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3.34 AVERAGE
3.34 AVERAGE
I have loved everything I've read by Carey to date, but I found this novel rather confusing. Jumps in time and unreliable narrators left me wondering what was real and what wasn't. Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention.
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Intriguing in the beginning, it got slower and slower until I found myself skim reading the last fifty pages or so just to get rid of it. Not my thing though I did think it was quite promising. Just a bit too weird for me I think.
adventurous
medium-paced
Apart from the theme of Australian identity that runs through his novels like a spine, the subjects of Peter Carey’s writing are hugely diverse: the Plymouth Brethren, gambling, adoptive fathers, incest, taxation, the Prince Rupert’s Drop, acrobatics, Charles Dickens and Irish mythology, to name a few. My Life As A Fake is a curious fusion of three very disparate things: Frankenstein, Malaysia and the Ern Malley hoax.
Now, I’m sure we’ve all heard of Frankenstein and Malaysia, but the Ern Malley hoax is little-known even in Australia outside of literary and academic circles. In 1944 the literary magazine Angry Penguins was embarrassed to find that some modernist poetry it had published and celebrated, submitted under the name of Ern Malley, had in fact been written in less than a day by two rival poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, in order to poke fun at what they saw as the nonsense verse of modernist poetry. The magazine was humiliated, but the joke was ultimately on McAuley and Stewart; nowadays the Malley poems are considered some of the finest examples of Australian modernist poetry. (Which I think says more about modernism than it does about the poems but, hey, whatever.)
My Life As A Fake is a fictionalised retelling of much of this true story, as an English magazine editor listens to the sad tale of disgraced Australian poet Christopher Chubb, exiled to Kuala Lumpur. Chubb’s own version of Ern Malley is Bob McCorkle, with one clear divergence from real life: soon after his hoaxing of a poetry editor, Chubb is confronted by a man claiming to be Bob McCorkle himself – not simply someone annoyed that Chubb ripped his name off, but the fictional poet in the flesh, claiming Chubb is entirely responsible for bringing him into being. (Apart from some small moments in True History of the Kelly Gang, this is probably Carey’s most magical realist novel.) Not only this, but McCorkle is a tall and violent man who resents his creator and, with echoes of Frankenstein, begins to torment him. This harassment culminates in the abduction of Chubb’s infant daughter, and Chubb must begin an arduous journey into the tropical heart of South-East Asia to recover her.
It’s an uneven novel, but not too bad. Carey captures the atmosphere of the Malay Peninsula beautifully – the heat, the melting pot of cultures, the fragrant rot of the jungle – and there are quite a number of memorable characters and events. I particularly liked the Tamil poisoner, and Chubb’s encounter in the deep jungle with a Malay nobleman whose household mistakes him for an evil spirit. Even when Carey isn’t at his best, he’s still pretty good.
Now, I’m sure we’ve all heard of Frankenstein and Malaysia, but the Ern Malley hoax is little-known even in Australia outside of literary and academic circles. In 1944 the literary magazine Angry Penguins was embarrassed to find that some modernist poetry it had published and celebrated, submitted under the name of Ern Malley, had in fact been written in less than a day by two rival poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, in order to poke fun at what they saw as the nonsense verse of modernist poetry. The magazine was humiliated, but the joke was ultimately on McAuley and Stewart; nowadays the Malley poems are considered some of the finest examples of Australian modernist poetry. (Which I think says more about modernism than it does about the poems but, hey, whatever.)
My Life As A Fake is a fictionalised retelling of much of this true story, as an English magazine editor listens to the sad tale of disgraced Australian poet Christopher Chubb, exiled to Kuala Lumpur. Chubb’s own version of Ern Malley is Bob McCorkle, with one clear divergence from real life: soon after his hoaxing of a poetry editor, Chubb is confronted by a man claiming to be Bob McCorkle himself – not simply someone annoyed that Chubb ripped his name off, but the fictional poet in the flesh, claiming Chubb is entirely responsible for bringing him into being. (Apart from some small moments in True History of the Kelly Gang, this is probably Carey’s most magical realist novel.) Not only this, but McCorkle is a tall and violent man who resents his creator and, with echoes of Frankenstein, begins to torment him. This harassment culminates in the abduction of Chubb’s infant daughter, and Chubb must begin an arduous journey into the tropical heart of South-East Asia to recover her.
