SWF: The Uncommon Reader, Wood, Williamson & Gleeson-White

It was a grey, cold and wet start to the 2013 Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF) today, but I kicked it off in great style with ‘The Uncommon Reader’. Tegan Bennett Daylight chaired an engaging panel discussion with respected critics James Wood, Geordie Williamson and Jane Gleeson-White on what books have inspired them, from their formative years through to their predictions on the classics of tomorrow. I’ll just pick out a few talking points…

There was a discussion about the moment they began to feel like they wanted or needed to reply to books. James said it wasn’t until university that he was taught to read better, at which point he began to be a better reader, or observer, of the world as well. I think this is true of all us readers.

Both Geordie and Jane spoke of the enthusiasm that works such as Wood’s The Broken Estate allowed them to have. Jane said she still reads with a child’s enthusiasm now, something that was evident when she spoke about her favourites.

For James, he wanted to be able to write about things that made him want to burst out and say ‘this is bloody good!’. He writes not for academics, but for other readers.

Tegan asked a great question about what are the books that these avid readers return to, time and again. For Geordie, it is V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. From Naipaul, post-colonial literature emerges. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a most ‘writerly’ book, something he leafs through when he feels a little stale.

James also admires Naipaul, noting A House for Mr Biswas as a very funny and poignant work. But for him, ‘the one’ is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a favourite of mine too. It has, he said, the thing so many works of fiction lack: the ideal ending.

Jane gets excited about any new translations of works by Homer and Tolstoy. But the two works she picked out are F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with its ‘flawless prose’ (she read a passage of this out, endearingly trying not to cry!), and a favourite of mine: Emily Bronte’s  Wuthering Heights (my review).

Thoughts then turned to books and writers of today that will last. Tegan offered Alice Munro and Kazuo Ishiguro. Geordie split the discussion into local and international contexts. For his local, he gave Tim Winton, admiring Winton’s ability to pull off writing that appeals to a wide audience and is also ‘pregnant with intelligence’. He had a smile when saying Stephen Romei had rung him to say the new Winton has just been delivered (expect it on your nearest bookshelf soon! – no title was given). For a global context, he offered David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a ‘generational shift’, and praised the first page of Wallace’s unfinished work The Pale King.

James echoed Geordie’s praise of the opening to The Pale King, and agreed with Tim Winton. To that he added his admiration for Peter Carey, saying that while he liked his more recent works, he is eagerly hoping for the next ‘great novel’ from him, something to rival Illywhacker (my review) and Oscar and Lucinda (my review). (Given they are two of my favourite novels, I couldn’t agree more!) He also noted Christina Stead’s The Little Hotel. For his international, he picked out W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, (which is featured in Wood’s most recent work of criticism The Fun Stuff and Other Essays). 

For Jane, it is Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. But the one that ‘knocked her socks off’ recently was Atomised by French author Michel Houellebecq, which had James Wood nodding too. Jane was positively gushing in her praise, and has blogged about Atomised at Bookish Girl.

For all that, the one author not mentioned, but mentioned by an audience member in a question was Jane Austen. Geordie swung this to Tegan, who re-reads every Austen each year, (and is an admirer of Northanger Abbey, whereas Jane Gleeson-White said she’s more a Persuasion fan (as am I).

I left with the feeling that if I had only attended one session at this years’ festival, then this would have been a great one to choose. The reading list alone would keep me going with great reads for a good while. The panel spoke with intelligence, wit, and above all, enthusiasm about the thing that brings us all together: books.

I’ll have more SWF musings over the coming days and weeks.

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2011 Favourite Reads

There have been many enjoyable reads this year.  The Boat by Nam Le got 2011 off to a great start with a collection of disperse and riveting ‘long’ shorts.  I then had the pleasure of re-visiting two of Peter Carey’s great novels in Oscar and Lucinda and Illywhacker.  One of the standouts of the year was That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott, winner of the Miles Franklin.  I thoroughly enjoyed David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten – so clever and absorbing, the way the inter-linkages worked was very impressive.  Then onto another debut novel, this time from an Australian, with Favel Parret’s wonderful Past the Shallows.  There was time for some great classics too, like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Later in the year I was thrilled and appalled by Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch – what a ride!  And speaking of rides, what a way to end the year with The Savage Detectivesby Roberto Bolaño: part road story, part loss of innocence, every part fantastic.  You can find the reviews of any of these by searching or by clicking on the tags at the end of this post.

