Peter
Carey
Theft: A Love Story
Knopf, $45 hb, 288 pp,
1740512561
SOMETIMES
THE BEST place to get
a true picture of what
Peter Carey is really
thinking about his writing
is in the international
press coverage, in the
slipstream of a book’s
reception, when he is
at least partly preoccupied
with the next writing
challenge. At such times,
Carey’s sensitivities
are vulnerable to exposure,
as they were in an interview
with Robert Birnbaum
in an American regional
newspaper after he won
his second Booker Prize,
for True History
of the Kelly Gang
(2000). Carey is speaking
about readers and reviewers
(whom he reluctantly
acknowledges are also
readers). Australian
reviewers, he explains
to his interviewer,
are usually just journalists
and therefore subject
to literalness and plot
summary, an approach
that doesn’t work
with his fiction.
Carey
has always claimed to
write for his Australian
readers first and foremost,
but you can’t help
wondering if he is out
of touch not only with
the quality of Australian
reviewing but with the
fidelity his readers
may show him. Expectations
that are not met can
quickly turn away the
most loyal fan, one
perhaps beginning to
tire of the conversation
they’ve been having
with his characters
and character types.
Are Carey’s readers
ready for yet another
misunderstood misfit-genius
from Down Under?
I
confess I began Carey’s
new novel Theft:
A Love Story slightly
weary of his continuing
love affair with fakery
and the overloaded conceit
of his previous novel
My Life As a Fake
(2003). I therefore
approached with resistance
this new story about
Butcher Jones, alias
Michael Boone, a boy
who escaped the Australian
cultural wilderness
of Bacchus Marsh to
become a great but out-of-style
painter, then an art
hoaxer.
Butcher
and his mentally challenged
brother Hugh, for whom
he is the sole guardian,
are warriors in a battle
against a lack of generosity
and insight, not least
the ugliness of ‘opinion’,
expert or otherwise,
as it is marshalled
in the cause of art.
They are also locked
into certain understandings
and misunderstandings
of their own.
Theft
is Carey’s latest
ode to misunderstanding,
a narrative swept along
by an undercurrent of
the author’s very
particular views on
art, artists and the
art of being misunderstood.
Like much of his previous
work, this is a large-canvas
novel with aspects visual
and visceral in ways
beyond its immediate
subject. The hint of
subtext is more pointed
than in his earlier
picaresque fictions,
even though Theft
moves with the pace
of popular crime fiction,
a pace driven by the
frustrated ambitions
of its characters. Were
it not for a carefully
constructed antiphonal
narrative, the plot
might have been too
complex and chaotic
to comprehend, but Carey’s
choice of narrative
structure has liberated
him. He manipulates
both pace and perspective
superbly, and the contrast
between the voices of
the brothers describes
an arc of relationship
that traditional narration
and dialogue could not
achieve.
Butcher’s
narrative screams at
us with self-love, and
the artist’s wounded
ego, lurching unexpectedly
into resentful diatribes,
is slapped on the reader’s
table like a bad hand
of poker: he has fallen
from grace in the ‘art
world’, a world
he doesn’t even
believe in, either because
or in spite of his talent.
We understand there
has been a ‘theft’
of his ‘great works’
as ‘marital assets’
in a divorce, and we
are invited to become
intimate with the aspects
of his psyche whose
urgent need for expression
cannot be quelled by
the consumption of large
quantities of alcohol.
Relief
from this bile comes
via Hugh’s narrative,
which offers a strange
stillness, haunting
us with hints of another
story about love; not
the romance between
Butcher and a canny
female art forger but
love in its many other
forms. Hugh not only
understands more than
his clever artist-brother
and reluctant caretaker;
he understands more
than anyone else in
the novel. All of this
is somehow made transparently
clear in the candour
of his faux naïf
utterances.
The
resemblance between
William Faulkner’s
Benjy in The Sound
and the Fury (1929)
and Carey’s Hugh
are marked: both characters
are profoundly isolated
by mental illness, but
their lived experience
and commentary on life
is privileged as the
greater narrative moral
force. In the interview
quoted earlier, Carey
repeats comments he
has often made about
the influence of Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
(1930) on his work in
the early days of his
writing career. Given
the timing of the interview,
the comparison between
Benjy and Hugh seems
even more relevant.
