Word: douglasses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even as she is drawn into Chubb's beguilements, Wode-Douglass is a brittle, amusing narrator. But eventually she's just the audience for Chubb's less gripping story of his daughter's kidnapping by McCorkle, the figment with a beating heart. With this, the book seems to move from novel to fable, a world in which poems and children all have uncertain parentage. Even so, decoding that fable is another kind of pleasure. Carey's book begins with a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Here's a story with another monster who strode into the world...
...have a life outside the intentions of the artist? In Carey's nimble revision of the Malley episode, we enter through Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London poetry magazine, who is thinking back on a trip she made to Malaysia in 1972 in the company of John Slater, a goatish, prevaricating but celebrated poet. In Kuala Lumpur she stumbles upon Christopher Chubb, a disheveled Australian expatriate who has a bike-repair shop but also reads Rilke. Learning that Wode-Douglass is an editor, he tantalizes her, not with his own work but with a brilliant page...
Slater warns Wode-Douglass that Chubb is a hoaxer and that McCorkle is merely a phantom. This seems to explain everything until Chubb tells her the almost convincing story of how McCorkle--powerful, angry and nearly 7 ft. tall--turned up one day in the flesh. Is McCorkle flesh and blood or a projection of Chubb's imagination? And since Chubb's own verse is mush, how could he possibly have been the real author of McCorkle's stunning poems--the work of a man who had "ripped up history and nailed it back together with its viscera...
...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...
...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...