What were your favourites this year?

As for 2012, I’m not about to go in for any challenges.  I just plan on reading more classics, both old – Anna Karenina – and more recent – Bolaño’s epic 2666.  And I shall keep abreast of some hot-off-the-press works.  Apart from that, I shall go where the wind takes me.

I hope you join me for future musings!

All the best for the new year.

John

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Illywhacker by Peter Carey

I’ve wanted for some time to read Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985) back-to-back with Oscar and Lucinda (1988).  My (distant!) memories of Illywhacker was that it was every bit the classic that O&L turned out to be, but somehow it seems to have been overshadowed by the latter’s Booker Prize-winning success.  An example of this is on the front cover of my old edition where it is pointed out that Illywhacker was written “by the author of Oscar and Lucinda”!

There are some interesting parallels between them.  They both have first person to third person narrative ‘frames’.  I’ve noted with O&L that this seemed illogical, but with Illywhacker the wonderful open silences any similar concern we might have … in this story, anything goes:

My name is Herbert Badgery.  I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. … I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar.  I say that early to set things straight.  Caveat emptor.

What a wonderful open.

The narrative frame works better in Illywhacker for other reasons too: though some of the scenes are a stretch for our first-person narrator, he does have connections and shares correspondence with other characters which makes this ‘reach’ believable.

Illywhacker is a big rollicking picaresque romp covering three generations, with helpings of lyrical ‘hyper-realism’ and a dash or two of magical realism.  There are so many story threads it’s hard to summarise the plot.  Herbert is an early Australian aviator and car seller and dreams of making Australian planes and Australian cars.  He almost secures funding but his scheme to make planes fails and he seems to give up on selling cars because none are Australian.  This notion of industries being sold or owned by Americans and then later Japanese interests rather than being our own is perhaps the central underlying theme of the novel.  When Herbert’s son Charles buys a Holden and proclaims it an Australian car, something his father should be proud of, Herbert can’t contain his anger, saying that Holden is American-owned and that the car is not Australian.

Alloyed to this theme of ownership is the associated question of national identity, how strong it is and how it places us in the wider world.  Much has changed in the past 26 years since the book was first published, though our ‘local’ car industry is still owned by the major international conglomerates.  I wonder what Carey must think of the economic situation in the US now (where he lives), the run-down of the uncompetitive US car manufacturers and the unrelated fact that most of the US government debt is owned by China…

In any event, events spiral out from Herbert’s efforts to secure the funding from a man named Jack McGrath who puts up Herbert in his rambling well-to-do mansion after Herbert crash-lands his plane into a farm next to where Jack and his wife, Molly, and daughter, Phoebe, are picnicking.  Herbert, an inveterate liar and womaniser, eyes off Phoebe as well as her old man’s money, selling him the dream of an Australian aeronautical industry.  Poor Jack dies, possibly of shame when he introduces Herbert to his business associates and the truth begins to unravel.  He comes back to haunt Herbert as a ghost after old Herbert shacks up with spoilt Phoebe.  This is poignant given Herbert and Jack’s earlier conversation where Jack told Herbert he did not favour older men with younger women.  Herbert builds a make-shift home for Phoebe (who he marries, although it turns out he already is!) and Molly out on the mudflats on land he doesn’t own, but it is not enough for Phoebe who, after bearing him two children, takes off with her female lover for Sydney.

And this is just the start of the novel!

We learn of Herbert’s upbringing, how he was taken in and reared by an old Chinese man, named Goon Tse Ying.  Ying teaches Herbert the trick of disappearing.  He warns Herbert not to use it as one of the repercussions of the trick is the making of dragons which bring evil into the world.  Needless to say Herbert uses the trick in order to impress a woman, Leah Goldstein, who becomes his lover.  While the trick impresses Leah it does indeed summon tragedy into Herbert’s life after his children try to imitate him.

Dragons and snakes form a recurring motif throughout.  Herbert’s son Charles becomes expert in the handling of snakes and then all creatures.  This skill is used by Herbert to run scams in country pubs.  It is also a talent which Charles then uses to create ‘The Best Pet Shop in the World’ in an arcade between George and Pitt Streets (reminiscent of our lovely Strand arcade) in Sydney in later years when Herbert is in jail.  Charles makes this into a success with his bare hands, but it transpires that some of the funding for the venture has come from an oil company in the US.  It seems that even pet stores have been sold off to foreign interests!