It’s an uneven novel, but not too bad. Carey captures the atmosphere of the Malay Peninsula beautifully – the heat, the melting pot of cultures, the fragrant rot of the jungle – and there are quite a number of memorable characters and events. I particularly liked the Tamil poisoner, and Chubb’s encounter in the deep jungle with a Malay nobleman whose household mistakes him for an evil spirit. Even when Carey isn’t at his best, he’s still pretty good.
Felt pretty yanked around by this book...a story within a story with changing narrators...that ended abruptly and unsatisfactorily. It might be someone else's cup of tea but not mine.
Well this just makes me cross: carefully extending the Malley mythos by using details from the actual story in the fiction, at first it feels like a dazzling trick conjuring fiction from a very real but strange tale. But then you realise that Carey is his own Christopher Chubb: he has coat tailed on a genius of his own creation (and that of others) and somehow pummelled it into a somewhat conventional bit of melodrama, never doing the conceit justice. In fact it feels very much like another novel he couldn’t quite finish that leeches off a fascinating central idea and drains life and interest from it. There’s a dawning horror about fifty pages towards the end that you realise that Carey has inextricably fucked this up and it just ends up as a mess. A weirdly conventional novel smothering a far better novel to death. Very annoying
Take a 1940s literary hoax, Frankenstein, Rilke, Ezra Pound, literary journal editorship and the memsahib culture of Malaysia in the middle of last century and whip it all up with ulcerated legs and modish, society-shocking femmes fatales and you've pretty much got this entry in Carey's oeuvre. My Life as a Fake is shorter than a lot of his other work - I think it's probably on par with something like The Tax Inspector for length - but it packs a pretty hefty punch.
From the outset, we're told the story - relayed in the first person by literature journal editor Sarah Wode-Douglass - is a recounting in 1985 events occurring in 1972 which related to events thirty years earlier. The idea of a game of Chinese Whispers, of unreliable narration is explicitly set up in the interwoven tales of two other main characters - the louche John Slater and the pitiful Christopher Chubb - who each, rather obviously have their own interests in directing the narrative. The discussions take place in the sweltering heat and torrential rains of Kuala Lumpur, a perfect place for half-remembered visions and fever-dreamed histories.
History plays an important role in the work. The examination of the strictures of colonialism, of Tamil uprisings, of responsibilities dodged is important. Carey's recreation of the past is, as ever, flawless, and yet not completely reliable. There's a thoroughly believable tract of southeast Asia here, just as there's a wonderfully recreated Chatswood house, or Kings Cross dive. You can walk right in.
As in other works, he's taken reality and bent it to fit, in this case as a meditation on the act of creation, on the magical thinking that broadly describes the generation of the written word. Wode-Douglass is attempting to uncover the truth of a literary hoax that has borne terrible fruit - Christopher Chubb had, in younger times, created a faux poet, Bob McCorkle, to ensnare a contemporary. Which had been fine until McCorkle turned up and demanded some kind of recompense for being so rudely born.
This is where the novel's opening quote - from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - begins to make sense. Except it's not bodysnatching that's brought this creature to life; it's poetry. Here's where the history becomes most important: Carey has borrowed most of the backstory from one of Australia's most famous literary hoaxes, the Ern Malley affair. McCorkle is the embodiment of Malley - words in a trial and in letters from relatives are borrowed from the original affair, and his poetry is Malley's. (Well, that of his creators - one of whom Carey quotes at the conclusion of the work.)
The story ropes in real figures (such as Wystan Auden or Lord Antrim) to examine the truth of its title: that the main characters have all lived part of their life as fakes. As hoaxers, as dilettantes, or as creators of personal fictions, more comfortable than the truth. The mix of artificial with actual is considered, and the story manages to escape bogging on its personal and philosophical aspects.
My Life as a Fake is a great tale. Everyone lies. Everyone creates. Intentions count for a lot, and for nothing at all. The question is this: how far would you go to ensure your truth was the truth?
