhattanese, recently hired Vassar English professor Anna “Dial” Xenos’s broad Bostonian accent, and the Queensland dialect of Remus Creek Road outside Yandina, Queensland. The author’s one-line introduction to Gladys the Haitian maid provides both comic relief to a tense situation and a glimpse of maternal concern for the child of outlaws: “You don’t be getting yourself upset seeing your mommy and daddy in the hands of the po-lees” (Carey, 2008, 17). Contributing to the illicit nature of Che’s flight from Manhattan to Queensland are the serio-comic catchphrases of the 1970s—“leave it to Beaver,” “it’s cool,” “good vibrations,” “trippy,” and “go with the flow”— which flout the level of terror in Che and Dial, his motherly abductor (ibid., 74, 89, 110, 87). Carey is meticulous in his study of dialect. While writing Illywhacker (1985), for three years, he thumbed through Geoff Wilkes’s Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (1978), the source of Carey’s title. Although not clarified by etymological research, the title term “illywhacker” suggests pig Latin for “willy hacker,” a description of masturbation implying exhibitionism through a form of self-pleasuring. The racy pun reprises the farce of Jonathan Swift’s description of Gulliver’s apprenticeship under “my good Master Bates” (Swift, 2003, 22). For good reason, in the opening lines, the narrator, Herbert Peter Bad-

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gery, admits to being a liar and warns in Latin, “Caveat emptor (Let the buyer beware)” (Carey, 1985, 11) In fiction and in the expatriate’s memoir 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001), Carey pictures language as a clan inheritance from preceding generations, including the much repeated “chook” for “chicken” “fossick” for “rummage,” “hessian” for “burlap,” “ute” for “pickup truck,” and “dunny” for “outhouse.” The protagonist develops into a rogue pilot of a Morris Farman biplane and a salesman of Ford T models by emulating his father, “a liar and bullshitter ... hungry for a quid,” a standard British term for the pound sterling (ibid., 85, 456). Whether Herbert’s practicing “how to appear bigger or smaller, how to skin a crow, butcher a pig, wear expensive shoes when my suit was inferior, how to change my accent, how to modulate my walk,” his prolixity and willful chicanery empower him to succeed over the odds, in part by re-enacting his father’s blather (ibid., 221). Drawn from the Great Depression era and World War II slang, the list of his idiosyncratic terms— goog, staver, spiv, abo, quandong, rattler, yabbies— suits his roguery. Through Carey’s characterization of the fictional Aussie rascal, he commemorates and vivifies the high points in the career of his colorful grandfather, aviation innovator Robert Graham “R. G.” Carey of Warrnambool.

CLASS AND DIALOGUE In Oscar and Lucinda (1988), language, both verbal and body English, sets at odds the caste divisions of Sydney. Any undue refinement heightens working-class suspicions of the pretentious British “pommy” (gentleman) in Australia, who mocks the local “JackyJacky,” “navvy,” and “larrikin” (Carey, 1988, 387, 349, 376, 49). For the Reverend Mr. Oscar Hopkins, the scrawny, twitchy minister, an “odd bod” at St. John’s in Randwick parish, body language is “loose and floppy as a puppet” (ibid., 84, 310). On board the steamer Leviathan, he faces Mr. Borrodaile of Ultimo, a declassé mimicker of Oscar’s lordosis, concave cheeks, and jerky walk. Without realizing the insult, Oscar smiles at the improvisation and salutes, “My congratulations, Mr. Borrodaile, it is a great gift” (ibid., 205). The exchange reveals Oscar’s social naiveté and his openness to ridicule. A shift in professional class alters the relationship of outsiders and Sydney’s working class. The minister’s ouster from the pulpit reduces him to penury and wretched labor in the accounting department of James “Jimmy” d’Abbs, a parvenu Irishman who labors at a polished air of artsiness. Expectations heighten after Lucinda announces Oscar’s credentials as an Oriel College “Hon” (honor student) and graduate and labels him an Oxford scholar versed in Greek and Latin (ibid., 103). As a test, D’Abbs asks Oscar to decline “sinister,” the Latin for “left hand,” a mockery of the minister’s left-handedness. The ensuing word battle pits Oscar’s incorrect “sinistur, sinistu, sinistu, sinistrum, sinistris” against d’Abbs’s nonsense reply “Sinistartorium” (ibid., 291). The comic lingual duel implies that neither man knows enough about Latin to outshine the other.

