Boy, it's been kind of gloomy around here recently, hasn't it? What with unanticipated abridgments, disorganized Englishmen, and lukewarm responses to historical fiction, things have looked rosier. But here, my friends, is the antidote: Peter Carey's rollicking Australian epic Illywhacker is robust and uproarious - a chewy, stew-like story you can really sink your teeth into, and which also offers a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of lying and the truth. I've written before about how I would cheerfully devour a phone book if Peter Carey took it into his head to write one, and Illywhacker is no exception - although it is different than the other Carey novels I've read. It doesn't have quite the focused incandescence of Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, or the obsessive surreality of My Life as a Fake. Instead, it follows a John Irving-like model of sprawling, character-driven, oddball family saga: a portrait of three generations in the quick-tempered and bandy-legged Badgery clan. Narrating the tales of his progeny and their hangers-on is the 139-year old patriarch Herbert Badgery, an exuberant liar who has yarned, belched, strutted and cajoled his way through the Australian countryside over more than a century. Badgery is the archetype of the charismatic con-man, and Carey depicts him masterfully: we observe, at once, his flatulence and grime, and also his grand dreams of love and aviation, of starting an Australian airplane factory, of building a rambling mansion for the woman he loves. He's simultaneously crass, cynical, and grandly ambitious, and, somewhat predictably, gets his heart broken at least as often often as he breaks the hearts of others. Possibly most important, he's a freewheeling unreliable narrator, telling the reader on the first page, "[M:]y advice is to not waste your time with your red pen, to try to pull apart the strands of lies and truth, but to relax and enjoy the show."Apart from his masterful control of sentences and paragraphs, one of the most interesting things about Peter Carey is the complex morality in his novels; all of the four that I've read so far have interrogated the relationship between lying, storytelling, and the truth, and come to complicated conclusions that can't readily be summarized. Mid-way through Illywhacker, Badgery (sort of) wins and then (kind of) loses a puritanically honest woman named Leah Goldstein, of whom he eventually and unexpectedly makes a lying addict. After they are separated, she spends years upon years faithfully writing to him, creating letters which are almost complete balderdash:Later she would think of these months, when she helped her friend die, as one of the most important times in her life.But she wrote not a word about it to me. Instead she described long walks with Rosa along the clifftops to Tamarama. She did not date these walks, but the impression given was that they had happened an hour or a minute before, that Rosa sat across from her at the kitchen table, drinking fragrant tea. They were beautiful letters, bulging with powerful skies and rimmed with intense yellow light. Every blade of grass seemed sharply painted, every word of conversation exact and true. Perhaps these things had once taken place. Perhaps she invented them. In any case they gave me that electric, unnatural mixture of emotions that every prisoner knows, where even the best things in the world outside become slashed with our own bitterness or jealousy. This confusion of love and hurt is very powerful. I came to crave it even while I dreaded it. It is a more potent drug than simple happiness. ...There was a time, when I finally learned the truth, that I could have killed her for her deception, to have made me feel so much about what revealed itself as nothing. I will tell you, later, how I got on the train with my bottle and my blade. But when I think about her now I cannot even imagine my own anger.Another word for "lying addict"? "Accomplished fiction writer." When he learns that the lovely world Leah created for him is a lie, Badgery is faced, on a more dramatic scale, with the feelings we all have upon finishing a fantastic book: loss and grief for a world he believed in. Leah has written herself through a gauntlet of lies and somehow become a novelist - and also, argues Badgery, a fully fledged Australian citizen. For, as Carey has his famous fictional historian MV Anderson relate, Our forefathers were all great liars. They lied about the lands they selected and the cattle they owned. They lied about their backgrounds and the parentage of their wives. However it is their first lie that is the most impressive for being so monumental, i.e., that the continent, at the time of first settlement, was said to be occupied but not cultivated and by that simple device they were able to give the legal owners short shrift and, when they objected, to use the musket or poison flour, and to do so with a clear conscience. It is in the context of this great foundation stone that we must begin our study of Australian history.Together, these two passages paint an impressively complex view of lying and storytelling. On the one hand, Badgery spends the entire novel fighting for Australian pride - for Australians to invest, for example, in Australian-made cars and airplanes, rather than importing British and American models thought to be self-evidently better than anything "we" could make. He rails against the colonial inferiority complex that motivates many Australians of his day to truckle to the British crown. And so, recognizing that lying and tall-tale-telling are an integral part of his Australian heritage, he embraces them with unmitigated exuberance. I couldn't help loving him for it; the charisma of his voice is intoxicating. On the other hand, though, a big reason that lying has become a national pastime for Australians (and, I might add, Americans) is both shameful and essentially BRITISH: the foundation stone of British colonization in both places was a huge, convenient deception about whether the land they took was already being used. So Badgery's mode of protest against the British turns out to originate with them, and his recommendation to his readers not to look too closely at the truthfulness of his own stories mirrors the cavalier disregard with which they invaded continents and invented the convenient fiction that they had "discovered" them.But while the lies of Badgery and the British colonizers are largely selfish and