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A review by gh7
Amnesia by Peter Carey
3.0
Amnesia has had a rather sorry time of it in the world. Almost all the reviews are damning and its average rating is a woeful 2.82. Half way through I thought I might be able to launch a laudable defence. After all, Peter Carey is now 75 and we all know his best days as a novelist are behind him and have been so for a while now. In his prime he wrote a fabulous series of novels and, without doing the math, I'd include him as one of the thirty best living novelists.
The main problem of Amnesia is perhaps how Carey chooses to tell what is potentially a great story. His ever more experimental narrative technique has been a problem I've had with him for a while. In his prime his narrative voice was always pretty straightforward. The conventional tracks along which he unfurled his tales suited his fabulous talent at storytelling. He's blessed with fizzing vitality and his characters are always imagined and brought to life to the hilt. In recent years he's gone all post-modernist and experimented with dual, sometimes conflicting, narrative voices. As is the case here where the first half of the novel is narrated in the first person by a disgraced journalist who has been bamboozled into telling the story of the daughter of a woman he had a crush on as a young man. This is Gaby, an eco-terrorist who the US government wants to extradite. The second half of the novel switches to two first person narratives recorded on tape inside a kind of third person overview. Yep, it's confusing! Oddly though it's the second half which is more engaging. I had problems with Felix, the narrator of the first part. I didn't find him very interesting and often found his life drearily confusing. The beating heart of the novel is Gaby and the mother/daughter conflict was brilliantly done. Whenever Gaby's on the page the novel is compelling. Unfortunately this isn't true when Felix hogs the pages. Another problem, at times Carey assumes a knowledge of Australian politics which I simply did not have. So the best bits are a punk take on movies like Silkwood or The East and the worst bits another take on the mid-life crisis of a liberal warm hearted, cold-footed male.
If you've never read Carey I'd recommend all his early novels, from Illywhacker through to Theft.
The main problem of Amnesia is perhaps how Carey chooses to tell what is potentially a great story. His ever more experimental narrative technique has been a problem I've had with him for a while. In his prime his narrative voice was always pretty straightforward. The conventional tracks along which he unfurled his tales suited his fabulous talent at storytelling. He's blessed with fizzing vitality and his characters are always imagined and brought to life to the hilt. In recent years he's gone all post-modernist and experimented with dual, sometimes conflicting, narrative voices. As is the case here where the first half of the novel is narrated in the first person by a disgraced journalist who has been bamboozled into telling the story of the daughter of a woman he had a crush on as a young man. This is Gaby, an eco-terrorist who the US government wants to extradite. The second half of the novel switches to two first person narratives recorded on tape inside a kind of third person overview. Yep, it's confusing! Oddly though it's the second half which is more engaging. I had problems with Felix, the narrator of the first part. I didn't find him very interesting and often found his life drearily confusing. The beating heart of the novel is Gaby and the mother/daughter conflict was brilliantly done. Whenever Gaby's on the page the novel is compelling. Unfortunately this isn't true when Felix hogs the pages. Another problem, at times Carey assumes a knowledge of Australian politics which I simply did not have. So the best bits are a punk take on movies like Silkwood or The East and the worst bits another take on the mid-life crisis of a liberal warm hearted, cold-footed male.
If you've never read Carey I'd recommend all his early novels, from Illywhacker through to Theft.