MUTE IN COMPANY Carey indicates through inchoate evenings together that neither title character is capable of simple speech. After Oscar settles at Lucinda’s country home at Longnose Point, Balmain, he fails at expressing himself to a woman he adores. Worsening his isolation, his awkward gestures and miscommunications distance him from his beloved. In contradictory postures, he and Lucinda are “each blind to the condition of the other” (ibid., 309). Thus silenced, they wordlessly hug themselves rather than each other, giving the impres-

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sion that he protects himself from her and that she rejects him. They perpetuate their inability to express mutual affection and, like the proverbial ships passing in the night, never exchange loving words. The impasse becomes so palpable that, Lucinda “felt the space between them as if it were a living thing,” the author’s conceit that turns wordlessness into a presence as ominous as the Tower of Babel (ibid., 377). Oscar earns a grudging respect from the glass blowers of Lucinda’s factory, crafters who speak a local argot “as direct as nails” (ibid., 307). Oscar’s fish-out-of-water syndrome worsens at a tavern at Urunga, where sordid badinage among tipplers involves urging the minister to visit a prostitute behind a torn curtain to “dip your wee white toe in the holy well,” a coarse metaphor for fornication (ibid., 403). The blasphemy compels him to rise to rebuke the card players. He attempts an utterance like an Old Testament patriarch, but can only tremble and glare. As his courage grows, he mutters “How could I smite you?” and recites a pastiche of verses from Psalm 23 (ibid., 404). The menacing atmosphere silences the “sky-pilot” before he endangers himself further (ibid., 403). His mangled rebuke prefigures his one-sided plea for forgiveness before he drowns alone and screaming in a glass chapel. Saving him from erasure from history is the family story aired by Bob, the posthumous grandson that Oscar unknowingly sires in 1866 on governess Miriam Mason Chadwick within hours of his death. Through Oscar’s ignoble death and slide into aboriginal legend, Carey indicates how an inept communicator impacts Australian history.

FANTASY DYSTOPIA For The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Carey creates his own version of colonial language for Efica, a cluster of 18 archipelagos in the South Pacific. According to reviewer Philip Hensher of the Guardian Weekly, the author writes “fabulously, Dickensianly profuse” prose (Hensher, 1994, 28). Carey explained, “One of my ways to reveal the language of the Eficans was to delve into their French and English colonial past. I began to develop these creolised expressions which would grow from Efican history [that] percolated through their language” (Polito, 1996, 1). He creates original patois, legitimized by a two-part glossary covering French-tinged Efican and Dutch-flavored Voorstandese idiom. Carey enjoyed writing the outline of hybrid language that creates • humorous idiom (to see the angels=experience sexual orgasm; spin drier=prostitute) • ritual food (crois cakes=cross cakes) • word play (vert-walk=narrow green between a curb and sidewalk) • professions (santamarie=nurse). He enjoys garbled French (mo-chou=mons choufleur; dos-sack=backpack; odeklonje=eau de cologne) as well as sight gags (porpoise=penis; wheel-squirrel=rollerblader). For the imperial Voorstand language, he concocts • • • •

Anglo-Saxon look-alikes (hunning=honey) pseudo–Germanic (liefling=darling; wolkegrabber=skyscraper) pseudo–Dutch (prikkeled=irritated, Kakdorp=shit town) tech talk (Simulacrum=robot).

