Word: 19th
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Harriman first interviewed Feb. 12. Bates called him back Feb. 15 and offered him the job the next day. He accepted last Monday, becoming the 19th coach at Bates. The hiring was announced Thursday...
Banished for life to New South Wales, a convict eventually returns to 19th century London, risking hanging if the law discovers him, all because he wants to see Henry Phipps, the young English gentleman he has "made" by sending money from abroad. Does that premise sound familiar? It will to those who have read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and remember Pip's turmoil when he learns that his elevation in society has been financed by the fearsome felon Abel Magwitch. The novel being described here, however, is Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (Knopf; 306 pages; $24). What the dickens...
...then ad-libs an original and freestanding performance, replete with the sorts of twists and shocks and coincidences that originally gave page turners a good name. And those readers who retain a clear sense of Dickens' novel will encounter a trove of subtle allusions, not just to the 19th century author's life and works but also to the predatory relationship between an inventor of tales and the real-life subjects who find themselves grist for this creative mill...
...struggle between Maggs and Oates, a character obviously based on Dickens and lacking only the original's extenuating genius, forms the stem of Carey's plot. But, as befits a mock-19th century novel, there are many fascinating exfoliations. All of Carey's major characters come equipped with vivid childhoods--not just Maggs, thrown on a Thames mud flat as an infant and adopted in order to be trained as a thief, or Oates, humiliated and impoverished young by a feckless father. There is also Mercy Larkin, who befriends Maggs and who was sent into prostitution when barely more than...
...stop." Here was one place where an "in turn," as it happened, referred to "a rock filled with clockwise rotation," as opposed to, not a special prosecutor, but an "out turn." Nearby was a whole museum of curling--well, a couple of display cases, containing a signed brush, a 19th century crampit, a polishing machine and all 10 issues of the now defunct Japanese magazine Happy Curling...