convenient, however attractive they may seem, Leah's fictions are a more complicated matter. It doesn't directly benefit her to provide Badgery with false images of a beautiful life which she is not really living. It provides a bit of escapism for her, crafting these letters in which everything she wishes is made true, but it also accentuates the gulf between what she wants and what she has. Whatever results her actions have (and there are both positive and negative repurcussions), her primary motivation, arguably, is kindness. It's painful to Badgery to learn that (almost) everything he believed about Leah's life is a lie, but he's such an inveterate liar himself that it's hard to pity him too much. And if we condemn Leah, what to make of our own decision to pick up Peter Carey's Illywhacker? Of all people, isn't Herbert Badgery, con-man extraordinaire, ASKING to be conned himself, just as we readers of fiction are when we crack open his book? After all, it was Badgery who taught Leah to lie in the first place. Not to mention that through her lies, she manages to demonstrate truths: the truth that she loves Badgery, and that she wishes things were different.Without giving too much away, I'll just say that toward the end of Illywhacker all these intersecting threads of lies and counter-lies, of the personal versus the national, take a disorienting and eerie turn. I don't pretend to have tracked them all; as Badgery says in the novel's opening, there comes a point when it's best to just sit back and enjoy the ride. And enjoy it I did, thoroughly and completely. Carey has yet to disappoint.
G'day, g'day!How ya going?What do you know!Well, strike a light!G'day, g'day,And how ya go-o-oing?Just say g'day, g'day, g'day,And you'll be right! —Slim DustyThis is a novel about Australia: the souvenir-shop image of Slim Dusty records and tourist posters, and the romantic but gritty reality that underlies it. It is about how to separate the two: how to celebrate your own history without turning it into a cartoon or a travesty. It is, in short, about ‘the problems of belief and principle’ faced by three generations of proud Australians.‘I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old,’ our narrator, Herbert Badgery, tells us at the start. ‘I am a terrible liar…My age is the one fact you can rely on.’ His being 139 is, of course, one of the least believable ‘facts’ in here, and so right from the beginning of this long, picaresque novel, there is an in-built lack of trust – an uncertainty which frees you up to concentrate on the emotional and symbolic value of what you're being told without worrying too much about its feasibility.Just as well, because the plot at times feels like nothing more than a series of tall tales, shaggy dog stories, fireside anecdotes and family legends – albeit brilliantly told ones, because Peter Carey seems incapable of writing a boring sentence. Planes are crashed, children are conceived, narrow escapes are had. At first I thought it was brilliant, but I have to admit that the novel gradually beat me down from four stars to three-and-a-half. The problem is one of focus. There isn't one – or if there is, it's the whole country. The book rambles, and even our aged narrator does not constitute a central character for much of it – many sections do not involve him at all, and although the digressions are enjoyable I found myself wondering what exactly it was adding up to.But perhaps this is my fault. Characters, central or otherwise, are not the main concern, and Carey tells us as much near the end, in a reference to one character's own literary exploits:the real subject of Goldstein's work was not the people, but the landscape and its roads, red, yellow, white, ochre, mustard, dun, madeira, maize, the raw optimistic tracks that cut the arteries of an ancient culture before a new one had been born.Illywhacker likewise takes us on a delirious journey through western Victoria, the placenames beating out a steady rhythm in a way that reminded me of the geographical romance of Kerouac's America: Ballarat, Bacchus Marsh, Jeparit, Geelong, not to mention wonderful sketches of Melbourne and Sydney. ‘It is not a country where you can rest,’ says one character. ‘It is a black man's country: sharp stones, rocks, sticks, bull ants, flies. We can only move around it like tourists.’The book itself tries (like so many of its characters) to forge or identify some kind of authentic Australia. Its language is discretely shot through with regionalisms: wildlife like she-oaks and yabbies, people that work as cockies or bushies or rabbit-ohs, obscure references to mud-maps and kero and dunnymen, clichés like Akubras, fair-dinkum and dinky-di, surprising mundanities like ‘nature strips’ and ‘rear-vision mirrors’. Sentences like ‘the johns had sworn to massacre the swaggies if they jumped the rattler.’In the early parts of the book, set in the 1910s and 1920s, this Australia is defined in opposition to England, and Herbert reserves his most withering scorn for fellow countrymen who still idolise the motherland.It was what happened in this country. The minute they began to make a quid they started to turn into Englishmen. Cocky Abbot was probably descended from some old cockney lag, who had arrived here talking flash language, a pickpocket, a bread-stealer, and now, a hundred years later his descendents were dressing like his gaolers and torturers, disowning the language, softening their vowels, greasing their way into the plummy speech of the men who had ordered their ancestors lashed until the flesh had been dragged in bleeding strips from their naked backs.But towards the end of the book, the enemy shifts to become multinational industry in general, and American investors (who ‘misunderstood our ironies and took them for firmly held beliefs’) in particular. Herbert and his family, struggling to turn their Sydney premises into a monument to Australian fauna, end up with something between a tourist attraction and a prison, funded by General Motors and owned by the Mitsubishi Company of Japan. Almost everyone involved ends up reduced to – in Carey's typically memorable phrase – ‘a skin-wrapped parcel of fucked-up dreams’.‘I have not valued what I have loved,’ frets one character. To this extent Illywhacker is a cautionary tale. You can love your country to your heart's content, but giving it its proper value is an altogether trickier proposition. In a country founded on lies, maybe lying is the best solution after all.
