Illywhacker by Peter Carey

First published: 1985

Type of work: Picaresque yarn

Time of work: From 1886 to the mid-1980’s

Locale: Victoria and New South Wales, Australia

Principal Characters:

• Herbert Badgery, the aged narrator
• Leah Goldstein, his friend and sometime lover
• Phoebe McGrath, his sometime wife
• Charles Badgery, his son

The Novel

Herbert Badgery, the narrator of Illywhacker and the patriarch of its three generations of Badgerys, claims at the outset of the novel that he is 139 years old. He also boasts that he is an inveterate liar. Illywhacker is the memoirs of this aged, but not too aged, mendicant. He describes a life of wandering about southeastern Australia, from adventure to adventure, from fib to fib.

The rambling style of his six hundred pages of reminiscence, tall tale after tall tale grafted onto other tall tales, matches the style of his life. His story begins in the early days of air travel. He ditches his unpredictable aircraft in a paddock near a church parking lot, where Phoebe McGrath and her parents have imagined that they are safely picnicking. Jumping from the plane, Herbert captures a deadly brown snake that threatens to bite him. When Phoebe asks why he has the snake in his hands, the only likely explanation he can quickly muster is an out-and-out fib: he says that it is a pet. The snake wriggles its way in and out of the narrative for many pages until, after Herbert has broken the family’s trust by dallying amorously with Phoebe on the roof of the McGraths’ farmhouse, the snake takes Phoebe’s father’s life; rather, he commits suicide with it.

This episode typifies, although it greatly simplifies, the complex, convoluted, comic style of Herbert’s narrative. It also presents the kinds of thematic materials on which he will stitch together a case against his fellow Australians. He tells of fleeing beatings at ten and being taught survival skills by a Chinese merchant and magician; of what happens when he excuses his crash-landing by assuring Phoebe’s father that they could make a better, Australian aircraft themselves; of his love for Leah Goldstein, a medical student prompted to become an exotic dancer by a confused dedication to Socialist causes; and of much more.

Herbert’s memoirs are almost an allegory of Australian history. At every turning, Herbert refers to events of national significance but then quickly reverts to details of his own life. In national affairs, he sees lies, the greatest of them being that Australia is its own master. To salvage honor from the failure of national proportions, he spins his own, monumentally idiosyncratic pack of lies. He piles anecdote upon anecdote and follows every back road of his life, until eventually the reader realizes that Herbert has been doggedly defying the expectation that he will tie up the loose ends of his fragmentary, meandering narrative. For Herbert, diversity is the point. His memoirs are a celebration of the natural resources the elements of his landscape worthy of being spun into a good yarn that have been ill-used by his fellows.

Not surprisingly, then, the celebration is bittersweet. Herbert may see that his Illywhacking beats his countrymen’s bland, patriotic mush of lies anytime. He can know that an Australian automobile made by an American company which takes all the profits is in fact no Australian automobile at all. Yet he also sees that the belief that it is can persist anyway. When his son, Charles, builds a successful business the Best Pet Shop in the World its success depends on the readiness of foreign customers to purchase smuggled exotic Australian birds and reptiles. Herbert sees that such colonialism is inevitable. His own projects, however resourceful they are, are, after all, notoriously unsuccessful or inconsequential, too. In a final irony, as Herbert ends his narrative, he is an attraction at a bizarre human zoo that his grandson, Hissao, has established with Japanese backing.

The Characters

Herbert Badgery, the aged narrator of Illywhacker, warns his readers bluntly at the outset that “lying is my main subject, my specialty, my skill. “He is assigned, by himself and others, a variety of names from his Australian vernacular: “ratbag,” “illywhacker,” and so on. Leah Goldstein explains this last term: An illywhacker is “a spieler” she says. “A trickster. A quandong. A ripperty man. A con-man.”

