Peter Carey

 

Peter Carey is one of the few authors to have won the Booker Prize twice, having won it in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. These two novels, being set in the nineteenth century, illustrate Carey's interest in the historical novel form, which he refashions through his postmodern sensibility, bringing to it an awareness of an irredeemably lost innocence.

 

 Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia. In the late 1960s he travelled through Europe and the Middle East, and worked in advertising in London. He returned to Australia in 1970, to work in advertising in Melbourne and Sydney while writing most of the stories published in the volumes The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979). His first published novel was Bliss (1981), which is based on a theme of  'hippies versus capitalism', questioning given ideas of normality through a mixture of realism and fantasy.

Bliss was followed by Illywhacker (1985), a postmodern retelling of his grandfather's experiences delivering the first mail around Australia. The book's title comes from an Australian colloquialism for con artist, and its main topic is lying, as announced from the very beginning by Herbert Badgery, the 139 year-old 'Illywhacker'. The novel shows the history of twentieth-century Australia, but, in the true spirit of postmodernist playful treatment of reality', the history is presented through a rich interplay of truth and lies. with the narrator himself even questioning the truth of his own stories.

Carey has lived in various parts of Australia, including Bellingen, which made a strong impact on him, and provided some of the inspiration for Oscar and Lucinda, a mock Victorian historical novel, set mainly in nineteenth-century Australia. It combines a lucid critique of bigotry with the beautiful (but impossible) love story of Oscar Hopkins and Lucinda Leplastrier. After quarrelling with his father over their different religious views, the young Anglican reverend Oscar - who believes the ultimate proof of God's existence has been revealed to him through gambling is driven by his vice to Australia. On the ship he meets Lucinda, an orphaned heiress and an obsessive gambler herself. She owns a glass factory, and their community of thought and feeling - not very obvious otherwise finds a metaphorical projection in the glass cathedral they build together Lucinda bets her inheritance that Oscar can not deliver his church to his remote missionary post. Oscar's foolish attempt to transport the church down the river Bellingen fails. and the church sinks.

 

The novel is informed by a postmodern outlook, which encompasses the awareness of the world's fragmentariness, chaos theory, and the French philosopher Blaise Pascal's idea that faith is a form of gambling. This idea faithfully mirrors Carey's attitude to fiction writing in general as Bruce Woodcock observes, 'If faith was a gamble for Pascal, writing seems to be an incessant gamble for Peter Carey, which is perhaps why he is such a constantly exciting writer. Carey's work remarkable for its fluidity of shape, focus and theme, has an element of risk-taking about it. While interested in revisiting traditional forms, he constantly takes risks by turning them on their heads and filling them up with contemporary content. This ever-present questioning attitude, combined with an awareness of the human condition, has earned him a wide readership. Oscar and Lucinda was filmed in 1997 by Gillian Armstrong and starred Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett.

 

In the late 1980s Carey took up residence in New York City, where he completed much of The Tax Inspector (1991) and wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) and Jack Maggs (1997), Jack Maggs somewhat prefigures True History of the Kelly Gang in that it is also a convict story, indulging in the delights of Victorian melodrama blended with a pervading sense of history and elements of the Australian tradition of convict literature. The novel stages an engaging story of identity reinvention Maggs reminding the reader of Magwitch from Dickens's Great Expectations - against the background of the guilt-haunted past of colonial England.

 

True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) presents a colourful portrait of the famous Irish Australian outlaw and martyr Ned Kelly, who was hanged for murder, but transformed by legend into one of the big names of Australian nationalism. Receiving the award, Carey said that he was indebted to his wife, and to Ian McEwan, one of the rival nominees, promising to buy him an expensive meal. In the novel Carey adopts the language of late nineteenth-century rural Australians, using among his sources the outlaw's one surviving letter. Carey takes the reader from Ned's childhood, through his teenage years in and out of prison, his horse thefts and bank hold-ups, and finally to his years as a leader of a rebel band of farmers, fighting against a corrupt system.

 

In 2001 Carey published A Wildly Distorted Account, a travel book of his 30-day visit to Sydney. My Life as a Fake (2003) was inspired by Australia's most famous literary hoax, the 'Ern Malley Scandal' of 1944, in which a literary editor was persuaded to publish a collection of fake 'Modernist poems which two anti-modernist poets had put together in a few hours and offered under the pseudonym Ern Malley.

 

Like Ned Kelly, Carey is a declared anti conventionalist: not only did he abandon university studies, but years later, having won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Jack Maggs in 1998, he became famous in the British press for refusing to meet the queen on the occasion.