There is so much to love about this story.  The writing is Carey at his best: the historical details are vivid, the character sketches Dickensian, the descriptions of landscape lyrical.  Take for instance, [p62]:

The line of dwarf yellow cypress pines along Blobell’s Hill was smudged by dull grey cloud and nothing in the landscape was distinct except the particularly clear sound of a crow above the saltpans flying north towards O’Hagen’s.  It sounded like barbed wire.

Leah has a laugh [p209] which is “a tangle like blackberries, sweet, prickly, untidy, uncivilized…”

There are wonderful descriptions of wildlife too, glorious parrots.  (Any story that has king parrots in it is, in my view, a winner.)

And there is this advice on Sydney that Herbert gives Hissao, [p508]:

I showed him, most important of all, the sort of city it was – full of trickery and deception.  If you push against it too hard you will find yourself leaning against empty air.  It is never, for all its brick and concrete, quite substantial and I would not be surprised to wake one morning and find the whole thing gone, with only the grinning facade of Luna Park rising from the blue shimmer of eucalyptus bush.

The plot continues to spiral and I won’t try to describe it any further.  Suffice to say there are shenanigans aplenty when Herbert gets out of jail and comes to Sydney to live with Charles and the menageries of people and pets he has acquired – including his wife, Emma, who decides she’d rather live in a cage.  There is more triumph and tragedy.  There are tales of communists and smuggling.  There are deserved digs at the so-called ‘White Australia Policy’ of the mid 2oth century.  There is Carey touching on aboriginal issues too, albeit briefly.  There is Herbert’s grandson Hissao’s desperate effort to rescue the shop, which he does by securing Japanese funding, turning the pet shop into a bizarre and macabre show of people rather than just pets.  Herbert himself becomes one of the displays.  The selling off of Australia is complete – we begin to sell ourselves.

There are, of course, differences between Illywhacker and O&L.  O&L’s characterisation is deeper and sharper, more thoughtful – there is a lot of symbolism in Oscar and Lucinda’s characters.  These facets are to be expected in a book that focuses on two people.  Illywhacker spreads time across three generations and multiple wives and lovers.  Back stories are always fleshed out, even for minor characters.  There is a lot more ‘going on’.  But the theme of the selling out of Australian industry to overseas, of demurring to older or more confident nations, of being unsure of ourselves, comes across quite strongly.  There are a lot of characters serving the overall thematic structure.

If it has faults, say its length and its long back-stories to minor characters, they are for me easily overlooked by the richness and joy in such diversions and how Carey ties them together.

In the end you can’t compare apples with oranges.  Oscar and Lucinda is a tragic love story built upon a folly.  There is almost folly here too, but only to show the extremes with which the selling of Australian business to overseas interests is taken, to heighten the deep comic thrust of the narrative – for Illywhacker is a very funny book.  For me, Illywhacker is every bit as good as Oscar and Lucinda.  Rather than being cast in the latter’s shadow, it deserves its own spotlight.  It is a great book, Carey at his exuberant best.  It has kept me silent company all these years and it remains one of my all time favourites.

As an aside, it seems to me that Illywhacker and Steve Toltz’s Booker shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole share the same DNA.  They are both big rambling multi-generational comic tales that shine a light on what it means to be Australian, though each through their own unique lens.  (Their protagonist narrators both spend time in prison too.)  Lovers of one will enjoy the other.  What other books do you see as fitting into this particularly Australian comic story-telling cast?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and/or whether you think Illywhacker stands up to Oscar and Lucinda.

The Dilettante’s Rating: 5/5

Illywhacker by Peter Carey

faber and faber

1985

ISBN: 9780571139491

560 pages

Source: the bookshelf rainbow (aka: personal library)

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Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

This is not the first time I’ve read Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey and I dare say it won’t be the last.  I’ve been on a bit of a historical bent of late, and an American friend of mine, recently arrived into Australia, wanted to read it so I thought, ‘why not?’  Winner of the Booker Prize in 1988, O&L sees Carey at his irrepressible best, writing with such vivaciousness that he is able to transcend the technical limitations he constructs, and provide us with a modern classic in the process.

