Word: lucinda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While Oscar is successfully mastering and profiting from the odds, half a world away Lucinda Leplastrier finds herself orphaned in New South Wales. Her parents' experimental farm has been subdivided and sold by her legal guardian, leaving her with an inheritance of more than (pounds)10,000 and the freedom to move to the colonial metropolis of Sydney, where she buys one of the first things she sees, the Prince Rupert's Glassworks. Lucinda's purchase is not entirely impulsive; she has already come under the spell of glass, with the conviction "that it is invisible, solid, in short...
...church, Australian Author Peter Carey's third novel has begun to build to a spectacular finish. But none of the surprises to come are any more outlandish than the trail of circumstances and coincidences that have led up to them. Like the glass structure it celebrates, Oscar and Lucinda seems the stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th century history and the mullions of painstaking detail. The book does not, of course, weigh twelve tons, but it will seem substantial enough to readers unable to put it down...
Carey's title provides an answer to the first and most obvious question: Who on earth would go to the considerable trouble of making a glass church materialize in the Australian outback? Why, Oscar and Lucinda, naturally. But who are (or were) they, what brought them together, and why did they conceive such a pointless, improbable dream? Explanations, as the author supplies them, grow ever less simple and more entertaining...
Carey's next trick is to bring these two similarly addicted but far-flung young people together. Lucinda journeys to London, where she consults with the designer of the Crystal Palace, the glass-and-iron housing for the famed Exhibition of 1851, about new directions her factory should take. Oscar, meanwhile, successfully out of Oxford and teaching school, has begun to feel that his method of raising money, while not in itself sinful, has inspired unholy passions in his soul. He longs, in short, to bet on everything. So, on the toss of a coin, he decides that...
...suppose they are wrong? On the surface, at least, the events that ripple forth from the meeting of Oscar and Lucinda strongly suggest that possibility. Carey slowly, almost imperceptibly, introduces tragedy into his narrative. For all their individual charms, his hero and heroine have a way of both exalting and destroying everything and everyone around them, including each other. And behind their individual fates lies another, equally ambiguous story, which may be either the arrival of civilization in a barbarous land or the destruction of an Edenic world by pompous, ignorant invaders. Like the best fiction, Oscar and Lucinda does...