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twistinthetale's review against another edition
2.0
This was a pretty tough slog for me. I can see the talent in the writing but the plot and characters were quite unappealing. I found that the blurb, describing a cyber attack on prison facilities in Australia and America, was misleading as the novel really didn't deal with this in any detail. The seedy suburban setting and the unsympathetic characters left a sourness that was difficult to ignore. Only just a 2 star rating for me.
tasmanian_bibliophile's review against another edition
3.0
‘The corporation is under our control. The angel declares you free.’
In 2010, on a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne, Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into the computers of Australia’s prison system. Many prisoners, including hundreds of asylum seekers walk free.
But, because an American corporation runs prison security, the worm also infects close to 5000 American places of incarceration. Was the American intrusion intended?
Felix Moore, who considers himself ‘Australia’s last serving left-wing journalist’ has no doubt. He’s convinced that Gaby’s act was part of a long-running covert conflict between Australia and America. What long running covert conflict? You know, the one that dates back to the Battle of Brisbane in 1942, includes the vexed issue of Pine, and the coup against Gough Whitlam in 1975.
Felix Moore himself is in a spot of bother. He’s just lost a big libel case and his wife has kicked him out. Fortunately, his good mate, property developer Woody Townes has a job for Felix. Woody is going to fund Felix to write Gaby’s biography. He’s concerned that the USA might extradite Gaby.
And then it all gets complicated. Getting Gaby (who just happens to have been born on 11 November 1975) to co-operate may be a challenge. And then, there’s her film-star mother.
Enough. It’s a complicated story that would benefit from rereading. It’s a satire that requires knowledge/memory of events that many of us have forgotten (if we ever knew them). That’s amnesia. It’s a satire about activism, journalism, politics and the relationship between Australia and the USA. It’s a satire with some fairly unlikable characters because, well, characters are less important than ideas in satire.
Just how seriously should we take it?
Not my favourite novel by Peter Carey, but definitely worth reading.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
In 2010, on a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne, Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into the computers of Australia’s prison system. Many prisoners, including hundreds of asylum seekers walk free.
But, because an American corporation runs prison security, the worm also infects close to 5000 American places of incarceration. Was the American intrusion intended?
Felix Moore, who considers himself ‘Australia’s last serving left-wing journalist’ has no doubt. He’s convinced that Gaby’s act was part of a long-running covert conflict between Australia and America. What long running covert conflict? You know, the one that dates back to the Battle of Brisbane in 1942, includes the vexed issue of Pine, and the coup against Gough Whitlam in 1975.
Felix Moore himself is in a spot of bother. He’s just lost a big libel case and his wife has kicked him out. Fortunately, his good mate, property developer Woody Townes has a job for Felix. Woody is going to fund Felix to write Gaby’s biography. He’s concerned that the USA might extradite Gaby.
And then it all gets complicated. Getting Gaby (who just happens to have been born on 11 November 1975) to co-operate may be a challenge. And then, there’s her film-star mother.
Enough. It’s a complicated story that would benefit from rereading. It’s a satire that requires knowledge/memory of events that many of us have forgotten (if we ever knew them). That’s amnesia. It’s a satire about activism, journalism, politics and the relationship between Australia and the USA. It’s a satire with some fairly unlikable characters because, well, characters are less important than ideas in satire.
Just how seriously should we take it?
Not my favourite novel by Peter Carey, but definitely worth reading.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
tasmanian_bibliophile's review
3.0
‘The corporation is under our control. The angel declares you free.’
In 2010, on a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne, Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into the computers of Australia’s prison system. Many prisoners, including hundreds of asylum seekers walk free.
But, because an American corporation runs prison security, the worm also infects close to 5000 American places of incarceration. Was the American intrusion intended?
Felix Moore, who considers himself ‘Australia’s last serving left-wing journalist’ has no doubt. He’s convinced that Gaby’s act was part of a long-running covert conflict between Australia and America. What long running covert conflict? You know, the one that dates back to the Battle of Brisbane in 1942, includes the vexed issue of Pine, and the coup against Gough Whitlam in 1975.