From the outset, we're told the story - relayed in the first person by literature journal editor Sarah Wode-Douglass - is a recounting in 1985 events occurring in 1972 which related to events thirty years earlier. The idea of a game of Chinese Whispers, of unreliable narration is explicitly set up in the interwoven tales of two other main characters - the louche John Slater and the pitiful Christopher Chubb - who each, rather obviously have their own interests in directing the narrative. The discussions take place in the sweltering heat and torrential rains of Kuala Lumpur, a perfect place for half-remembered visions and fever-dreamed histories.
History plays an important role in the work. The examination of the strictures of colonialism, of Tamil uprisings, of responsibilities dodged is important. Carey's recreation of the past is, as ever, flawless, and yet not completely reliable. There's a thoroughly believable tract of southeast Asia here, just as there's a wonderfully recreated Chatswood house, or Kings Cross dive. You can walk right in.
As in other works, he's taken reality and bent it to fit, in this case as a meditation on the act of creation, on the magical thinking that broadly describes the generation of the written word. Wode-Douglass is attempting to uncover the truth of a literary hoax that has borne terrible fruit - Christopher Chubb had, in younger times, created a faux poet, Bob McCorkle, to ensnare a contemporary. Which had been fine until McCorkle turned up and demanded some kind of recompense for being so rudely born.
This is where the novel's opening quote - from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - begins to make sense. Except it's not bodysnatching that's brought this creature to life; it's poetry. Here's where the history becomes most important: Carey has borrowed most of the backstory from one of Australia's most famous literary hoaxes, the Ern Malley affair. McCorkle is the embodiment of Malley - words in a trial and in letters from relatives are borrowed from the original affair, and his poetry is Malley's. (Well, that of his creators - one of whom Carey quotes at the conclusion of the work.)
The story ropes in real figures (such as Wystan Auden or Lord Antrim) to examine the truth of its title: that the main characters have all lived part of their life as fakes. As hoaxers, as dilettantes, or as creators of personal fictions, more comfortable than the truth. The mix of artificial with actual is considered, and the story manages to escape bogging on its personal and philosophical aspects.
My Life as a Fake is a great tale. Everyone lies. Everyone creates. Intentions count for a lot, and for nothing at all. The question is this: how far would you go to ensure your truth was the truth?
Carey writes beautifully. His settings drip with realism and his characters are completely believable. Unfortunately in this case his characters were three elitist white bores having their emotional dramas in Kuala Lumpur. There are a series of exoticised Asian stereotypes, a cursory mention now and then that colonialism might not be such a great thing for everyone but mostly the three very unlikeable characters live out their dramas in a way that exploits rather than explores the setting.
I completely loathed Chubb and Slater. I mainly disliked Sarah/Micks but there were snippets of empathy, she was a female in a so clearly male-centred world, she was a closet lesbian...I could relate a little, except she was so darn privileged and well connected and a thorough bitch with it (though maybe a little less so than the narcissist Slater and the whinging xenophobe Chubb). I think Carey has tried to render unlikeable characters complex and likeable. I just kept seeing the race, class and power in the interactions and absolutely hating them for all that their hearts were broken or they were capable of moments of kindness toward other white powerful people (in a way that not at all undid the hierarchy).\
I usually feel like Carey is barracking for the underdog so I am not sure if I missed something here or if he decided to try to explore a more right-wing POV to extend himself. Either way I have to give this 3 stars for the clever idea and the masterful writing but I can't give it more because I didn't enjoy it or feel like it was a great insight.
I completely loathed Chubb and Slater. I mainly disliked Sarah/Micks but there were snippets of empathy, she was a female in a so clearly male-centred world, she was a closet lesbian...I could relate a little, except she was so darn privileged and well connected and a thorough bitch with it (though maybe a little less so than the narcissist Slater and the whinging xenophobe Chubb). I think Carey has tried to render unlikeable characters complex and likeable. I just kept seeing the race, class and power in the interactions and absolutely hating them for all that their hearts were broken or they were capable of moments of kindness toward other white powerful people (in a way that not at all undid the hierarchy).\
I usually feel like Carey is barracking for the underdog so I am not sure if I missed something here or if he decided to try to explore a more right-wing POV to extend himself. Either way I have to give this 3 stars for the clever idea and the masterful writing but I can't give it more because I didn't enjoy it or feel like it was a great insight.