The story is narrated by the great-grandson of Oscar who occasionally pops up with first person, present-day diversions, but whom we never really know much about.  This ‘frame’ allows Carey some freedom with language and also the details which the narrator uses (such as noting historical facts that occur after the time-period of the story).  However, it creates a problem of logic: the narration slips from 1^st person in the present day to the close 3^rd person in the past and we have to ask how our narrator could possibly know all these details?  It’s a fascinating authorial choice.  The slip between 1^st and 3^rd person is very sly, almost unnoticeable, but it is noticeable.  So apart from some minor benefits noted above, why does he do it?  I suspect the main reason, (without giving much away here), arises because of a need to set up the tale of the antecedents of the narrator.  That said, I’m not sure it was necessary for the narrator to be constructed in this way, and it might make it hard for some readers to suspend disbelief.

But enough of technical musings!

Our memorable protagonists, both outsiders, both by turns reserved and wild, are brought together quite late on – they first speak to each other only on page 231.  As the narrator tells us [p225], “In order that I exist, two gamblers, one Obsessive, the other Compulsive, must meet.”  Despite this separation, they are tied together by two of the core motifs of the novel: glass, and more particularly their unquenchable thirst for gambling.  These passions are fused together in Oscar and Lucinda’s mad folly to build a glass church for remote Boat Harbour on the Bellinger River in northern NSW – a folly which is sealed with a wager.  It is precisely because of the details with which Carey creates the past that this implausible bargain is made so real, so believable.

Glass appears in the very first paragraph, [p1]: “… the wall which held the sacred glass daguerreotype of my great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins (1841-66).”  Oscar is encased in glass in the very first image, and, as it happens, he is encased in glass at the end too.  It’s a lovely symmetry in a wildly picaresque story.

Not too long after, [p11], we meet Oscar as a boy in a coastal village in Devon England, son to a Christian fundamentalist preacher and accomplished naturalist whose “eyes were fixed, looked straight before him and shamed the devil.”  [p24]  Oscar is re-classifying his button collection, some of which are glass.  The re-ordering of several hundred buttons shows us his obsessive nature, a nature that will ultimately bring him trouble in many ways.

Soon thereafter, [p16], we are introduced to Oscar’s water phobia thus:

Oscar was afraid of the sea.  It smelt of death to him.  When he thought about this ‘death’, it was not as a single thing you could label with a single word.  It was not a discreet entity.  It fractured and flew apart, it swarmed like fish, splintered like glass.

This lovely linking of glass and water* lays the groundwork for the final scene.

When we meet Lucinda, in colonial New South Wales, [p77], we hear of her admiration for the Crystal Palace, a large cast-iron and glass exhibition space (originally built in London’s Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, later moved to a suburb south of London, and sadly lost to fire in 1936).  We also hear the story of how, as a girl, her father obtained from England and then exploded for her a Prince Rupert’s drop: a marvellous accident of glass making, at once incredibly strong and, if nipped in just the right place, overly weak, exploding into glass so fine it was like ‘brown sugar’.  Lucinda finds in this event an emotion—wonder—which is described [p134] as “very more-ish.”  Already we sense in her the thrill of such events, the rush that games of chance and gambling will later bring her.

Arriving into Sydney from Parramatta with a large inheritance, Lucinda comes across the Darling Harbour glassworks.  As chance would have it – and there is much of chance in this story – the factory is for sale, so she has to buy it.  Glass, she knows, “is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, … and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, … it is invisible, solid, in short a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good as any material to build a life from.”

Meanwhile, back in London, Oscar has eschewed living with his father for the local Anglican priest, the Rev Hugh Stratton.  He decides this by throwing a stone over his shoulder onto a hopscotch ‘court’.  It is a game of chance in, but the pebble keeps landing on ‘α’ – alpha or ‘a’ for Anglican.  Oscar takes it as a sign from God.  He moves out, breaking his father’s heart and perhaps his own in the process.  This tragic quality to Oscar rubs off on pretty much everyone he meets, including the Anglican priest who begs Oscar for his betting system and loses his entire wealth foolishly trying to make it work for him, and then commits the sin of suicide.  Later, when studying in Oxford, Oscar sees the arrival of the rouge Wardley-Fish into his life as another sign from God.  Wardley-Fish takes him to Epsom Downs and introduces him to a world he didn’t know existed: the world of horses and betting.  Oscar sees the light, so-to-speak.  He is hooked and develops an elaborate, obsessively maintained and successful betting system.  His decision to come to New South Wales on missionary work is made with the toss of a coin.  As he leaves, his father presents him with the caul from his birth.  Cauls are said to guard against drowning and were once highly prized good luck charms, particularly amongst sailors.