Felix Moore himself is in a spot of bother. He’s just lost a big libel case and his wife has kicked him out. Fortunately, his good mate, property developer Woody Townes has a job for Felix. Woody is going to fund Felix to write Gaby’s biography. He’s concerned that the USA might extradite Gaby.
And then it all gets complicated. Getting Gaby (who just happens to have been born on 11 November 1975) to co-operate may be a challenge. And then, there’s her film-star mother.
Enough. It’s a complicated story that would benefit from rereading. It’s a satire that requires knowledge/memory of events that many of us have forgotten (if we ever knew them). That’s amnesia. It’s a satire about activism, journalism, politics and the relationship between Australia and the USA. It’s a satire with some fairly unlikable characters because, well, characters are less important than ideas in satire.
Just how seriously should we take it?
Not my favourite novel by Peter Carey, but definitely worth reading.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
In 2010, on a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne, Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into the computers of Australia’s prison system. Many prisoners, including hundreds of asylum seekers walk free.
But, because an American corporation runs prison security, the worm also infects close to 5000 American places of incarceration. Was the American intrusion intended?
Felix Moore, who considers himself ‘Australia’s last serving left-wing journalist’ has no doubt. He’s convinced that Gaby’s act was part of a long-running covert conflict between Australia and America. What long running covert conflict? You know, the one that dates back to the Battle of Brisbane in 1942, includes the vexed issue of Pine, and the coup against Gough Whitlam in 1975.
Felix Moore himself is in a spot of bother. He’s just lost a big libel case and his wife has kicked him out. Fortunately, his good mate, property developer Woody Townes has a job for Felix. Woody is going to fund Felix to write Gaby’s biography. He’s concerned that the USA might extradite Gaby.
And then it all gets complicated. Getting Gaby (who just happens to have been born on 11 November 1975) to co-operate may be a challenge. And then, there’s her film-star mother.
Enough. It’s a complicated story that would benefit from rereading. It’s a satire that requires knowledge/memory of events that many of us have forgotten (if we ever knew them). That’s amnesia. It’s a satire about activism, journalism, politics and the relationship between Australia and the USA. It’s a satire with some fairly unlikable characters because, well, characters are less important than ideas in satire.
Just how seriously should we take it?
Not my favourite novel by Peter Carey, but definitely worth reading.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
sam_masnick's review
1.0
There isn't anything about this book I liked! The story was disjointed with no flow and the characters unlikeable.
sawyerbell's review against another edition
3.0
Thank you to Goodreads First Reads for providing me with a free copy of Amnesia.
Peter Carey is always a hit and miss author for me. I love his vivid, muscular prose and the way he brings a setting to life but sometimes have trouble engaging with his characters and plots. This proved true for Amnesia as well. While Felix, the beaten down journalist and Gaby,the cyberpunk activist, were intermittently interesting, the plot was noir-ishly murky and ultimately not as interesting as the blurb seemed to promise.
Peter Carey is always a hit and miss author for me. I love his vivid, muscular prose and the way he brings a setting to life but sometimes have trouble engaging with his characters and plots. This proved true for Amnesia as well. While Felix, the beaten down journalist and Gaby,the cyberpunk activist, were intermittently interesting, the plot was noir-ishly murky and ultimately not as interesting as the blurb seemed to promise.
chukg's review
3.0
Well written with realistically drawn characters, especially the main guy, but most of them are at least moderately unpleasant people. Cool to see some old computer stuff (Zork & BBS) that I know about, also I learned some Australian history. Much more a character study than a genre book, which was not really what I was expecting from the blurb (but goes along with the author's previous work).
renee_conoulty's review against another edition
2.0
I love reading Australian fiction and I liked all the Aussie references. I found the plot a bit all over the place though. It was hard to keep track of all the different POV, and I didn't really like any of the characters.
The title Amnesia referred to an incident during World War II that the greater population of Australia had forgotten about - or were never told. I enjoyed reading about what that was and after checking online, realising that it was based on fact.
I recieved this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The title Amnesia referred to an incident during World War II that the greater population of Australia had forgotten about - or were never told. I enjoyed reading about what that was and after checking online, realising that it was based on fact.