As explained by Michael Heyward, a reviewer for the New Republic, the double patois forms “the fictional equivalent to that sensation of strangeness we all have when we hear

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foreigners speaking our language but using words we never would” (Heyward, 1995, 40). Slang adds “vid,” “sirkus,” and “zine” as evidence of pop media, a theme that Carey peruses in his father-son odyssey to Tokyo publishers of manga and anime in Wrong about Japan (2005). In an interview with the novelist, analyst Robert Polito complimented the scholarly machinery of annotated commentaries as “very funny, teasing academia, among other targets. But they also convey a powerful, almost tragic sense of the two countries’ linguistic strangeness from each other” (Polito, 1996, 1).

19TH-CENTURY VERISIMILITUDE For Jack Maggs (1997), the narrative must delineate the title figure’s adaptation to two nations. The author energizes the text with cocky locutions, such as “esclop” and “Peeler” for “police officer,” “magging” for “chattering,” “skiver” for “layabout,” and “clack-box” for “smart-mouth” (Carey, 1997, 39, 154, 214, 157). Grammarian John Anderson notes Carey’s rule extension in making idioms suit the speaker’s intent. The title figure expresses the job of his foster mother as “She grew me up,” a resetting of active verb and object that transfers the power of maturation to the parent (ibid., 26). To Ramona Koval, an interviewer for Meanjin, the author explained his sources, “dictionaries of cant, criminal slang, wonderful, wonderful books, scary in a way” for their directness in matters of coercion and violence (Koval, 1997, 670). He singled out New Zealand lexicographer Eric Partridge’s Historical Slang (1974) that Carey located in a Yale bookshop as a source of misogynistic and sexual terms. For True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Carey recreated an Irish-Australian argot that he called “a very Irish voice, unpunctuated, passionate, with great stream of sentence ... like Ned Kelly’s DNA” (Seaman, 2005, 52). For critic Henry Sutton of the London Independent, the effect is “a breathless and ultimately very convincing punctuationless dialect ... both hypnotic and extraordinarily powerful” (Sutton, 2003). For a model, the author relied on the language of his elementary school playground in the 1940s for the voicing of a persona as familiar as the boys of his old neighborhood. He explained, “The Kelly voice has been in my head forever” (Murphy, 2003). The lingo preserves elements and tenets of the gang’s milieu in the 1870s and of Australia’s convict past. Contributing to Kelly’s character are his use of “b-----ds,” “b-----rs,” “b-----y,” “c--t,” “eff,” “effing,” “f-----g,” and “ess” and the Dickensian euphemism “adjectival” as masks for improper language, a shield of Ned’s infant daughter’s innocence and a gesture to the truth (Carey, 2000, 3, 9, 157, passim). In justification of character foibles, Carey impressed interviewer Nicholas Wroe, a reviewer for the Guardian, with the value of verisimilitude of language: “He lifts his eyes from the main story and gives you a picture of this whole people of Irish immigrants who have been brutalised and are struggling for some space and some reasonable way of life” (Wroe, 2001, 6). Like William Faulkner’s compassion for Mississippi’s agrarian poor in As I Lay Dying (1930) and Carlos Fuentes’s respect for the bilingual Mexican revolutionary General Tomas Arroyo in Old Gringo (1985), Carey’s voicing of “Derwenter” for “convict,” “fizgig” for “informer,” “lag” for “capture,” and “dob in” for “betray” echoes the pain and outrage of demoralized frontier folk searching for a libertarian champion (ibid., 164, 143, 140, 152).

