My Life as a Fake (Hardcover)

The narrator of My Life is a Fake is the English poetry editor Sarah Wode-Douglass. She travels to Kuala Lumpur on the invitation of her acquaintance, the poet John Slater, with whom she has a long and complicated past. By accident she meets Chubb who is working in a bicycle repair shop. He gives her a glimpse of a poem by the poet he created named McCorkle. Sarah is desperate to retrieve this poet's work to make her own claim to fame. However, first she must hear the whole gruesome story behind it. It is a complicated affair leading Sarah and the reader to wonder what is real and what is fake. McCorkle comes to life and discredits Chubb's own life. Not only is Chubb's past revealed, but through conversations with Slater Sarah's own past is examined. Another fake is revealed.

Carey does a magnificent job at evoking the environment of Kuala Lumpur in this time period. He creates a thrilling story despite its complicated plot. As the story progresses it becomes confusing who exactly is narrating the story. This fight to be heard seems to be the point because the spotlight is the object of desire for which the characters' manic ambition is set. Lies are the fuel used to gain entry into it. Each character struggles to make their lies sound the most convincing. It is the reader's delightful job to sift through for the truth.

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.

This is a novel about the stories - which may or may not be true - of a man who may or may not be insane, told to a woman who may or may not be insane, about a larger-than-life (in a literal sense) poet who may or may not have existed. At its core, it is a novel about stories, language and poetry. But if this makes the book sound boring, be assured that it is not. It is an exhilarating, thrilling book, and it is hard not to keep turning the pages.

The title is a clue to some of the mysteries of this book. Whose life is it that is "fake"? The invented Bob McCorkle? His unlikely creator, Christopher Chubb? The poetry obsessive Sarah Wode-Douglass? All of their stories are told in the novel, and we are left guessing how much of the story takes place in the mind of any one of them.

One element of the novel which is a little confusing - I believe intentionally so - is the absence of quotation marks around dialogue. This makes it often unclear who is speaking and, more importantly, blurs the boundaries between narrative and dialogue. We do not know what is narrative "fact" and what is recounted to the narrator.

[Spoiler warning:] Another significant key to the novel is the suicide of Sarah Wode-Douglass's mother when Sarah was a small child. What is the significance of this event? Sarah has no recollection of it (at least until reminded of the fact that she had been covered in blood as a child), yet the events surrounding it are part of the reason for her voyage to Malaysia with one of the participants of her mother's suicide. The novel also ends with Sarah being covered in blood. Has Sarah taken revenge on her father (through the father-figure of Christopher Chubb) who, she has just learned, betrayed her mother immediately before the mother's suicide?

"My Life as a Fake" is a highly entertaining novel, very well written, with depths and complexities that surprised me and left me thinking about the book for a long time afterwards. Highly recommended.