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A review by adunten
The Potato Factory by Bryce Courtenay
4.0
2016 vreading challenge: a historical fiction novel.
In many ways, The Potato Factory could be described as a manifesto of the underdog wrapped in a scathing indictment of early 19th British culture: it features many characters from traditionally downtrodden classes who succeed through hard work, wits, and pure gumption despite the verdict of “society” that they were born to be trash, are inherently trash, will always be trash, and shouldn't even bother to dream of a better life because they are trash and trash doesn't deserve to be anywhere but the dump. Nearly everyone featured in the story is born to that most downtrodden of classes: the poor. In his foreword, Courtenay describes this novel as his personal thank you note to his adopted home country of Australia, and in many ways you could say the story of the underdog is the very manifesto of Australia itself – the will to show the world that a bunch of people “society” cast off as trash and scum can make it through hard work, wit and pure gumption, and they don't need silly things like “good breeding” or boarding school manners to win at life. You might even say that the idea that people should be judged by their words and deeds, and not by their birth, class, upbringing or money is an essential part of the Australian character. (Of course, it took them a while to apply that sort of thinking to the aborigines... I think Courtenay is engaging in pure bombast when he boasts several times in the foreword that Australia is “the most egalitarian country in the world.” Suuuuure it is... if you're white and male.)
Underdog #1: Our spunky heroine, Mary Abacus, is a woman who spends a significant part of her early life whoring, and later running a whorehouse, simply because whoring is about the only job open to a woman when she can't get a reference as a servant, and no one will hire a woman as a clerk. She faces first-hand the hypocrisy of a society that says the decent jobs should go to the men because a woman can always make a living on her back, and then scorns her for being a whore when she took the only path left to her. Although a significant chunk of the story is about Ikey Solomon, Mary is the clear lodestone and the character you can genuinely like and root for. Despite her rough upbringing and even rougher treatment as a young career woman on the streets of London, and the many brutal hardships she faces, she retains her inherent sense of fairness, compassion, and decency. That's not to say she's a pushover or an angel – she's sharp as a tack and as cutthroat as she needs to be to survive. But she's also smart and has a head for business, and she knows that a bit of human decency and tough-but-fair treatment costs very little and repays itself in spades in respect and loyalty earned.
Underdog #2: Our hero (or perhaps anti-hero), Ikey Solomon, is a notorious fence, con artist, forger, and criminal jack of all trades. He's a disgusting wretch and is almost as hard to truly like as Mary is hard to dislike. But his loquacious patter lulls one into almost-liking him, if for no other reason than that he's entertaining. And as criminals go, he could be worse. He's not a cruel or brutal man, primarily because he's too cowardly and physically wimpy to ever intimidate anyone. So he operates on slinking flattery and guile instead, but is an earnest believer in the principle of “always leave a little salt on the bread.” In other words, don't take so much that the people you deal with can't make their own livings. He and his odious wife Hannah richly deserve one another, but the story is written in a way that will ensure you dislike Ikey less than you dislike Hannah. She and Ikey are two of a kind, but for some reason she comes off much the worse as one of the clear villains. Perhaps it was that bit where but let's face it, we hated her long before that, even though in every other way, she's virtually indistinguishable from Ikey.
A lot of reviewers have described the character of Ikey Solomon as a recognizable lift of Dickens’ famous character Fagan of Oliver Twist. However, considering Ikey isn’t fictional but was a real person, I suspect the reverse is true – that the real Ikey Solomon inspired the fictional character of Fagan. (Bit of trivia: Dickens himself makes a cameo when he interviews Sparrow Fart for a newspaper article about Ikey.)
Underdog #3: The story is peopled with a motley supporting cast of whores, thugs, pickpockets, con artists, assorted convicts, and drunks, who are as often as not proven to be good of heart in their own way and simply trying to make their way in a hard world that has made them hard. They prove themselves capable of small, and sometimes large, acts of friendship and loyalty. They, as much as the main players, prove the story's point that people, on some level, deserve better than to be wholly judged by their class or wealth or even criminal lifestyle.
Villainy: In contrast, the empowered classes of the story repeatedly prove themselves to be generally (with a few notable exceptions) far worse people than the “scum” they despise on principle. They are ruled by bigotry, hypocrisy, smirking dishonesty, insatiable greed, and most notably, a depth of not only apathy, but open revilement, toward anyone they deem “beneath” them that is almost unfathomable by today's standards. It's unclear whether they are truly any worse than those of the lower classes, but they have the power to inflict far more misery on others, and they exercise it freely. No wonder these people were able to view the entire native population of Australia as mere vermin to be exterminated – they thought little better of the poorer classes of London. If they had been around during Hitler's time, they would have lauded him. Most of the story's graphic atrocities (and there are some doozies) are perpetrated by these sorts of people.
Oh, did you want to know about the plot?? I'll just say it's a rollicking (and often harrowing) adventure that involves lots of unsavory people in low places and Bad Things happening to our heroes. I never found it slow, and while it wasn't quite “couldn't put it down” riveting, the pages kept turning for me.
Minor Gripes
Much of the broad outlines of the story are based on real historical people and events, and as a result, Courtenay’s narrative style wavers between telling an up-close, personal, and immediate story based on the characters’ own experiences and perceptions, and pulling back to a broader, bird’s-eye historian’s perspective in which he continuously violates the novelist’s “show; don’t tell” rule. This is particularly true toward the beginning, in which he spends long passages explaining our characters’ personalities and motivations to us instead of simply showing them to us through their words and actions.
Some of Courtenay's portrayals of inter-racial relationships seemed off. Unfortunately, not the horrible stuff – to my sorrow, that’s all too believable. What I had a problem with is the idea that Mary, even as good and compassionate a person as we know she is, could really be as open-minded as portrayed, given the culture of the time.