WORD TRICKS Carey needed a panoply of word tricks to plumb the mental wells of an Aussie poet in My Life as a Fake (2003). He explained in an interview, “Since the Kelly Gang, I aspired

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to make a poetry out of an unlettered voice and ever since I’ve been obsessed with bending, snapping and reshaping sentences, trying to join things in ways that are not at first apparent” (Bennett 2008). The narrator, Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, editor of the London-based poetry journal Modern Review, struggles with the veracity of poet Christopher Chubb, an Australian expatriate living in the back of a bicycle shop in Penang, Kuala Lumpur. As a test, Sarah analyzes his Malaysian English, which produces such corruptions as bisnis (business), samah-samah (same), sarcky (sarcastic), releks (relax), and trishaw (three-wheeled rickshaw). In rebuke of Sarah’s fastidiousness, analyst David Huddart asserts, “There is nothing definitively proper about British English: English is in fact not owned by anyone, and so its transformations in other places create their own versions of propriety” (Huddart, 2006, 64). Huddart concludes that, even the mimicry of pidgin English “has its own life and power,” just as Chubb’s fake literature is still creative writing, whatever its provenance (ibid.). To express the agility of Bob McCorkle’s diction, the text ridicules his misidentification of the nipple of a baby’s bottle. To Christopher Chubb, McCorkle’s inventor, McCorkle aligns four approximate rhymes, “Tit, tight, teat, tote. What a great joke that is. Fee, fie, fo, fum,” a reference to the British folktale “Jack and the Giant Killer,” which bookman Benjamin Tabart first printed in 1807 as a cautionary tale to over-reachers like Chubb (Carey, 2003, 151). The allusion to a monstrous human abductor suits the subsequent description of McCorkle, whose muscular frame is seven feet tall. Theft by an oversized monster implies that Chubb’s week-old daughter Tina is in mortal danger from manhandling. Contributing to verbal pyrotechnics is McCorkle’s complaint that Chubb invented him as a 24-year-old writer without a childhood, a failing that McCorkle rationalizes as justification for kidnapping Tina. In a shift of tone from playful to melodramatic, McCorkle creates bathos by demanding justice of his “dear Father” (ibid., 152). The snipe turns to irony in the resolution, when Tina and Mrs. Lim hack Chubb to death with a machete and toss his corpse down the stairs. The shocking human pile creates a palpable metaphor for Chubb’s attempt to hold together his hoax.

OUT OF THE MOUTHS The best of Carey emerges from the mouths of off-center characters the likes of Honey Barbara, Jack Maggs, Ned Kelly, and Tristan Smith. For Theft: A Love Story (2006), the cast requires a loopy arrangement of defensive artist and ex-con — 36-year-old Michael “Butcher Bones” Boone, a ragged rebel from Bacchus Marsh created along the lines of Herbert Peter Badgery, the title fraud in Illywhacker (1985). Abetting Butcher is his felonious lover — 28-year-old adulterer Marlene Cook Leibovitz, an art authenticator and expert with burglary tools— and Butcher’s younger brother, Hugh “Slow Bones” Boone, a 34-year-old idiot savant. Critic John Updike typifies the Boone brothers’ monologues as “giddy, unbuttoned, reminiscing” from Carey’s boyhood (Updike, 2007, 361). According to James Wood, a critic for the London Review of Books, Butcher is one of “Carey’s scarred, ebullient narrators ... a tough dramatic alloy, delicate and robust at once,” who punctuates his ravings with a naughty-boy rat-a-tat of “fuck” and “shit” (Wood, 2006, 16). The bluster that upbraids Hugh for his unlovely behaviors— wolfing fried sausages, glowering, farting, breaking little fingers— reveals an older caretaker who bears with fraternal affection the onus of a simpleton forever-child. In the midst of a day-and-night romance marathon linking Butcher and Marlene, Hugh lives on the cusp, an observer no more noticed than a puppy.

