Salon.com > Peter Carey

“Theft”

Wed, 10 May 2006 11:30:00 +0000

"Good artists borrow; great artists steal," said Picasso or T.S. Eliot or Salvador Dali -- no one seems to know which. Peter Carey's new novel, as wily and diverting as the ones before, treats of all the ways that art and theft intersect in the lives of two brothers, Michael "Butcher Bones" Boone and Hugh "Slow Bones" Boone. The items purloined include: paint, canvas, a spouse, a son, a patrimony, an artist's style, an artist's finished work, the right to authenticate an artist's work, a forgery, a human life and a folding chair. "Theft" is a hard-boiled detective story of sorts, complete with an ingenious conspiracy and a ravishingly deceitful femme fatale.

The novel is set in the early 1980s. Michael is a burnt-out Australian painter who "had once been as famous as a painter could expect to be in his own backyard." A bad divorce and the shifting styles of the art world have cast him onto hard times. Plus, there's the little matter of the prison stint he did after being caught trying to steal back the paintings his ex-wife won in the divorce settlement. And the restraining order. Now he's reduced to serving as unpaid caretaker in a borrowed cabin outside a small, swampy, buggy Australian town.

“True History of the Kelly Gang” by Peter Carey

Thu, 11 Jan 2001 19:18:00 +0000

Few novelists are more artistically protean than the Australian-born Peter Carey, who has written fantasy ("The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith"), domestic realism ("Bliss"), picaresque adventure ("Illywacker") and suburban gothic ("The Tax Inspector"), as well as the more or less uncategorizable Booker Prize-winning "Oscar and Lucinda." So anyone who fell in love with his last novel, the Dickensian "Jack Maggs," shouldn't reach for the new one, "True History of the Kelly Gang," expecting more of the same. This time around, Carey has written a western, although one thing "True History" does share with all his other books is its Australian heart.

"True History" presents itself as a collection of autobiographical documents, mostly written by Ned Kelly, a legendary outlaw who, with his brother and two friends, briefly had the run of northeast Victoria and a chunk of New South Wales at the end of the 19th century. Ned addresses his story to his daughter, whom he was never to meet, so that she will not have to know "what it is to be raised on lies and silences." The peculiar style Carey uses to re-create Ned's voice is crude without the sacrifice of eloquence; it comes across as the heartfelt expression of an intelligent, reflective but indifferently educated man. A sample: "Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen's Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it." It takes a page or two to adjust to the way the sentences run together, but only that long, and there's something organic to the way they're compounded, as if they were measured in ideas and breath, not the more pedestrian notion of "complete thoughts."

Missing Children

Tue, 05 May 1998 10:45:00 +0000

My wife became pregnant during her first menstrual cycle after she went
off the pill. Through blind luck. There was no basal thermometer, no
counting of days, no testing of mucus viscosity. Our attitude was, "If it happens, it
happens." Underlying our casual approach was an unspoken, paralyzing
fear of failure.

We are conditioned to think about procreation as the easiest,
most "natural" event. The societal message about people who do fail -- those
unfortunate to suffer miscarriages or stillbirths, those who endure
infertility, those who are gay -- is that they have been naturally
selected out and are therefore damaged. Silently damaged. It is a great
unspoken. This we know from a surprising number of friends who have
suffered from not being able to have a child. In this age of supreme
faith in science, the loss of a child seems medieval, and those who
endure it frequently feel compelled to suffer in silence, too hurt, too
ashamed, too angry to talk about it. And we, the unthinking easy
breeders (our daughter will soon be 3), generally don't know what to say, how to comfort, how to
empathize with such a primal, personal loss. "Wanting a Child," in which prominent writers share their personal stories
of infertility, miscarriage, adoption and the challenges of raising
disabled children, should help banish the taboo of talking about
miscarriage and loss, comfort those struggling to become parents and
help those who want to understand the emotional crush weighing down on
their friends.