My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey
Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a serious but struggling literary magazine, is persuaded to visit Kuala Lumpur with a famous poet and old family friend, John Slater, half in hope of finding out the truth about her mother’s death, for which she has blamed him for years.
But Sarah's biggest regret is that she has never yet found – and published – a really great piece of work and, when she accidentally meets a down-at-heel Australian cycle repair man who shows her a tantalising piece of manuscript, she leaps at the opportunity to see more.
The bitter man that starts telling her his story is Christopher Chubb, a poet who caused a sensation in his home country when he sent a series of poems to an avant-garde journal, Personae, together with a brief biography of their supposedly dead creator, one Bob McCorkle, a mechanic, and a covering letter from an equally fictitious relative, asking whether the poems are any good.
David Weiss, the magazine's editor, is completely taken in by the hoax – but it is to be his downfall, as he is prosecuted for obscenity by an Establishment that creates a case out of almost nothing.
The guilt-riddled Chubb then finds that his creation has come to life and, kidnapping an infant that Chubb has adopted, believing it to be his own, flees. Chubb follows, through jungles and down rivers, through civil war and inter-tribal conflicts, all the way to Kuala Lumpur as the novel spins toward its climax.
Peter Carey's novel takes as its starting point the Ern Malley hoax of 1943, in which two Australian writers created a fictional poet and submitted poetry in his name to a literary magazine, Angry Penguins.
The real hoax and the fictional one do, of course, opposite things. The original one – like its literary successor – was intended to show up modernism and an obsession with fashion in Australian culture. But Carey turns this on its head to suggest post-colonial the fear of not being fashionable and modern as well as those fears of modernism.
However, it's not essential to enjoyment of the story to know the history behind the hoax, because this is a book that raises far more questions and ideas than that.
There's a matter of anti-semitism that crops up early on in Chubb's attitude to Weiss, a young Jew who has inherited the wealth that has allowed him to set up his journal. But while there are hints throughout the novel of bigotry between different ethnic groups, and some suggestions of class hatreds too, Chubb's anti-semitism has no equal in terms of the weight that it has in the early scenes, and it's difficult to know what point Carey is making is, beyond the obvious It's A Bad Thing. Is he suggesting that Chubb was really motivated by anti-semitism? Even that racism and anti-semitism have coloured Australian attitudes toward culture?
The big theme here is one of creation – not only creation of artistic work but also creation of self.
Developing this idea, he takes Mary Shelley's great nature-blaspheming creation, Frankenstein, and makes McCorkle a vast monster, his face originally created by 'stitching' together pieces of different photographs, that haunts – and taunts – his maker.
Man defies nature – and cannot escape his arrogance.
The artist, in the act of creation, becomes a god; becomes an extra-natural blasphemer, and risks becoming imprisoned by his own creation and by the madness of his audacity. Is Chubb's world a fantasy or is it – in defiance of nature – real? Is Chubb telling the truth or spinning a vast web of lies? Is he really a genius – or is he mad?
And Slater recalls the idea of Salieri in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus – aware of genius but at the same time, knowing his own mediocrity, in spite of his own great fame.
Sarah, apparently not a creator herself, is so determined to discover something special, thus clothing herself in vicarious glory, that she is sucked into Chubb's world and even considers crime. This is the critic/publisher criticised, but both critic and artist needing each other, bound together in a relationship of mutual dependence.
What is fake and what is real? Thus we are left with myriad questions and ideas; a complex, multi-layered thing that can leave one breathless.
Carey's prose is straightforward and takes the story spinning forward at pace. And there are some stand-out moments, such as this acerbic gem: "Australia is a country where a woman named Chamberlain was recently convicted of murdering her baby on the basis of no evidence other than her refusal to cry on television" – which in recalling the opening of Camus's The Outsider, also damns his own country.
All is appearances. All is an act to get by, to produce positive reactions from others. We challenge that at peril to ourselves.
The ending is rather sudden and slightly unsatisfactory in terms of loose ends, but My Life as a Fake is a rollicking good piece of literary entertainment.
Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a serious but struggling literary magazine, is persuaded to visit Kuala Lumpur with a famous poet and old family friend, John Slater, half in hope of finding out the truth about her mother’s death, for which she has blamed him for years.
But Sarah's biggest regret is that she has never yet found – and published – a really great piece of work and, when she accidentally meets a down-at-heel Australian cycle repair man who shows her a tantalising piece of manuscript, she leaps at the opportunity to see more.
The bitter man that starts telling her his story is Christopher Chubb, a poet who caused a sensation in his home country when he sent a series of poems to an avant-garde journal, Personae, together with a brief biography of their supposedly dead creator, one Bob McCorkle, a mechanic, and a covering letter from an equally fictitious relative, asking whether the poems are any good.
David Weiss, the magazine's editor, is completely taken in by the hoax – but it is to be his downfall, as he is prosecuted for obscenity by an Establishment that creates a case out of almost nothing.
The guilt-riddled Chubb then finds that his creation has come to life and, kidnapping an infant that Chubb has adopted, believing it to be his own, flees. Chubb follows, through jungles and down rivers, through civil war and inter-tribal conflicts, all the way to Kuala Lumpur as the novel spins toward its climax.
Peter Carey's novel takes as its starting point the Ern Malley hoax of 1943, in which two Australian writers created a fictional poet and submitted poetry in his name to a literary magazine, Angry Penguins.
The real hoax and the fictional one do, of course, opposite things. The original one – like its literary successor – was intended to show up modernism and an obsession with fashion in Australian culture. But Carey turns this on its head to suggest post-colonial the fear of not being fashionable and modern as well as those fears of modernism.
However, it's not essential to enjoyment of the story to know the history behind the hoax, because this is a book that raises far more questions and ideas than that.
There's a matter of anti-semitism that crops up early on in Chubb's attitude to Weiss, a young Jew who has inherited the wealth that has allowed him to set up his journal. But while there are hints throughout the novel of bigotry between different ethnic groups, and some suggestions of class hatreds too, Chubb's anti-semitism has no equal in terms of the weight that it has in the early scenes, and it's difficult to know what point Carey is making is, beyond the obvious It's A Bad Thing. Is he suggesting that Chubb was really motivated by anti-semitism? Even that racism and anti-semitism have coloured Australian attitudes toward culture?
The big theme here is one of creation – not only creation of artistic work but also creation of self.
Developing this idea, he takes Mary Shelley's great nature-blaspheming creation, Frankenstein, and makes McCorkle a vast monster, his face originally created by 'stitching' together pieces of different photographs, that haunts – and taunts – his maker.
Man defies nature – and cannot escape his arrogance.
The artist, in the act of creation, becomes a god; becomes an extra-natural blasphemer, and risks becoming imprisoned by his own creation and by the madness of his audacity. Is Chubb's world a fantasy or is it – in defiance of nature – real? Is Chubb telling the truth or spinning a vast web of lies? Is he really a genius – or is he mad?
And Slater recalls the idea of Salieri in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus – aware of genius but at the same time, knowing his own mediocrity, in spite of his own great fame.
Sarah, apparently not a creator herself, is so determined to discover something special, thus clothing herself in vicarious glory, that she is sucked into Chubb's world and even considers crime. This is the critic/publisher criticised, but both critic and artist needing each other, bound together in a relationship of mutual dependence.
What is fake and what is real? Thus we are left with myriad questions and ideas; a complex, multi-layered thing that can leave one breathless.
Carey's prose is straightforward and takes the story spinning forward at pace. And there are some stand-out moments, such as this acerbic gem: "Australia is a country where a woman named Chamberlain was recently convicted of murdering her baby on the basis of no evidence other than her refusal to cry on television" – which in recalling the opening of Camus's The Outsider, also damns his own country.
All is appearances. All is an act to get by, to produce positive reactions from others. We challenge that at peril to ourselves.
The ending is rather sudden and slightly unsatisfactory in terms of loose ends, but My Life as a Fake is a rollicking good piece of literary entertainment.