Herbert’s six hundred pages of anecdote, diversion, and fabrication describe a varied and colorful rascal’s life. He is at once a nest-builder who can turn scraps into houses and an itinerant who wriggles along so quickly that even a ten-year stint in jail cannot slow him down. In a typical period of his life, he says, he wandered about Victoria “writing bad cheques when I could get hold of a book, running raffles in pubs, buying stolen petrol.” Yet he is no malicious criminal and no ordinary rascal. His disdain of legal and social restraints and his fabrications are his ennobling defense against society’s large-scale, demeaning lies that win easy, infuriating acceptance. As he says, lying is his main subject.

The lie of Australian independence is for Herbert the largest of all. It fuels his disdain for others and disappoints his vision of the rich potential in Australia’s resources. He says: “I would rather fill my history with great men and women, philosophers, scientists, intellectuals, artists, but I confess my self incapable of so vast a lie.” That, however, is a fib, too, for his people have their own stature. He makes a giant, albeit a giant of the mundane, of every farmer, immigrant, pioneer, and dreamer with whom he drinks a beer or whose daughter or wife takes his fancy. Yet, pathetically, every person in this rich, curious cross section of his young country, himself included, disappoints him.

When Herbert becomes a guest of the McGrath family, he quickly becomes enamored of the teenage Phoebe. After first seducing her history teacher, Phoebe seduces and marries Herbert. After several rooftop rendezvous, however, Herbert finds that Phoebe is as calculating as she is sexually precocious. She bears two children, then runs away with Horace, the itinerant poet, and Annette Davidson, her history teacher and lover, eventually to achieve, poorly and pretentiously, her ambition to become a poet.

When, as a young man, Herbert meets Leah Goldstein, she is the very exotic dancer of such numbers as the Emu Dance. She becomes Herbert’s lover and then his friend. She took up dancing, Herbert learns, to emulate Rosa Kaletsky, an expelled member of the Soviet Communist Party whose son, an emotionally gnarled Party organizer, Leah later marries.

Charles, Herbert’s son, achieves more fully than does his father the ambition to establish an Australian industry: He runs a pet shop that is, he believes, the best in the world. Half-deaf and hopelessly inadequate, Charles nevertheless prospers in business and provides for all the other Badgerys, Herbert included. Yet his success is tainted. Like Australia’s economy, Peter Carey suggests, Charles’s pet store succeeds only by pandering to American, Japanese, and European customers.

In considering Herbert’s depiction of the characters in his life story, it is well to remember that he is pathologically and purposefully a liar. Late in the memoirs, a note from Leah Goldstein appears that accuses Herbert of distorting facts so as to portray cruelly both himself and others.

Critical Context

In Illywhacker, Carey develops in depth the themes and style he introduced in The Fat Man in History (1974), a collection of short stories, and Bliss (1981), his first novel. One reason for the length of Illywhacker, however, is that in it Carey writes, far more fully than before, about his native Australia. The subject clearly compels him for all of its length, Illywhacker appears not overlong, but bursting to expand.

In Illywhacker, as in his other works, Carey writes in a vigorous satirical style whose language is down-to-earth but whose structure is sophisticated. All of Carey’s works feature rigorous attention to physical details. In Illywhacker, Herbert’s infatuation with the ordinary he tells, for example, why there are few things in the world more useful than a Hessian bag has a clear thematic purpose. It suggests, for example, the way the pioneers and even recent citizens of the historically young country have been forced to eke out a living from whatever was at hand.

Black humor also is a constant feature of Carey’s writing. In Illywhacker, Carey’s dark satire has found an ideal vehicle in Herbert Badgery, who minutely inspects every event, person, and thing. The result is always humorous and generally satirical. Carey’s, like Badgery’s, is a mind that will not agree with polite society that certain things, such as bodily functions and trash, can be blithely ignored. Themes common in other works that also appear here include the nature of colonization, particularly at the hands of American cultural influence.

Bibliography

Hutchinson, Paul E. Review in Library Journal. CX (August, 1985), p. 113.

Jacobson, Howard. Review in The New York Times Book Review. XC (November 17, 1985), p. 15.

Lewis, Roger. Review in New Statesman. CIX (April 19, 1985), p. 34.

The New Yorker. Review. LXI (November 11, 1985), p. 154.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CCXXVII (May 31, 1985), p. 47.