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My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey
It's not often that a writer of the caliber of PETER CAREY turns his attention to our part of the world.
PETER CAREY is always flamboyant, but MY LIFE AS A FAKE, which takes place largely in Malaysia, is such a virtuoso performance that one might almost suspect him of showing off -- if it were not for the traces of self-parody.
MY LIFE AS A FAKE is told at the intersection of two stories: the first of Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London literary journal, and society poet John Slater; the second of Australian Christopher Chubb, perpetrator of a ruinous literary hoax decades earlier.
MY LIFE AS A FAKE draws its inspiration from a true episode: the editor of an Australian literary journal called Angry Penguins (even Peter Carey couldn't make up a name like that) was conned into publishing work of a previously unknown literary genius -- unknown because he was made up. The poor editor was later had up on charges of publishing obscenities.
But the veracity of these historical underpinnings is almost a distraction to the story itself, which soon spins out of the orbit proscribed for it.
When Sarah meets a down-at-heel Chubb in Kuala Lumpur, it seems that Chubb's fictitious poet, Bob McCorkle, took on flesh and blood when a heckler at the trial assumed his persona: this impersonation of a non-existent poet pursues Chubb, ruins his life (which was pretty dicey anyway) and, as we discover, continues (or, rather, starts) writing.
There is so much going on in MY LIFE AS A FAKE, that it is hard to know where to begin. The novel is chockablock of literary references and allusions, from the quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that starts us off before the title page to Lowell, Conrad and Ezra Pound. It also is a discourse on the nature of writing and creative greatness and mediocrity, the disconnect between art and morality, and a comment on publishing professionals: the guardians of our literary conscience seem easily duped.
It is an experiment in narrative, flipping between first- and third-person, with narrators changing between paragraphs: an effect that I can only describe as cubist, forcing the reader to view the same scene from at least two vantage points simultaneously.
Then there is the story: although unbalanced in places (the Wode-Douglass/Slater axis seems weaker than the Chubb/McCorkle one), the plot (once we get the preliminaries out of the way) rips along, fantastical, yet -- just barely -- believable, containing, kidnapping, greed, violence, love, murder and despair, the whole thing dripping with raw emotion, symbolism and irony.
And finally, Carey describes a Malaysia before the Pertamina Towers and air-conditioned shopping malls and captures the smells, sights, rhythms and contradictions of Southeast Asia, lacing dialogue with (as far I can tell) accurate snippets of Malay.
MY LIFE AS A FAKE is, not unlike Carey Booker Prize-winning True Life of the Kelly Gang, a classical tragedy: we know how it'll all turn out. We know, but we keep on turning the pages anyway. Satu lagi, one more, as Chubb says.
Peter Gordon
27/01/2004
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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