It is a magnificent, poetic contemplation of the lying, fakery, and insincerity inherent in the act of artistic creation. For these reasons alone - that he frightens those who want their fiction easy and annoys those who want theirs portentous - a new Peter Carey novel is cause for joyĪt a time when readers are so often asked to respect, admire and even to buy a vast number of memoirs and naively autobiographical novels whose only dubious merit lies in their sincerity, Peter Carey’s new novel comes like a monsoon after drought.
Too emotionally dangerous to be fully embraced by doe-eyed lovers of The Time Traveler's Wife, too much fun to be taken entirely seriously by the dour acolytes of JM Coetzee (the contemporary whose career his most resembles), Carey ploughs his own dogged, compelling, fantastical furrow. Perhaps this is why, despite being one of the world's leading novelists, he is more respected than loved. He is formally ostentatious, often inventing fabulist characters with equally fabulist voices and generally remaining allergic to adjective-free naturalism.
His novels roil, threatening at any moment to erupt impolitely all over the carpet. "If you are MAKING ART," says a character in Peter Carey's magnificent new novel "the labour never ends, no peace, no Sabbath, just eternal churning and cursing and worrying and fretting."Ĭarey is an artist who churns and curses and worries and frets.
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