I recieved this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
bibliotechied's review against another edition
2.0
It has been many years since I actually wanted to read a book by Peter Carey. The blurb looked interesting, the opening sentence arresting, but the book failed to deliver. I found the laboured Australianess annoying. Carey writes for Americans, over-explaining Australian history and adding a veneer of inauthentic sounding Australian slang. Everything happened in some indeterminate time (except for 1975 and the Battle of Brisbane) which only added to the air of unreality of a narrative told by an unpleasant old journalist who kept getting kidnapped and kept one removed from the actual story. It will be a long time before I read another Peter Carey novel.
edgeworth's review against another edition
3.0
Of the 1,328 books I have logged on Goodreads (752 read, 570 want-to-read), Peter Carey’s Amnesia has the unfortunate position of being the second-lowest ranked of all of them, with a truly dire average rating of 2.82 stars out of 5. The lowest-ranked is Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, which perhaps has the excuse of being a Booker winner which would’ve drawn many users to it who never would have read him otherwise, and quickly found he wasn’t to their taste – the same reason you can find so many copies in op shops. Amnesia is more of a puzzler. It’s not, I think, a particularly good novel, but it’s certainly not the worst book in the world – it’s not even Carey’s worst book, being a rung above two of his other contemporary efforts, His Illegal Self and The Chemistry of Tears.
I can see what irritated many readers, though, because it irritated me too. I think Amnesia is the first of Carey’s novels that was released after I’d started reading him, and I remember copies ranked across Waterstone’s new release shelves when I was living in London in 2014, when Julian Assange’s Ecuadorean consulate bolt-hole and Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks and subsequent flight to Hong Kong and Russia were still freshly ripped from the headlines. Assange’s Melburnian roots clearly struck a chord with Carey’s long-standing mistrust of American global dominance and how that interacts with Australia, previously explored in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and His Illegal Self, and Amnesia begins on a high note:
It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed. Because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations the worm immediately infected 117 US federal correctional facilities, 1700 prisons, and over 3000 county jails. Wherever it went, it travelled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: THE CORPORATION IS UNDER OUR CONTROL. THE ANGEL DECLARES YOU FREE.
The first hundred-odd pages introduce us to Felix Moore, a flat-broke journalist recently ejected from his family home after being found guilty of defamation. Moore is recruited by the supporters of Gaby Bailleux, the arrested Australian hacker responsible for the novel’s opening incident and Carey’s Assange stand-in, to “properly educate the Australian public, who are naturally inclined to believe the Americans are overreaching again… Australianise her, mate.” With few other options he agrees on the story of a lifetime, but remains skittish and wary of what it will mean to be involved with the United States’ new public enemy number one.
The problem (and this is where I suspect Carey lost most of those disgruntled Goodreads users) is that he promptly ignores this promising set-up – which suggests Amnesia will be a timely techno-thriller – in favour of a rambling account of Gaby’s teenage years, ostensibly about the story of how she got involved in the world of underground hackers, but mostly just a family drama not dissimilar to any number of his other novels. It became increasingly clear, as Amnesia‘s pages went past, that the novel was never going to venture much further than the streets of Carlton circa 1989, and even then it surprised me when Carey only returned to the present day and wrapped up the original storyline, in a rather lazy deus ex machina manner, in the final seven (!) pages.
It’s a shame Carey took such a great idea for a novel and delivered such an underwhelming result, especially since on a line-by-line level he’s as good a writer as he’s ever been. As always, I quite liked his sense of place:
Before exhausting the last of the birdshit deposits which were the source of its fabulous wealth, before going into business as a detention facility for asylum seekers, the nation-state of Nauru destroyed two landmark buildings in Collins Street and erected a 52-floor octagonal monument to its own ineptitude and corruption. Who would want to have an office on this site? My mate of course.
The embankment was not a real riverbank, but a mess made by bulldozed mud and ancient garbage. From here you could look down to see the poor fucked Merri Creek threading through the body of Coburg like the vein in the dead body of a prawn. The descent was steep, shoulder-high with fennel. There was a spewy smell. Factories occupied the high ground above the creek, below the power pylons. The actual watercourse was marked by abandoned cars and broken industrial equipment including a sabotaged dragline crane with its long steel boom twisted like a swan’s neck.
