Word: carey
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...ARTS Books: Peter Carey's new novel...
...Carey quotes original documents from the scandal extensively but updates the action to the early '70s and transports a now lone hoaxer, Christopher Chubb, to Kuala Lumpur. The book's narrator (and Chubb's hoaxee) is Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a highbrow literary review based in London. When Chubb shows her a single page of verse written by Bob McCorkle (the novel's Ern Malley), Wode-Douglass becomes obsessed with publishing work bearing his name. The mainspring of Carey's story is a fascinating statement by Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, years after the original hoax was exposed...
...This tale of a monster emerging from the human mind and the international pursuit of a crumbling manuscript closely follows the canons of the 19th century Gothic novel. Yet Carey does right not to belabor his debt to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which haunts every page. Carey unfolds his plot in a Chinese-box construction of narration within narration, focusing mostly on Chubb's telling his story to Wode-Douglass in a hotel bar in K.L. It's a convention straight out of a Regency-era chiller: the aged friar revealing the horrid skeletons in the abbey closet...
...Much of the fun lies in Carey's bravura manipulation of the clich?s of genre fiction. Some readers might find the diabolical Chinese women in the grisly finale to be an offensive caricature, reminiscent of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu epics, but the scene plays absorbingly well as the denouement of a revenge tragedy...
...True History of the Kelly Gang with its deliberate misspellings and solecisms, Carey sets stylistic obstacles in the reader's way in his new novel. He abjures the use of quotation marks for dialogue, which gives his pages a stylish, neomodernist look, but as the narrative structure grows more convoluted, the reader is often left wondering whether a line is dialogue or the narrator's commentary. Given Carey's many allusions to T.S. Eliot, this complexity might be intended to suggest the elusiveness of certain knowledge about human identity?or it might be merely pretentious. And his attempts to give...