Hail, Australia
It's a fine time to be
writing a Victorian novel. The last year has been one of Jane Austen's
brightest; PBS and cable TV have given fresh life to Hardy, Scott, and all
three Brontës; even Dickens got a Hollywood makeover this winter, his
Great
Expectations transported from Kent and London to New York
and Florida. We have renewed our fascination with the close spaces of
19 th -century England, and it is with those close spaces, the dim
hallways and yellow glooms, that the Australian novelist Peter Carey's Jack
Maggs reacquaints us.
Already a
best seller in England and Australia, Maggs marks Carey's second foray
into Victorian England. His first, the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and
Lucinda (1988), is now a major motion picture. Carey specializes in the
picaresque, in one-man novels about larger-than-life social misfits who must
cope with rotten childhoods, loveless families, hideous disfigurements, and
secret shames. Orphans with tics and dwarfs without lips or teeth ( Jack
Maggs and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith ), 10-year-old parricides
and sexually abused teen-agers ( Illywhacker and The Tax
Inspector )--Carey documents their stories in exhaustive, loving detail.
There is plenty of humor in his books, some of it sharp and much of it just
plain funny; and bizarre bits of magic that, though not always comprehensible,
compound a real sense of menace.
Jack Maggs offers many of these Carey staples. It opens
with the return to England of its eponymous hero, and uses a combination of
linear narrative and flashback to tell a story that spans several decades. In
broad outline, it echoes Great
Expectations , Dickens' story of
Pip the waif who is befriended by Magwitch the convict, though Carey's book is
also partly a reflection on how Dickens' novel came to be written. There are
quite a few correspondences between the two novels, of which the play on names
is only one. Like Dickens' Abel Magwitch, Jack Maggs has been exiled to the
Australian backwaters. Both men have protégés: Maggs' is Henry Phipps, a much
younger man who we think may be his son. Maggs returns from New South Wales,
where he is now a citizen of good repute and considerable wealth, to England,
where he is still a wanted man, to find Phipps, whose foppish lifestyle he has
long subsidized. It is with Maggs' search for Phipps that the story begins.
Soon after
his return, Maggs encounters Tobias Oates, a novelist and self-styled
"cartographer" of the "Criminal Mind," of which Maggs is soon forced to become
the hapless embodiment. Oates cuts a deal with Maggs: He will help the convict
find Phipps if Maggs will agree to undergo a series of experiments in
"Mesmerism." Their terrible sessions (click for a sample) anchor the tale and
provide a framework for its telling. Through them--plus a cache of
invisible-ink letters Maggs writes to Phipps in order to acquaint the protégé
with his protector--we look into Maggs' tortured soul, and witness an Oates in
all but tumescent pursuit of Maggs' life story, which he will exploit for his
next best seller.
Though there is much that Carey takes from
Dickens, he manages to separate his story from its archetype quite easily.
Carey's is a metanovel-- Great
Expectations , the Australian
version--that takes on the master and his work by first tenderly tucking them
into its pages, then slowly exposing their vulnerabilities. What we end up with
is a sharp postcolonial critique not just of one writer but of novel-writing as
a whole.
Carey
lays his trap by hewing close to Dickens in style and mood. Maggs '
London is Dickens' London, only darker: a city whose humanity has long since
run dry and whose juveniles--the Twists and Dorrits and Chuzzlewits and
Maggses--are forced into lives of crime. The year is 1837--that of Victoria's
accession--but we get a sense not of empire or of politely crumpeting tearooms
but of decay and disease, of the more-Dickensian-than-Dickens underside of
rapid industrialization and urban growth.
Carey does an impressive job as time traveler and tour
guide. Maggs is delightfully atmospheric and full of peel-away details,
shit-rimmed cobblestones and stinking . The quaintly elaborate names--Percival
Clarence Buckle, Mercy Larkin, Sophina Smith--are a lively match for Dickens'
Uriah Heeps and Augustus Snodgrasses. And the quaintly elaborate
capitalization--Buckle "found his way into ... the sleepy arms of his Good
Companion"--takes you further back, to Richardson and Pamela , as does
this priceless request: " 'Turn over my pretty one, and raise your sweet white
bottom in the air.' " But it is through the portrait of Oates, author,
hypnotist, and all-round selfish bastard, that Carey brings his novel into its
own. For Oates' pretensions--his impassioned defense of abused children; his
overassiduous note-taking; his obsessions with criminality, mesmerism, and his
wife's sister--parrot Dickens' own well-documented preoccupations. Jack
Maggs is arching its brow at Dickens' vaunted causes, making them
potentially smelly. And where a literal-minded parodist might have bound the
narrative to Dickens and his doings, Carey gives the novel and its themes a
full life outside them. If you've read the Victorian author, you get your
insider's chuckle. If not, you still get a good yarn.
Carey's
careful separation of 19 th -century England from modern-day anywhere
may be the key to our appreciation of the Victorian world, but it is his
portrait of Maggs that allows you to collapse that distance and to really
settle into his novel. Carey gives us the flawed, utterly romantic anti-hero of
high Victorian fiction--absurdly tall, absurdly shy, absurdly proud, absurdly
trusting, Maggs is a sighted Edward Rochester, a kinder Heathcliff. His scarred
back and missing fingers, his tragic isolation from those around him, however,
also make him identifiably Careyesque. Of course, Carey isn't the first author
to use castaways to dramatize a world gone wrong. If anything, he makes a
remarkably unsubtle play for your sympathies.
Carey's cheerful ham-fistedness turns out to be
just what is called for to correct Dickens' lugubriousness. Suffice it to say
that when Carey rewrites Dickens' ending--Maggs, unlike the late lamented
Magwitch, does not die a miserable death--it is a perfectly delightful
solution. Maggs is given an out. In fact, all the sympathetic characters in the
novel are given outs. They are allowed to transcend their particular
poverties--of class, gender, or nationality--in a way Dickens granted precious
few Micawbers. Carey even reclaims that slighted continent, Australia. It isn't
just a convenient dumping ground for convicts, he tells us, with the ticklish
pride so typical of the expatriate (Carey lives in New York). Jack Maggs'
burgeoning dignity and the choices he makes at novel's end give
19 th -century Australia the bourgeois stature it lacked in Dickens'
novel, allowing the country to become a place of hope rather than of exile. By
the same token, Jack Maggs ' triumphal march burnishes the literary
moment to which its author lays proud claim, restoring the
19 th -century English novel, that much-maligned instrument of
colonial oppression, to a well-deserved place in the sun.
