My Life As A Fake/Peter Carey

What a title.  It’s about someone who’s a fake.  All their life.  Sound familiar?  It called out to me immediately.  Why?  Obviously, it could be about me.  I’ll admit it—I’ve felt like a fake.  At times.  Maybe a lot of the time.  All my life?  Maybe not.  But I do get the feeling.  And I may be wrong, but I’ll bet you do too.  So the title works; a real grabber.

Did this feeling of kinship carry forward into the work?  No.  Carey’s fake, it turns out, is a peculiar subtype:  the literary fraudster.  In this case not only is the faking done on the page, it involves a high portion of smart-alec adolescent smirking.  I’ll pull one over on the lot of you, the prankster thinks, and I’ll be ..what?  Superior.  So it’s all about feeling superior.

And me?  I’m not interested in faking superiority through cheap tricks.  I do enjoy faking different roles.  Catch Me If You Can, the story of Frank Abignale, is more my style.

So the title did not pan out.  How about the substance?  Here it’s a curious work.  The literary puzzle is never resolved.  We never find out who wrote the poetry of earth-shattering genius discovered by the self-centered poetry journal editor.  We never find out how the imaginary character created in the hoax suddenly became embodied, gollum-like, to haunt our hero.  So literary sleuthing, the monster that overwhelms our editor, is a dead-end.  

In its place Carey places the real point of his narrative—a life of obsession.  It grows like a tumor.  The hoaxer, Chubb, now truly chastised, his career in tatters, discovers the child of his lover has been taken by his nemesis.  His life now has meaning.  He is on the trail.

It’s a spiral downward from there on.  Chubb—and we are filled with doubts about his reliability—takes us to Malaysia, to the upcountry wilds, to the Japanese invasion, to a boarding school smothered by jungle and mildew, to river life and magic curses.  Carey knows his Malay, and can navigate the culture, with its mix of Chinese and Sikhs and sweating English authors investigating their masculinities.  He knows the weather, the downpours and mouldering smells.  And he knows his bicycles.  Bicycles helped people escape the Chinese.  Bicycles turned out to be the way Chubb makes his meager living, supporting two women.  And bicycles are probably a symbol of something, something vague.

What’s not vague are the women.  The women are legacies of the nemesis, who has died.  A guilty Chubb is obligated to look after them.  So here we have an unlikely social triad—scarred Chinese widow, scarred Eurasian beauty, and near-crippled Australian literary has-been.  

Each of these are probably archetypes or fairy tale characters.  They’re not fleshed-out humans.  The only humans I can find are the editor and her erstwhile mentor, the literary fake Slater.  Right, another fake.  But it turns out he’s a gentleman after all, and truly cares for the editor as only a gentle uncle could.  These two, who have a side story of their own, intermingle with Chubb and the other archetypes just enough to carry the story.  So as story the book flits curiously between the fantasy/Malaysia scene and the two literary types bogged down by a peculiarly British ennui.  It makes for a grating texture, tied together by a pretty slender thread—sleuthing for the ephemeral work of genius.  Carey pulls it off, and it’s overall a pleasure.  But I wonder at the complexity here.  The sought object, the writing, turned out to be empty.   The searching was the point all along.  So the plot itself was a fake—were are misled on several levels, all enjoyable.

So if you like puzzles, this one is for you.