There
is also development
in Theft of what
is often acknowledged
as Carey’s strength
as a novelist: his ability
to detail, sometimes
grossly, the most abysmal
human conduct while
rendering a character
sympathetically. This
particular gift was
not especially stretched
in True History of
the Kelly Gang,
since Australian national
mythology makes it hard
to find anyone who doesn’t
view the bushranger–outlaw
sympathetically, but
if the self-regarding
and self-pitying Butcher
can seem plausibly human,
if flawed, then Carey
is clearly not about
to lose this gift.
It
is, however, with the
character of Hugh that
Carey has taken his
greatest gamble yet
as a writer. Although
the idiot savant
prototype can take a
well-earned place in
the pantheon of novelistic
devices, we would expect
a novelist writing in
the twenty-first century
to render such a character
with great care and
great particularity.
Carey must have found
his problem was dangerously
reversed: how to stop
readers feeling the
wrong kind of sympathy
— pity without
empathy. Carey has risen
to this challenge, as
Hugh’s ‘state’
— his hugeness,
his clumsiness, his
sorrow — appears
to lessen as his voice
emerges. Carey gives
him an impressive vocabulary
of Australian slang,
placed like direction
markers on a journey
back to a world Hugh
understands, that of
his Australian childhood:
the Marsh, a sleep-out,
a butcher’s shop,
a drunken dad, a pious
mum, the comfort —
and the discomfort —
of having his condition
‘understood’.
So
in Theft the
writer’s risk-taking
has become a great fictional
success, a subtle intertextual
comment given the novel’s
own commentary on the
lottery of art, one
that can only be actualised
by readers who may or
may not be inclined
to that understanding
of the novel. The same
readers might be right,
too, in detecting a
stronger than usual
autobiographical thread
in this new novel. Carey’s
works have always been
liberal with references
to places he knows well,
from Bellingen in northern
New South Wales, where
he once part-owned a
property, to New York,
where he now lives.
In Theft, the
compass narrows perceptibly
to include curiously
affectionate and detailed
descriptions of Bacchus
Marsh, the Victorian
town where Carey grew
up.
Even
these, though, are superficial
markers compared with
what amounts to a commentary
of considerable spleen
in the voice of the
once-famous artist-protagonist.
At times, Butcher seems
to conduct a meta-narrative
a bit like a cartoon
character given both
dialogue and thoughts,
with readers treated
to regular commentary
on what it’s like
to be resented as an
international Australian
success, or to have
one’s art works
transferred as marital
assets in a divorce
settlement.
Carey
would no doubt resist
this reading, just as
he laments what he might
call ‘expectations
of the real’ among
his readers (and reviewers).
He understands that
this is, to some extent,
a legacy of his having
chosen to base fiction
on historical events,
but it is also the consequence
of the extraordinary
level of detail Carey
seems to feel is necessary
to bring these worlds
to life. In Illywhacker
(1985) and Oscar
and Lucinda (1988),
wild conceits seem natural
and inevitable, and
there is no trace in
the prose of the effort
required in bringing
that to pass. This is
less the case with Theft.
Carey
is surprisingly evasive
about the research aspect
of his writing, particularly
the extent of it. In
the Birnbaum interview,
he claims to have no
patience for the task
and approves of E.L.
Doctorow’s advice:
‘Do as little as
you can get away with.’
Yet this simply does
not ring true in the
case of Theft,
which reveals layer
upon layer of the most
informed and detailed
knowledge of artistic
construction, paint
composition, painting
technique and the craft
of forgery dating back
some hundreds of years.
Unlike
those earlier fictions,
here the detail is rendered
as separate, an activity,
an artefact; it is not
part of the emotional
world of the novel but
is delivered lecture-style
out of the voice of
its most qualified character.
Consequently, and ironically,
the effort of novelistic
artistry is all too
transparent, and the
detail the reader is
invited to absorb seems
to serve a functional
purpose without necessarily
offering an equivalent
reward to the imagination.
Theft
is therefore an unsettling
mixture of the best
and the worst of Carey:
a witty fast-paced yarn
which neverthe-less
depends too much on
information delivered
with less subtlety than
one would wish for.
There is, of course,
compensation: Carey
has not lost his clear
delight in language,
and the novel is full
of colourful and emotive
lashings of Australian
vernacular and a wonderful
laconic irony that only
his best prose can deliver.
Mockery and empathy
are impossible to separate
and for all the petty
hatreds strewn across
the unlucky paths of
the characters, not
to mention their having
to stare down premeditated
evil, Carey somehow
manages once again to
place a loving hand
on the shoulder of humankind.