What do You think about Illywhacker (2004)?
Ah, remember when books were important! And very very long. This teeming Dickensian Sydney, plonked in a Patrick White desert, was thrust at me by a wild-eyed enthusiast in 1985, shortly after it became the novel that should have won the Booker that year. I took one look at the size of the thing and decided to wait till I was more grown up - in my case another 24 years. To anyone who remembers the 80s it seems dated now by the fashions of the decade (Magic Realism, Wow!) though this effect will fade as it encounters new readers, and anyway the fashions have proved robust: Victoriana, modern architecture, Yankee hegemony, interesting animals ,the history of the left and, of course, Australia. The London literati recognised it as a fair old crack at the Great Aussie Novel and lavished arch obliquities on it ("A great tottering tower that stands up against all the odds"-Victoria Glendinning.) Helpfully typical that Australian greatness should flow from the brash pen of an advertising exec. For all that, they handed the Booker to another exponent of undisciplined Antipodean over-reach, Keri Hulme, whose representatives sang fetchingly at the Guildhall banquet in the time-honoured way of colonial curiosities. After all, Carey might have turned up in Rayban sunnies and a Porsche.
—Geoff
This book is filled with crazy characters whose lives are told by a biographical narrator who admits from the very beginning that he is a liar. If any writer were looking for an example of an unreliable narrator, this is the one. I kept thinking he was going to be dead sometime before the end, but Carey managed to avoid that 'fatal' error of first person writing.Set in Australia, starting in the early 20th century and progressing through to some ambiguous time much later, Illywhacker tells the story of Herbert Badgery, multiple bigamist, car salesman, and story-teller. It is descriptive of the time of war and depression as well as excess and expansion. By the time I got to the end, though, I felt that Carey must have been under the influence of some really great psychotropic substances. Even so, the emotional impact was such that I came to tears a few times as a result of the merging of totally bizarre events where the humanity, or inhumanity, took hold. I won't give away the ending, except to say, the emotional aspect expressed was totally unexpected and surprising. Yet the themes explored -- living in cages, the context of our individual lives, taking what life throws at you -- is covered in spades in a most concrete way. Although long at over 800 pages, Illywhacker is an engaging read, a montage of novelised stories about the most unusual lives.
—J.L. Whitaker
First sentence: "My name is Herbert Badgery."P. 99: "Molly McGrath whimpered and curled her fifty-year old body into a shaking ball beneath the sheets."Last sentence: "It will give him strength for the interesting times ahead." From the author's website: In Australian slang, an Illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character -- especially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere. Illywhacker was shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize.I won this book in a giveaway organised by Kim Forrester from Reading Matters; it was sent to me by the publisher faber and faber. Thanks to both of them!I have a double feeling about this book. While I loved the first 250 pages and the last 200 (total page number: 569), I thought the part in between a bit boring and a bit too long. Perhaps it was the introduction of so much new characters that apparently had nothing to do with the story (although later they did), or the interruption of the main story, I don't know. Herbert Badgery is an adventurous man, who tries to make the most of every event that happens in his life and every context and situation he finds himself in... he is a cynic but he is also very spontaneous. But, since he admits on the first page of the book that he is a liar, and since he is the narrator of the story, you begin to wonder if he is indeed the man that you think he is, based on his writings. One thing, however, I think drives him: that is his wish to have a home with a wife and kids and sit with them contently around the table.
—Nadyne