In many ways, The Potato Factory could be described as a manifesto of the underdog wrapped in a scathing indictment of early 19th British culture: it features many characters from traditionally downtrodden classes who succeed through hard work, wits, and pure gumption despite the verdict of “society” that they were born to be trash, are inherently trash, will always be trash, and shouldn't even bother to dream of a better life because they are trash and trash doesn't deserve to be anywhere but the dump. Nearly everyone featured in the story is born to that most downtrodden of classes: the poor. In his foreword, Courtenay describes this novel as his personal thank you note to his adopted home country of Australia, and in many ways you could say the story of the underdog is the very manifesto of Australia itself – the will to show the world that a bunch of people “society” cast off as trash and scum can make it through hard work, wit and pure gumption, and they don't need silly things like “good breeding” or boarding school manners to win at life. You might even say that the idea that people should be judged by their words and deeds, and not by their birth, class, upbringing or money is an essential part of the Australian character. (Of course, it took them a while to apply that sort of thinking to the aborigines... I think Courtenay is engaging in pure bombast when he boasts several times in the foreword that Australia is “the most egalitarian country in the world.” Suuuuure it is... if you're white and male.)
Underdog #1: Our spunky heroine, Mary Abacus, is a woman who spends a significant part of her early life whoring, and later running a whorehouse, simply because whoring is about the only job open to a woman when she can't get a reference as a servant, and no one will hire a woman as a clerk. She faces first-hand the hypocrisy of a society that says the decent jobs should go to the men because a woman can always make a living on her back, and then scorns her for being a whore when she took the only path left to her. Although a significant chunk of the story is about Ikey Solomon, Mary is the clear lodestone and the character you can genuinely like and root for. Despite her rough upbringing and even rougher treatment as a young career woman on the streets of London, and the many brutal hardships she faces, she retains her inherent sense of fairness, compassion, and decency. That's not to say she's a pushover or an angel – she's sharp as a tack and as cutthroat as she needs to be to survive. But she's also smart and has a head for business, and she knows that a bit of human decency and tough-but-fair treatment costs very little and repays itself in spades in respect and loyalty earned.
Underdog #2: Our hero (or perhaps anti-hero), Ikey Solomon, is a notorious fence, con artist, forger, and criminal jack of all trades. He's a disgusting wretch and is almost as hard to truly like as Mary is hard to dislike. But his loquacious patter lulls one into almost-liking him, if for no other reason than that he's entertaining. And as criminals go, he could be worse. He's not a cruel or brutal man, primarily because he's too cowardly and physically wimpy to ever intimidate anyone. So he operates on slinking flattery and guile instead, but is an earnest believer in the principle of “always leave a little salt on the bread.” In other words, don't take so much that the people you deal with can't make their own livings. He and his odious wife Hannah richly deserve one another, but the story is written in a way that will ensure you dislike Ikey less than you dislike Hannah. She and Ikey are two of a kind, but for some reason she comes off much the worse as one of the clear villains. Perhaps it was that bit where
Spoiler
she and her son David cut the finger off a small child to try to extort money from Ikey,A lot of reviewers have described the character of Ikey Solomon as a recognizable lift of Dickens’ famous character Fagan of Oliver Twist. However, considering Ikey isn’t fictional but was a real person, I suspect the reverse is true – that the real Ikey Solomon inspired the fictional character of Fagan. (Bit of trivia: Dickens himself makes a cameo when he interviews Sparrow Fart for a newspaper article about Ikey.)
Underdog #3: The story is peopled with a motley supporting cast of whores, thugs, pickpockets, con artists, assorted convicts, and drunks, who are as often as not proven to be good of heart in their own way and simply trying to make their way in a hard world that has made them hard. They prove themselves capable of small, and sometimes large, acts of friendship and loyalty. They, as much as the main players, prove the story's point that people, on some level, deserve better than to be wholly judged by their class or wealth or even criminal lifestyle.
Villainy: In contrast, the empowered classes of the story repeatedly prove themselves to be generally (with a few notable exceptions) far worse people than the “scum” they despise on principle. They are ruled by bigotry, hypocrisy, smirking dishonesty, insatiable greed, and most notably, a depth of not only apathy, but open revilement, toward anyone they deem “beneath” them that is almost unfathomable by today's standards. It's unclear whether they are truly any worse than those of the lower classes, but they have the power to inflict far more misery on others, and they exercise it freely. No wonder these people were able to view the entire native population of Australia as mere vermin to be exterminated – they thought little better of the poorer classes of London. If they had been around during Hitler's time, they would have lauded him. Most of the story's graphic atrocities (and there are some doozies) are perpetrated by these sorts of people.
Oh, did you want to know about the plot?? I'll just say it's a rollicking (and often harrowing) adventure that involves lots of unsavory people in low places and Bad Things happening to our heroes. I never found it slow, and while it wasn't quite “couldn't put it down” riveting, the pages kept turning for me.
Minor Gripes
Much of the broad outlines of the story are based on real historical people and events, and as a result, Courtenay’s narrative style wavers between telling an up-close, personal, and immediate story based on the characters’ own experiences and perceptions, and pulling back to a broader, bird’s-eye historian’s perspective in which he continuously violates the novelist’s “show; don’t tell” rule. This is particularly true toward the beginning, in which he spends long passages explaining our characters’ personalities and motivations to us instead of simply showing them to us through their words and actions.
Some of Courtenay's portrayals of inter-racial relationships seemed off. Unfortunately, not the horrible stuff – to my sorrow, that’s all too believable. What I had a problem with is the idea that Mary, even as good and compassionate a person as we know she is, could really be as open-minded as portrayed, given the culture of the time.