Random Book Review: "My Life as a Fake" by Peter Carey

Okay, I'll just say this straight off: I loved this book. It's a sort of creepy, semi-supernatural, literary mystery with roots in a historic Australian literary hoax. In short, a hard book to sum up, but one that is easy to appreciate.

Here's what Amazon says about it:

"In Melbourne in the 1950s, an arrogant young Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the trendiest of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of Chubb’s imagination. Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but the local authorities also sue its editor for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone uncannily resembling the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle leaps to his feet. At this moment a horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he has himself manufactured."

But this description is all backstory.

The "present" of the novel concerns Sarah Wode-Douglass, lover of poetry and editor of the "Modern Review" who, on a sort of whim, accompanies a lecherous old friend of her long-dead parents to Malaysia. There she finds a desperate Australian bicycle repairman reading obscure literature. The man shows her a scrap of poetry of such genius she is desperate to publish it. But in order to read the rest, she must bear witness to the bicycle repairman's strange story.

As you might have guessed by these two quite disparate descriptions, the plot of this novel is rather complicated and unconventional. The drama is almost entirely in the backstory with subplots (also involving backstory) and many interesting and not quite so interesting twists. Because of its complexity, the novel doesn't quite deliver that perfect ending I'd hoped for. It feels rushed, and much goes unexplained.

"My Life as a Fake" is ambitious beyond reason and yet, for the most part, it works. This is mostly due to Carey's beautiful prose. Although I know little about this part of the world, I felt the humid rain forest morning, the smells and narrow streets, the sense of alienation the characters seemed to cultivate.

In a way, this novel was similar to "His illegal Self" (which I reviewed a while back). But this novel touches on bigger themes: the meaning of art, identity, guilt and redemption among many other things. And, for me, it was a real page-turner.

Enjoy!

Book Review: "His Illegal Self" by Peter Carey

Here’s another “adult forms meaningful relationship with kid not his/her own” story, but one vastly different from “About a Boy” in focus and intent. I didn’t read this book as “research” but rather found it on the library’s scant audiobooks shelf and thought it sounded interesting. Little did I know, I was wading back into Zorro territory, if only slightly.

“His Illegal Self” is the story of 7 year old “Che”, the child of 70’s underground radicals, raised by his WASPy grandmother on a ritzy upstate New York estate. One day, a woman who Che takes to be his infamous and long absent mother shows up and absconds with him. At first Che is eager to join his notorious parents on the run, but the woman is not who he thinks she is, and the two end up in the Australian rain forest in a sort of subsistence level hippy commune.

This is the first of Peter Carey’s books I’ve read and I found the writing stunning. Descriptions of the Australian jungles and beaches are achingly beautiful, so lush and tactile I felt as if I knew these place down to the bones. The characters are interesting—though they take some time to know and understand. Perhaps this is intentional on Carey's part-- our initial impressions as confused as Che's as he sorts out the truth of his situation. It's a complex sort of truth, the characters are, in a way, as densely mysterious as the bush.

In fact, the whole book is structured so that the readers’ emotions mirror those of the boy as he sets off hopefully, becomes increasingly confused and frightened, before finally coming into his own sort of understanding.

From a writer’s point of view, I found the meandering plot really interesting. It had a deus ex machina feel to it in places, and was wide ranging and loose ended, but totally engrossing just the same. Some of the subplots seem to lead off into the dense brush and disappear, others are left shadowy, never quite resolve themselves. But the boy’s developing relationship with his unwitting “kidnapper” – and with a feral, paranoid hippie they encounter (Of course, this character sort of stole the show for me)—is complex and so well-depicted, the loose ends hardly mattered.

Carey is an established and well-respected writer. I wonder if a debut author would have been granted the space to be this sort of sloppy with the plot. Probably not. But I'm glad he was able to; "His Illegal Self" would have been a different book if he'd been forced to hack this wild and fertile jungle into neat little garden row plot strands.

Has anyone else read this one? Comments?