Oscar’s phobia for water foreshadows his tragic relationship with glass, given glass is a liquid.  So when we hear Lucinda think that it is as good a material to make a life from, we know that, for Oscar, such material is like kryptonite, and is not something he should make a life from.  But whereas Lucinda sees her “proty-type” as a dumpy glass ‘outhouse’, Oscar sees [p380]:

… a tiny church with dust dancing around it like microscopic angels.  … The light shone through its transparent, unadorned skin and cast colours on the distempered office walls as glorious as the stained glass windows of a cathedral. 

The die is cast.

One of the interesting facets of the book’s central relationship is the fact that Carey spends so long keeping our hero and heroine apart.  Apart from glass and gambling, Carey ties them together physically through their wild hair: Oscar’s [p13]: “… red hair, that frizzy nest which grew outwards, horizontal like a windblown tree in an Italianate painting…”, and Lucinda’s [p80]: “Her hair was reddish brown, more brown than red except here, by the creek, where a mote of light caught her and showed the red lights in a lightly frizzy halo.”  Later, her hair is described as a mass of unruly ‘snakes’.  Whilst Lucinda only talks to Oscar for the first time on p231, she sees him a few pages earlier.  She is returning to Sydney after a trip to London, made for the purpose of finding a husband.  She is walking along the dock, hoping for some company on the voyage, when [201]: “A hansom clipped past … bursting with clergymen, or so it seemed.  She noticed the unusual red hair of one of them, but only in passing…”

This leads to the wonderful image of Oscar’s whole party being hoisted onto the ship by the crane used to load animals after their attempts to get him up the gangplank end in failure.

What follows is a delightfully rendered and very peculiar love story as these two outsiders and loners are brought together, painfully, in characteristically prudish 19^th century fashion (heightened even more given Oscar is so religious).

In a wonderfully comic scene, Oscar comes up to the first class cabin of Lucinda to hear her confession, dreading the view out of the large glass windows of first class, crabbing his way to the table where Lucinda had been playing cards with herself.  She is mortified that he will see the cards, which of course he does.  But he shocks her, because, for Oscar, even religion—the strict prism through which he sees the world—is a gamble: [p261]:

‘Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier.  We bet – it is all in Pascal … we bet that there is a God.  We bet our life on it.  …  We must gamble every instant of our allotted span.  We must stake everythingon the unprovable fact of His existence.’

The novel also deals with the thorny issue of colonisation and its effects on the aboriginal population of Australia.  It was one of Carey’s initial themes: he saw an empty church of old Christian stories, having wiped out the old aboriginal stories, now itself being removed from the landscape near Bellingen because of a lack of funds.  Needless to say, the overland expedition, which Oscar’s delivery of the church puts into play, impacts local aboriginals with tragic consequences.

One of the brilliant facets of the book is its overtly visual descriptions.  It teems with life.  Carey has a Dickensian touch when it comes to drawing characters.  Take Wardley-Fish escorting Oscar to Epsom Downs [p109], in his “loud hound’s-tooth jacket with a handkerchief like a fistful of daffodils rammed into a rumpled vase.”  Even the steamer which carries Lucinda to Sydney is alive, [p136]: “The little steamer shuddered, cleared its throat of a clot of smoke, and pushed past the tangle at Market Street.”  Early Sydney is vivid; Lucinda sees the water of Sydney harbour [p136] rippling “with a satanic beauty: mother-of-pearl; spilled oil from a steamer.”  Later, we have the landscape: cockatoos rise off the trees after gunshot like feathers from an exploding pillow.  And there is Oscar sitting in the glass church [p498] as it is towed up the Bellinger River:

The man inside the church waved his hands, gestures which appeared, from the perspective of Marx Hill, to be mysterious, even magical, but which, inside the crystal furnace of the church, had the simple function of repelling the large and frightening insects which had become imprisoned there. 

