Peter Carey: My life as a fake

Reviewed by Margie Thomson

Now I find that once more I have shrunk

To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,

I had read in books that art is not easy

But no one warned that the mind repeats

In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

The black swan of trespass on alien waters.


As these words, conceived as a parody by a "prim, self-righteous" poet named Christopher Chubb, are recited to him by a man who sprang to life from Chubb's own imagination, he realises in horror that "What had been clever had now become true".

In our era of multiple and many-shaded truths, Peter Carey has tackled the ultimate postmodern subject area, creating a story that is onion-like in both its structure and its layers of meaning. Narratives lie within narratives, paradoxes abound, fakes come to life and the truth is always uncertain, ignored, reconstructed or unbelievable.

Carey's eighth novel is, like his previous, the Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang, based on real events in Australia's past - the 1943 Ern Malley affair that Robert Hughes has described as "without question, the literary hoax of the twentieth century". But rather than retell that history, Carey has simply used it as the genesis for his own wild imaginings, recasting the original personalities and adding some more of his own.

In 1943, two talented but conservative poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, decided to expose the pretension of the modernism-dominated literary establishment. They cobbled together, from sources as diverse as Shakespeare and a report on mosquito breeding-grounds, a collection of poems which they called The Darkening Ecliptic.

They invented a poet - Ern Malley, motor mechanic, largely unschooled, recently deceased at age 24 - and sent the lot to the editor of an avant-garde magazine, Angry Penguins, with a letter purporting to be from Malley's sister.

The editor guzzled the bait, declaring Malley "one of the most remarkable and important poetic figures of this country", published, and was soon after disgraced when the hoax was made public. Editor Max Harris was prosecuted for publishing obscenities supposedly contained within the poems.

Carey has bundled McAuley and Stewart into Christopher Chubb, turned the fictional Malley into furious, giantish Bob McCorkle, and invented a new editor, handsome, arrogant David Weiss. Among other new characters are the narrator, English literary editor Sarah Wode-Douglas, and her old enemy, an iconoclastic, dissolute older poet named John Slater.

The surreal elements of the plot, as fictional poet Bob McCorkle comes to life, are the wings Carey gives to the themes he has taken from the original events. He explores them through the lens of his own artistic preoccupation: the power of the imagination.

He's returning to questions he addressed in his second novel Illywacker - are we the creatures of the stories we tell ourselves, and can untruth can take on a life of its own, in effect becoming true?

Into the mix of history and his own imagination he's also added a big dose of Mary Shelley. My Life As A Fake is a modern take on the multi-dimensional story of Frankenstein and his monster.

Carey acknowledges this in the book's epigraph with the quote, "I beheld the wretch - the miserable monster whom I had created ... "), and he follows Shelley's story in various ways. As Frankenstein and his gruesome creation fled civilisation for Mont Blanc, so does McCorkle (followed by Chubb) flee to the jungles and cities of Malaysia. As Frankenstein's monster cries, "How dare you sport thus with life?", so does McCorkle angrily accuse Chubb, "You made my life as a joke."

While Wode-Douglas is the key narrator, the voices of Chubb and Slater dance in and out of her telling, so that often we are reading stories within stories, in the past and present - a complicated web that Carey creates with astonishing clarity. This is largely through his great skill at creating distinctive voices for his characters, both psychologically and phonically distinct, whether it's the coolly ironic tone of the London literary set, or the acquired Malaysian patois of Chubb.

On a trip to Malaysia in 1970, 26 years after Chubb's McCorkle hoax, Wode-Douglas stumbles across Chubb, now old, sick, disgraced, almost forgotten and working as a bicycle mechanic in fetid, sodden Kuala Lumpur, and she listens as he tells her his side of the story. And what a story it is: of a man become undone by his own invention.

Carey is an Australian who lives in New York but remains fascinated by Australian cultural mythology. He has long been attracted by those events although, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald recently, he struggled to find the right way of projecting them.

The story begins almost magically, taking the reader instantly into the heart of the novel and its characters, hooking with its ironic wit, intellectual playfulness and irresistible hints of mystery and suspense. However, it reaches a plateau around the three-quarter mark where it seems to slow, becoming a little dulled through the overuse of melodrama, before ending on a weaker note than we would expect from Carey.

The author is a phenomenon in contemporary popular literary fiction. Born just months after the literary hoax that he has now out-faked (he has just turned 60), he has won the Booker Prize for True History and for Oscar and Lucinda, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Jack Maggs and many Australian prizes. This book is largely wonderful, more complicated and intellectually ambitious than True History, although lacking that novel's consistent power.

Finally, it needs to be said that this is a truly gorgeous book: thick art-quality paper, rough-cut, coloured ink, lovely artwork on the covers. It's a triumphant gesture from Random House, which has just acquired Carey on a two-book deal from the University of Queensland Press, to which he remained loyal for 28 years.

Carey's novel is expected to pique interest in the original hoax, so Random House will re-release Michael Heyward's account, The Ern Malley Affair, later this year.

Knopf, $49.95