February 25–March 4, 1999
books
New Expectations
Writer Peter Carey talks back to Charles Dickens in Jack Maggs.
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Growing up in Australia, author Peter Carey was encouraged not to think of his homeland as a former penal colony, but to associate himself with the English soldiers stationed there. While reading Dickens' Great Expectations, he happened upon one of the few representations of Australians in great literature. In the novel, an Australian convict, Magwitch, becomes a successful businessman and financially supports young Pip, sending him money in England on a regular basis to allow him a gentleman's upbringing. Yet Carey was annoyed that Dickens hadn't drawn Magwitch with the tender sympathy that he lavished on Pip.
"Magwitch is my ancestor," explains Carey, 55, on the phone from his New York home. He views the patronizing English attitude of Australians as ruffians, personified in Magwitch, as a cultural slight. Jack Maggs (Knopf) is a literary response of sorts. Jack Maggs begins where Great Expectations ended, with the title character (whose name is a play on Magwitch) arriving in England to find his Pip, Henry Phipps. Maggs is desperate to keep his identity a secret. If discovered, he will be hanged for breaking the terms of his exile to Australia. Jack Maggs' primary antagonist is Tobias Oates, who, in some ways, represents Dickens. Carey describes Oates as "a Dickens sort of writer who had known the truth and not told it."
Oates, fascinated by Maggs, wants get into the criminal mind to help research a novel based on the ex-con's life. He also attempts to thwart Maggs' efforts to find Phipps because that will take him away from his research. Phipps is hiding from Maggs in fear of being exposed as the beneficiary of an exiled convict.
The struggles and the scheming begin when Oates discovers Maggs' true identity. The novel is a complex tale of infidelities, betrayals, homosexuality, unexpected fortunes, fierce courage and bloody deaths. And Peter Carey manages it with a hand that seems almost more comfortable in the formal style of Dickens than in the choppy postmodern sentence of today.
For Carey, it was a natural transition for him to take on Dickens, and recognize in Magwitch not only kinship as a fellow Australian, but to want to give him a heart, an identity, a story of his own. Carey has an affection for Australian history, in particular 19th-century Australia, which is a common setting for him.
Carey's best-known novel is the Booker Award-winning Oscar and Lucinda, a tale of two remarkable individuals fighting to live as they like in the conservative and racist society of the early days of Australian colonization. The attention he got from that was, admittedly, "what one dreams about." But in a country with a population of only 17 million, he quickly became a public figure after the success of the book and was drawn into prominent public debates. He made tabloid headlines when he won a major literary award and did not take the accompanying trip to meet the Queen of England. He downplays the reports, saying "one is inevitably some sort of controversial figure." But he does admit his last eight years in the United States has been "a nice holiday," where he has taught classes at NYU and Columbia, and is writing a new novel and a screenplay for Jack Maggs. Yet Carey also has a yen to return to Australia, and like Maggs, has a great love for his homeland.
In 1997, Peter Carey received more public attention when Oscar and Lucinda was made into a movie directed by Gillian Armstrong, starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett. Carey, who did not solicit the movie nor help write the screenplay (though he looked it over every so often while it was being written), just felt privileged to have the film made. And he likes the job that they did. Now he is writing the screenplay for Jack Maggs with Australian director Fred Schepisi, and while he seems to be enjoying it, it hasn't been easy. As he says "any time you can remove a thread of story at the same time as being true to the book, you feel triumphant."
Peter Carey will read Mon., March 1, 7:30 p.m. at Borders Book Shop, 1727 Walnut St., 215-568-7400.
