IN
THE LAST essay in this collection,
Robert Macfarlane touches on the main
reasons why Peter Carey’s novels
‘have proved so very attractive
to academic exegetes’, in their
combination of the postmodern and
the post-colonial. Just how attractive
is demonstrated in the sixty-page
bibliography, which is sure to be
one of the most used parts of Fabulating
Beauty, especially by overseas
readers without access to the invaluable
AustLit. Editor Andreas Gaile, a young
German academic, notes in his introduction
that Carey is now ‘the most widely
commented-on living Australian author’.
While Patrick White is currently well
ahead, with more than twice as many
critical items published on his work,
Carey is catching up fast. Visit any
bookshop, whether in Melbourne, London
or New York, and you will of course
find many more titles by Carey than
by White. If, as Simon During has
argued, White was the perfect novelist
for those wishing to argue for the
academic significance of Australian
literature in the 1950s and 1960s,
then Carey has just as obviously caught
the dominant theoretical currents
of the past thirty years. While Tim
Winton may sell just as well and,
if ‘favourite book’ polls
are any guide, be more loved, no one
has yet published a major critical
study of his work.
As
the bibliography demonstrates, no
less than seven monographs have so
far appeared on Carey’s work,
mainly published in Australia but
also in Italy, Austria and Britain.
Doctoral theses have been completed
in Ireland, France, Sweden, Germany
and Canada, as well as Australia.
The international interest reflected
here is also seen in the twenty essays
collected in Fabulating Beauty,
only five of which have previously
been published. Nine are by Australian
academics, five by Germans, three
by Americans, along with two by critics
from Britain and one from Sweden.
Gaile also provides a new interview
with Carey, who must be the most frequently
interviewed of any Australian author.
Most
of the essays focus on particular
works, though Karen Lamb provides
an insightful piece on Carey’s
reputation since winning his second
Booker Prize for True History of
the Kelly Gang (2000). Unlike
some of the other critics here, whose
readings of Carey seem too simplistically
post-colonial, Lamb notes the ‘increasingly
imperialist appro-priation of his
work’ following his first Booker
win with Oscar and Lucinda (1988),
his attempts to resist this with the
less well-received The Tax Inspector
(1991) and The Unusual Life
of Tristan Smith (1994), but then
his retreat to the safety of the past
with Jack Maggs (1997) and
True History.
Interestingly,
there is no essay here specifically
on The Tax Inspector, even
though, as one contributor notes,
this is probably Carey’s most
puzzling novel. All other titles get
individual treatment, including his
one book for children, The Big
Bazoohley (1995), and his travel
book 30 Days in Sydney (2001).
(The more recent Wrong about Japan,
2004, is listed in the bibliography
but clearly appeared too late to be
discussed.) There is only one essay
on Tristan Smith, as compared
with two on each of Carey’s Booker
Prize winners, and no less than three
on Jack Maggs, suggesting that
academics are just as influenced by
awards as is the ordinary punter.
Given
the volume of criticism that has already
appeared on Carey’s fiction,
the essays in Fabulating Beauty,
which rely mainly on post-colonial
and/or postmodernist approaches, often
seemed to have little new to say.
For me, the most interesting were
those that succeeded in placing Carey’s
works in larger literary or historical
contexts. So Nicholas Birns sets his
reading of the early story ‘Kristu-Du’
within a survey of the political realities
of the 1970s, demonstrating how closely
these are reflected in Carey’s
supposedly ‘fantastic’ fiction.
Bruce Woodcock provides an equally
engaging reading of Jack Maggs
against Karl Marx’s Capital,
reminding us that, as a best-selling
international novelist, Carey is inevitably
incorporated within the capitalist
system he has so often critiqued as
much as he is within old and new imperialisms.
Susan K. Martin echoes this point
in her study of True History
within the context of earlier Australian
fiction about Ned Kelly, noting the
difficulty of distinguishing between
‘the critique of commodification
and enthusiastic contribution to it’,
something that has concerned me about
Carey’s fictional treatment of
Australia ever since Illywacker
(1985). Martin also draws attention
to the insistence on Kelly’s
heterosexuality, not only in True
History but in Robert Drewe’s
earlier Our Sunshine (1991),
not to mention the recent film, all
of which provide Kelly with a fictional
female lover, with Carey also adding
a daughter. This, she argues, serves
to reinforce Kelly’s position
as the archetypal Australian hero:
white and unambiguously masculine.
In
contrast, Robert Macfarlane reads
My Life As a Fake (2003) against
a number of recent English novels
that have also been concerned with
the question of authenticity, especially
in relation to the literary, by writers
such as Peter Ackroyd, A.S. Byatt
and Julian Barnes. He notes that all,
like Carey, have difficulty with ‘how
to take on these literary-theoretical
questions of authenticity and re-cast
them valuably in a fictional form
without squeezing the human air out
of a novel’.
While
contemporary novelists’ preoccupation
with such theoretical questions has
proved very attractive to academics,
the accompanying loss of ‘human
air’ seems to have been one of
the reasons for literary fiction’s
declining general readership. And,
as Fabulating Beauty shows,
post-colonial and other post-structuralist
approaches usually work best when
applied to texts from a more innocent
age. If the novelist is as theoretically
sophisticated as the critic, comparative
and contextual readings can offer
more insight.
