Peter Carey

Author

• Born: May 7, 1943
• Place of Birth: Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia

Biography

The postcolonial search for national identity dominates Peter Carey’s fiction. An Australian by birth, Carey moved to New York in the late 1980s, but he continued to address the concerns that have characterized his work from the outset: Australian national consciousness (or that of any postcolonial country), the inherited burden of colonialism, history’s lies, and a fascination with the center—that is, New York or London. To enlarge on these themes, Carey has experimented radically in fictional forms.

Born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Carey grew up in a family whose men worked as car salesmen and aviators. He attended Geelong Grammar School, a venerable Australian institution patterned after a British boys’ school. He then moved to Victoria’s capital, Melbourne—one of those almost London-like cities that dot the world’s far-flung English-speaking outposts. After a year studying science at Monash University, Carey joined a Melbourne advertising agency. During 1968, he made the requisite stay in London, then settled in Sydney, where he continued his advertising career, interrupted by spells in a commune in Queensland’s rain forest. After serving as artist-in-residence at New York University in 1990, he remained in New York, where he writes and occasionally teaches classes in creative writing, including stints at Princeton and Columbia Universities and the City University of New York (CUNY). He has traveled extensively in the United States and Europe, giving readings and attending conferences where he promotes his own work and that of fellow Australian writers.

When Carey’s short stories appeared, first in Australian journals and then in two collections, they immediately attracted admirers at home and abroad. Both The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979) record the Australian experience in ways far afield from the social realism that long dominated the country’s fiction. At times futuristic and apocalyptic, in other instances revolutionary and paranoid, always satirical and ironic, the stories usually have no specific settings, nothing local about them, as they squarely confront the issues and problems of postcolonial people.

Although Carey’s first novel, Bliss (1981), is his weakest, it displays the energy, fantastic qualities, and originality that saw better use in his following work. The narrative takes up Harry Joy’s middle-aged male angst, worsened by a heart attack and confinement in a mental hospital. Leaving his unfaithful wife, who longs to go to New York, and his delinquent children behind, he moves to a commune in the rain forest, where he spends his days happily planting trees and telling stories. The next novel, Illywhacker (1985), also features a storyteller who sets out to relate Australia's whole, strange history. “Illywhacker” is Australian slang for a con artist. This label fits the 139-year-old, self-proclaimed liar who narrates adventures involving a host of colorful characters and incorporating all strands of Australian mythology. To round out the central character’s sometime career as a bush pilot and car salesman, Carey draws from his family’s early involvement in the automobile business and aviation, and just as in Bliss, he relies on his time in a commune.

Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which received Great Britain’s distinguished Booker Prize and may well be Carey’s finest work, moves away from contemporary Australia and the author’s experience. Instead, it reinvents the typical plot of an early Australian novel: life in England, the voyage to Australia, and the struggle in the Antipodes. Solidly textured as it renders an earlier England and recreates colonial nineteenth-century Sydney, the novel follows the unconsummated romance and misguided adventures of two compulsive gamblers: Oscar, a Church of England priest, and Lucinda, owner of a glass factory. The narrative adheres to reality in the early parts, even while mocking the historical novel. Still, the story turns fantastic once Oscar and Lucinda construct a glass church, which they send on an ill-fated move into the outback. The metaphor of the shattered glass chapel suggests the fragility and absurdity of white settlement on the ancient continent where the Aborigines had dwelled for forty thousand years.

Returning to the present, Carey satirizes contemporary Australian society in The Tax Inspector (1991), a bizarre tale of the Catchprices, who own an automobile dealership in suburban Sydney. A tax audit initiates the four days of the novel’s action, during which the family’s history unravels, including two generations of sexual abuse—a dangerous and daring metaphor for corruption that Carey manages skillfully. In the novel’s apocalyptic conclusion, Granny Catchprice, a dynamite fancier and expert, blows up the family business and home to erase the decadent past.

For The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Carey creates his own world—a distant colony called Efica (probably Australia) and a powerful imperial force called Voorstand (likely the United States). Tristan Smith, the Efican protagonist, grotesquely deformed and stunted in growth, harbors a fascination with and revulsion toward Voorstand. More reminiscent of Carey’s short stories than the preceding novels in its leap beyond realism, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith probes Carey’s obsession with the postcolonial condition most deeply.

Jack Maggs (1997) constituted Carey’s appropriation of Charles Dickens. His title character is a version of the Australian convict Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations (1861). The novel relates his experiences on returning to England after becoming an important landowner in Australia and his involvement with a mesmerist and writer who strongly resembles Dickens.

Jack Maggs and Carey’s next novel, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and True History also gave Carey his second Booker Prize. This novel repeats Carey’s interest in the convict and outlaw history of Australia, elevating the legendary bushranger Ned Kelly to the status of archetypal Australian, driven to outlawry by oppressive colonialist exploitation.

After publishing My Life as a Fake (2003), a fictional account of a true, famous story in Australian history in which two soldiers fabricated the existence of a working-class man who was also a great poet, Carey wrote the novels Theft: A Love Story (2006) and His Illegal Self (2008). Finally, in writing a book about his adopted country, America, in 2009, he took on the historical figure Alexis de Tocqueville and his experience of democracy in the country in the nineteenth century. He wrote The Chemistry of Tears (2012), published the same year he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in London, and managed to shift between times and perspectives to tell the story. His next novel, Amnesia (2014), was considered timely as its subject is the infamous incident of international interference in the Australian government in the 1970s. In A Long Way from Home (2017), Carey explores the intricacies of racism through a 1950 road race in Australia.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Bliss, 1981

Illywhacker, 1985

Oscar and Lucinda, 1988

The Tax Inspector, 1991

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 1994

The Big Bazoohley, 1995

Jack Maggs, 1997

True History of the Kelly Gang, 2000

My Life as a Fake, 2003

Theft: A Love Story, 2006

His Illegal Self, 2008

Parrot and Olivier in America, 2009

The Chemistry of Tears, 2012

Amnesia, 2014

A Long Way From Home, 2017

Short Fiction:

The Fat Man in History, 1974

War Crimes, 1979

The Fat Man in History, and Other Stories, 1981

Collected Stories, 1995

Screenplay:

Bliss, 1985 (with Ray Lawrence; adaptation of his novel)

Nonfiction:

A Letter to Our Son, 1994

Thirty Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, 2001

Wrong about Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son, 2004

Bibliography

"All Titles." Peter Carey, petercareybooks.com/all-titles. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Callahan, David. “Whose History Is the Fat Man’s? Peter Carey’s The Fat Man in History.” SPAN, vol. 40, 1995, pp. 34–53.

Hassell, Anthony J. Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction. University of Queensland Press, 1994.

Huggan, Graham. Peter Carey. Oxford UP, 1996.

Kane, Paul. “Postcolonial/Postmodern: Australian Literature and Peter Carey.” World Literature Today, vol. 67, no. 3, 1993, pp. 519–522.

Krassnitzer, Hermione. Aspects of Narration in Peter Carey’s Novels: Deconstructing Colonialism. Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.

Krasnostein, Sarah. On Peter Carey Writers on Writers. Black Inc., 2023. 

Larsson, Christer. “The Relative Merits of Goodness and Originality”: The Ethics of Storytelling in Peter Carey’s Novels. University of Uppsala Library, 2001.

Romei, Stephen. "Peter Carey Maintains the Rage." The Australian, 4 Oct. 2014, www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/peter-carey-maintains-the-rage/news-story/5da381b2524fa046256cbb88971f552a. Accessed 22 May 2017.

Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey. Manchester University Press, 2013.