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In Melbourne in the late 1940s, a young conservative poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. But over the ensuing years his audacious act of literary ventriloquism takes on a much darker resonance. Having fled Melbourne for the seedy, sweaty streets of Kuala Lumpur, Chubb finds himself, just as Frankenstein was, haunted and pursued by his own creation.
'Unfailingly, shamelessly entertaining.' Philip Hensher, The Times
'Confidently brilliant.' John Updike, The New Yorker
'In a beautifully crafted piece of storytelling, Peter Carey has produced an immensely powerful work that will resonate for generations.' Nick Groom, Independent
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The story is narrated on its outer layer (there are numerous stories within stories and narrators within these) by Sarah, the editor of a prestigious, if perpetually bankrupt, English poetry magazine. She writes in the early 1980s, some ten years after the main events of the story, which take place in Kuala Lumpur in 1972. She was taken there by a friend of her deceased parents (and, she suspects, her mother's lover), and seeks to use the trip as a way to talk to him about the suicide of her mother when she was a child. However, one day while strolling the streets of KL, she sees a decrepit white man sitting in a hovel of a bike-repair shop reading Rilke. This piques her interest and she is soon drawn into the strange tale of Christopher Chubb, a man who thirty years previously perpetuated a hoax on a modernist literary review.
Chubb found trendy modernist poetry to be vapid stuff and so submitted some nonsense material from a fictitious blue-collar mechanic poet to an editor he used to go to school with. The editor bought it hook, line and sinker, but eventually was prosecuted on obscenity charges. This is based on the "Ern Malley" case, and follows the real-life case in all its bizarre twists and turns. However, as Chubb relates to Sarah, his fictional poet actually showed up and started harassing him. Chubb had created a fake picture of the poet by grafting three photos of different people together, Frankenstein-like, and the embodiment of this picture appears at his house! Eventually "the monster" kidnaps Chubb's adopted daughter Tina (she is the result of a subplot involving a charismatic and sexy artiste in the '50s) and Chubb embarks on a long quest across Indonesia and Malaysia to try and recover the girl. As Chubb relates his story in Malay-peppered Australian English, one gets a strong whiff of Conrad about the whole affair (Heart of Darkness meets Lord Jim).
Sarah is kept enthralled by this tale because Chubb has shown her a page from another "McCorkle" work that she recognizes as genius. Desperate to finally publish something groundbreaking, she sticks around for the whole convoluted story, even though she's not sure whether or not Chubb is lying to her or possibly even mad. Along the way, there are all manner of stories in miniature -- secrets from Sarah's past and present are revealed, we get a part bit on the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, a Sri Lankan master poisoner is introduced, and as a side bonus there is some great descriptive writing about Kuala Lumpur. Sometimes the framework gets a bit complicated and the reader has to work hard to keep track of which layer of narration or time frame one is in. Readers who like clear resolutions are forewarned that Carey isn't interested in that -- the ultimate point of the book is that we all construct our own identities, to the point that sometimes we lose track of who we are.
The fraud, which took place in the 1940s, is told in flashbacks from the 1972 trip, mainly by Lady Sarah and Chubb. Its wry humor and social commentary are fun to read, with Chubb mocking the state of literary awareness in Australia at that time and providing information about the obscenity trial which resulted from his hoax. When Chubb cleverly shows her one page from another work by "McCorkle," Sarah sees it as a masterpiece akin to "The Wasteland," and tries to obtain the whole manuscript, the publication of which would save her magazine. Sarah's life in 1983, and shocking revelations by John Slater about Sarah's parents, their marriage, and her mother's death in the late 1930's widen the focus and time frame. The reader quickly recognizes, as all the characters play their parts and the story develops, that all are guilty of some sort of fakery.
The second half of the book, however, becomes a wild, often wacky adventure story as separate new plots develop, the time frame changes to World War II, and several new characters, unrelated to the main plot, tell their own stories. Sarah and Slater play no real role in the action as Chubb tries to rescue his daughter from a suddenly real, seven-foot-tall McCorkle, who has kidnapped her and run from island to island in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Japanese have invaded and have begun vividly described atrocities.
Separate, virtually unconnected plots in four time frames--1983, 1939, 1972, and World War II--revealed by four or five different narrators, in settings that include England, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia all contribute to a confusion of focus. The characters, events, and plot line from the beginning of the book have little if any overlap with the characters, events, and plots in the middle. Though the several sections are exciting and imaginative separately, they did not cohere for me, and I found myself thinking of the first half as a stand-alone novella, with the remaining episodes connected to it as a series of memorable, separately developed short stories. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple
For me, it became a very dreary book... I got so bored with the writing style, pace, and lack of variety that I skipped a good chunk... but even the ending didn't pick up! I'm sure I must be missing something from this cultural icon, but it wasn't for me, sorry!!!
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