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To the reader’s amusement, through intercalary chapters, the author inserts in Butcher’s ravings his brother Hugh’s naively informative commentary. The dual narratives ennoble with biblical citations, cynicism, and disorderly segues Hugh’s raw poetry: “All my life I lived amongst the perfumes of secrets, blood, roses, altar wine, who can say what happened to us all in Main Street, Bacchus Marsh, not me” (Carey, 2006, 250). For pseudo-family unity, the story highlights a mutual admiration in Hugh and Marlene for a favorite child’s book, The Magic Pudding, an Australian children’s classic that Norman Lindsay published in 1918. For Hugh, the remembered story orients his moral compass, the view of right and wrong that he expands to cover the amoral swindles of Marlene and Butcher. Animating character exchanges are joyous word battles, which reviewer James Wood types as “customised slang ... the warped reality of spoken language ... a vivid democracy, now high and now low, but always interestingly rich” (ibid.). See also Badgery, Herbert; humor; Illywhacker; irony; names

• Further readings Anderson, John M. Modern Grammars of Case. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. “Australian Authors Defend Local Language,” Guardian (21 April 2009): 5. Bennett, Ronni. “His Illegal Self by Peter Carey,” As Time Goes By, www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2008/02/ peter-carey.html, accessed on November 26, 2008. Blaber, Ronald, and Marvin Gilman. Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian, Canadian and Indian Fiction. Springwood, NSW: Butterfly, 1990. Carey, Peter. His Illegal Self. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2008. _____. Illywhacker. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. _____. Jack Maggs. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997. _____. My Life as a Fake. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2003. _____. Oscar and Lucinda. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988. _____. Theft: A Love Story. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 2006. _____. True History of the Kelly Gang. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Hensher, Philip. “Heaven, Hell and Disneyland,” Guardian Weekly (23 October 1994): 28. Heyward, Michael. “Parallel Universes,” New Republic 212, no. 15 (10 April 1995): 38 –41. Hope, Deborah. “Showing His Sensitive Side,” The Australian (22 March 2008). Huddart, David. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 2006. Korte, Barbara. Body Language in Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Koval, Ramona. “The Unexamined Life: Peter Carey Interviewed,” Meanjin 56, nos. 3 –4 (1997): 667–682. Murphy, Jessica. “A Living, Breathing Hoax,” Atlantic Unbound (22 October 2003). Polito, Robert. “Peter Carey,” Bomb no. 54 (winter 1996): 1. Seaman, Donna. Writers on the Air. Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2005. Sutton, Henry. “The Non-existent Poets Society,” Independent (14 September 2003). Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. London: Penguin, 2003. Updike, John. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism. New York: Random House, 2007. Wood, James. “Damaged Beasts,” London Review of Books 28, no. 11 (8 June 2006): 16 –17. Woodward, Richard B. “Out of Efica,” Village Voice 40, no. 9 (28 February 1995): 59. Wroe, Nicholas. “Fiction’s Great Outlaw,” Guardian (6 January 2001): 6.

legitimacy Peter Carey’s crusade for authenticity derives from inborn traits sharpened by daily battles with Aussie diffidence, a subject that the expatriate author surveys in much of his canon, particularly 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). James Wood, in a review of Theft: A Love Story (2006) for London Review of Books, draws a likely surmise about the influences on Carey’s themes: “He had read no books until he was 18, an Australian incapable of false aestheticism or preciousness, devoted to the hygienic stringencies of scepticism and year-round bullshit-detection” (Wood, 2006, 17). Carey’s fiction

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conflates the bastardy of characters— the tri-fathered cripple and title character in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), and the unelected position of architect Gerrard Haflinger in “Kristu-Du” (1979)— with the outcasting of Australia’s British pioneers, who arrived by sea from England’s poorhouses, homes for delinquents, and prisons. In acts of reclamation, he reinvests protagonists with self-worth by validating their courage, resilience, and humanity, his gift to Aussie legend Edward “Ned” Kelly and his Irish Catholic immigrant clan in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey introduces the redemption of outsiders in Bliss (1981), his first published novel. Fleeing an adulterous wife, two venal children, and a hostile home and work environment for safety in a woodlands commune on Bog Onion Road, 30-year-old Harry Stanthorpe Joy, a former advertising magnate, tackles guilt for failing as husband and father and for propagandizing cancer-causing products. He struggles to cleanse himself of destructive campaigns for Krappe Chemicals by communing with trees and absorbing their sacred blessing. Like Medieval crusader lore, the pur