The after party was in East Kew. I had lived in Melbourne all my life and never saw a house with gates like these, four-metre-high spears tipped with gold fleurs-de-lis, like the owners were waiting for the revolution.
Amnesia is by no means a terrible novel, but it’s certainly a missed opportunity. I’m writing this while SBS News is on, with a story on the United States’ ongoing endeavour to extradite Julian Assange from prison in Britain. Whatever you may think of that long and sorry saga, or of the man himself, the real-life story is undeniably more interesting than the fictionalised version Carey delivers in Amnesia.
I can see what irritated many readers, though, because it irritated me too. I think Amnesia is the first of Carey’s novels that was released after I’d started reading him, and I remember copies ranked across Waterstone’s new release shelves when I was living in London in 2014, when Julian Assange’s Ecuadorean consulate bolt-hole and Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks and subsequent flight to Hong Kong and Russia were still freshly ripped from the headlines. Assange’s Melburnian roots clearly struck a chord with Carey’s long-standing mistrust of American global dominance and how that interacts with Australia, previously explored in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and His Illegal Self, and Amnesia begins on a high note:
It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed. Because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations the worm immediately infected 117 US federal correctional facilities, 1700 prisons, and over 3000 county jails. Wherever it went, it travelled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: THE CORPORATION IS UNDER OUR CONTROL. THE ANGEL DECLARES YOU FREE.
The first hundred-odd pages introduce us to Felix Moore, a flat-broke journalist recently ejected from his family home after being found guilty of defamation. Moore is recruited by the supporters of Gaby Bailleux, the arrested Australian hacker responsible for the novel’s opening incident and Carey’s Assange stand-in, to “properly educate the Australian public, who are naturally inclined to believe the Americans are overreaching again… Australianise her, mate.” With few other options he agrees on the story of a lifetime, but remains skittish and wary of what it will mean to be involved with the United States’ new public enemy number one.
The problem (and this is where I suspect Carey lost most of those disgruntled Goodreads users) is that he promptly ignores this promising set-up – which suggests Amnesia will be a timely techno-thriller – in favour of a rambling account of Gaby’s teenage years, ostensibly about the story of how she got involved in the world of underground hackers, but mostly just a family drama not dissimilar to any number of his other novels. It became increasingly clear, as Amnesia‘s pages went past, that the novel was never going to venture much further than the streets of Carlton circa 1989, and even then it surprised me when Carey only returned to the present day and wrapped up the original storyline, in a rather lazy deus ex machina manner, in the final seven (!) pages.
It’s a shame Carey took such a great idea for a novel and delivered such an underwhelming result, especially since on a line-by-line level he’s as good a writer as he’s ever been. As always, I quite liked his sense of place:
Before exhausting the last of the birdshit deposits which were the source of its fabulous wealth, before going into business as a detention facility for asylum seekers, the nation-state of Nauru destroyed two landmark buildings in Collins Street and erected a 52-floor octagonal monument to its own ineptitude and corruption. Who would want to have an office on this site? My mate of course.
The embankment was not a real riverbank, but a mess made by bulldozed mud and ancient garbage. From here you could look down to see the poor fucked Merri Creek threading through the body of Coburg like the vein in the dead body of a prawn. The descent was steep, shoulder-high with fennel. There was a spewy smell. Factories occupied the high ground above the creek, below the power pylons. The actual watercourse was marked by abandoned cars and broken industrial equipment including a sabotaged dragline crane with its long steel boom twisted like a swan’s neck.
The after party was in East Kew. I had lived in Melbourne all my life and never saw a house with gates like these, four-metre-high spears tipped with gold fleurs-de-lis, like the owners were waiting for the revolution.
Amnesia is by no means a terrible novel, but it’s certainly a missed opportunity. I’m writing this while SBS News is on, with a story on the United States’ ongoing endeavour to extradite Julian Assange from prison in Britain. Whatever you may think of that long and sorry saga, or of the man himself, the real-life story is undeniably more interesting than the fictionalised version Carey delivers in Amnesia.