Oscar is trapped there too, for he is described (relentlessly, repeatedly) throughout as being like a praying mantis.  He’s an insect trapped with all the other insects.  It is a lovely, reasonably subtle link.  Unfortunately for the insects, the church seems to be a hell, for they keep bashing into the ‘nothing’ of the glass.

At other times though, the repetition is odd.  We have the strange situation where images and descriptions are used by both the narrator and then by the characters.  For example, at Epsom Downs, Oscar is described [p117] by the narrator as “such a scarecrow that some ageing Mohawks called out after him.”  Then, the very next page, Wardley-Fish says to him: “You look like a grinning scarecrow.”  How does Carey get away with this mixing between narrator and character’s viewpoint?  Is it merely a perverse effect of the narrator ‘frame’, that our narrator imagines everything?

Some time ago I read a chapter that focussed on Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda in Kate Grenville and Sue Woolf’s book: Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written.  In that highly intriguing study, Carey spoke of his process of writing and what he calls his method of ‘cantilevering’, in which he begins from a place several times, trying to get a little further each time, with each effort a little better realised, “more fully imagined.”  There is a print of one of his first pages where Carey is noting down ideas, the word ‘folly’ keeps appearing, as does ‘deuce’ – meaning both the playing card and also the devil.  Here is the brain-stormer at work.  After the interview, there are some pages of his early drafts, containing ideas, character sketches, and examples of cantilevering.  Interestingly, it is on one of these pages that he himself has typed: [p46]: “HOW IS ALL THIS KNOWN IF IT IS FIRST PERSON.  MAYBE THIRD WOULD BE BETTER.”  Carey also notes in the interview that he has already thought of all the problems that bad reviews point out, and how writing is a form of vocation where you spend a fair amount of time in a state of doubt.  It is a fascinating interview and chapter (and book!) for those of us who like to peer behind the curtain and see how the magician works.  But maybe Carey should have listened to himself on the question of first person vs third?

As the Guardian review and the chapter in Ten Stories will tell you, Carey’s inspiration for the opening of the story – with the fractured relationship between Oscar and his father, Theophilus, comes from Edmund Gosse’s memoir Father and Son.  Every book we read is very much part of a larger conversation; new books ‘speak’ to older ones constantly.  Carey is no stranger to this, of course.  I’ve heard it said that Illywhacker is a re-imagining of The Odyssey, (though I can’t find any references to back that up!); Jack Maggs is inspired by Magwitch from Great Expectations; True History of the Kelly Gang is inspired by Ned Kelly’s ‘Jerilderie Letter’; and his most recent novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, is a re-imagining of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Oscar and Lucinda has its faults – the narrator framework and the repetition.  But do you know what?  I don’t care.  It is a small wonder that Carey can get away with such things and in so doing produce a classic, a book that lives long in the memory, something that will be read decades from now with as much love and affection as it received when it first hit the shelves.  The reason is the care in which he builds his characters and how they in turn breathe life into story.  Some might not like the ending, but for me it’s a worthy Booker winner and member of the ‘1,001 Books to Read Before You Die’ list.  (It was also shortlisted for ‘The Booker of Bookers’, won by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.)

Given my slight misgivings I can’t give it 5/5 … but I’d dearly love to.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.  And what do you think of the movie adaptation with Cate Blanchett and (the excellent) Ralph Fiennes?  Did you like the (much altered!) ending?

For more on Oscar and Lucinda, see the Guardian’s book club excellent discussion led by John Mullen here:

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

faber and faber

1988

ISBN: 9780571153046

516 pages

Source: the bookshelf rainbow (aka: personal library)

* Spoiler alert: It is not just linking water and glass here – but death too.  This phobia of water that Oscar, also extends to his father who listens to Oscar’s lungs with a stethoscope every morning: [p26]: “They were always clear … but it gave him no peace, for God had told him there was something wrong with the boy.”  Oscar’s lungs might well be clear of water here, but by the end they’re not.  We see on the expedition too, his total abhorrence of water when he refuses to bathe, embarrassed to be naked in front of the other men, but perhaps just as likely, he knows he’s in a life-and-death struggle with water and senses that water will finally win out.  Not even his caul will protect him.  So we have this wonderful linkage: water, glass (which is a liquid), religion, gambling, and death.  Oscar’s fate is sealed right from the start of the novel, he is caught in the glass frame photo, and in the end he drowns, trapped in the glass church.

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