Thursday, January 08, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Faking it

By John Ziebell

The epigraph that introduces Peter Carey's new novel My Life As a Fake is from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and it's a fitting choice for this tale that imagines the darkest Promethean potential of--believe it or not--poetry.

This story about stories begins with a junket to Malaysia by a very odd couple: John Slater, an aging literary poseur, and the novel's narrator, Sarah Wode-Douglass, a journal editor who for some unclear and probably British reason goes by "Micks." From her perspective, the journey has a random and surreal sense, so her coincidental meeting with a derelict Aussie named Chubb seems totally credible, even when, with maddening lethargy, he begins confessing his role in a literary hoax that went fatally awry.

Carey, a two-time Booker Prize winner, has a flair for innovation and a notable ability to bend history to his service. His eighth novel is based on an incident that remains notorious in Australian literary circles. A poem titled "The Darkening Ecliptic" was submitted for publication in 1944, allegedly by an unschooled woman writing on behalf of her brother, Ern Malley. Max Harris, then a respected editor, ran the work, thinking he'd discovered an indigenous postmodern genius. In actuality, the letter, the poet's biography and the poem itself were all part of a plot created to embarrass Harris by two shrewd--and obviously convincing--reactionary poets who resented the direction that contemporary literature was taking. By the time the whole thing unraveled, Harris was not only professionally gored for falling for the ploy but, to make matters worse, faced criminal trial on charges that the hoax poem he'd printed was obscene.

The "poet" Chubb creates is named Bob McCorkle, but the parallel with Ern Malley is deliberate; Carey even borrows the original faked poem for his novel. And at this point Carey asks the more interesting question: What if somebody stepped into the counterfeit role and fulfilled it? Could a fictional creation come to life, as it were, evolving into a more inventive poet than Eliot, a more exacting observer than Whitman and a greater lunatic than Ezra Pound?

In Carey's world, the answer is yes. The physical manifestation of McCorkle is a seven-foot giant who absorbs the entire fiction as his reality, kidnaps the daughter of Chubb's lover, and escapes to Malaysia, where he becomes a specter, untouchable but always visible at the next horizon.

At least that's the story according to Chubb. But as we slowly discover that Micks is a model of misperception--a sexually, socially and psychologically repressed being who has misread everyone from her parents through Slater to her financial sponsors and her own confused self--there's certainly reason for her take on Chubb to be suspect as well.

Everyone differs, for better or worse, from appearance--at least their appearances as mediated by our string of unreliable imperialists: Micks, Slater, Chubb. Even the deftly drawn Malays who earn more of our respect than the book's principals--the decorated poisoner of Japanese soldiers, the near-mythical Chinese widow who becomes McCorkle's lover, the chief of the river pirates--can't give us the whole truth, which is the constant irony that the title reflects. Each player has an agenda; everyone is a fake, searching for a moment of opportunity and unearned benefit. In some ways we're all like Shelley's narrator, doomed to follow creations that escape and eclipse our control.
My Life As a Fake

Peter Carey

Knopf

266 pages