CAREY, Peter (Philip)

Nationality: Australian. Born: Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, 7 May 1943. Education: Geelong Grammar School; Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 1961. Family: Married 1) Leigh Weetman; 2) Alison Summers in 1985, one son. Career: Worked in advertising in Australia, 1962-68 and after 1970, and in London, 1968-70; partner, McSpedden Carey Advertising Consultants, Chippendale, New South Wales, until 1988; full-time writer, from 1988; currently professor, New York University. Lives in New York. Awards: New South Wales Premier's award, 1980, 1982; Miles Franklin award, 1981; National Book Council award, 1982, 1986; Australian Film Institute award, for screenplay, 1985; The Age Book of the Year award. 1985; Booker prize, 1988. Member: Fellow, Royal Society of Literature.

Publications

Short Stories

The Fat Man in History. 1974; as Exotic Pleasures, 1981.

War Crimes. 1979.

Collected Stories. n.d.

Novels

Bliss. 1981.

Illywhacker. 1985.

Oscar and Lucinda. 1988.

The Tax Inspector. 1991.

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. n.d.

The Big Bazoohley. n.d.

Jack Maggs. 1998.

Plays

Bliss: The Screenplay. 1986; as Bliss: The Film, 1986.

Screenplays:

Bliss, with Ray Lawrence, 1987; Until the End of the World, with Wim Wenders.

*

Critical Studies:

"What Happened to the Short Story?" by Frank Moorhouse, in Australian Literary Studies 8, October 1977; "Bizarre Realities: An Interview with Carey" by John Maddocks, Southerly 41, March 1981; Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame by Karen Lamb, 1992; Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey's Fiction by Anthony J. Hassall, 1994; Peter Carey by Graham Huggan, 1996; Peter Carey by Bruce Woodcock, 1996.

* * *

In some ways the short fiction of Peter Carey seems to have served as a warmup for his work as a novelist. The two collections upon which his reputation rests, The Fat Man in History and War Crimes, were both published in the 1970s, while in the 1980s he turned his attention more exclusively to the novels. Like his novels, the stories are speculative and fanciful, often starting from the question, "What if… ?" Stories ask, for example, "What if a person could buy a new and randomly selected genetic makeup?" ("The Chance"). Or, what if the psyche could be stripped of concealing layers as easily as the body can be stripped of clothing? ("Peeling"). In similar fashion Carey's novels imagine what would happen if a man could die more than once (Bliss) or postulate that the whole of Australian history might be a series of lies people have conned themselves into believing (Illywhacker).

In Carey's fictional scenarios metaphor is often literalized and then driven to its (il)logical extremes. In "The Fat Man in History," for instance, the obese are hated and persecuted because they are thought literally to embody the gluttonous and self-indulgent greed of capitalism, which a communistic revolution has supplanted. One group of fat men responds in kind to these assumptions, deciding to "purify" the revolution by separating its nourishing aspects from the dross. To do this they plan to pass it through their digestive systems, "bodily consuming an official of the Revolution." Carey has likened the method he employs in stories like "Fat Man" to that of a cartoonist, exaggerating, caricaturing, and pushing things to a "ludicrous … extension."

Both the short fiction and the novels exhibit this cartoonist's take on reality, and they share other technical features as well. Most notable is a masterful blending of the convincingly real, the disturbingly surreal, and the unabashedly outlandish. The mix variously recalls such literary progenitors as Kafka, Faulkner, Borges, García Márquez, Donald Barthelme, and Nabokov. Kafka, we remember, turns a character into a giant insect and then with sober realism narrates what must inevitably follow. Faulkner has a corpse recount the story of her life, and García Márquez sets an ascension into heaven amidst wet sheets. Similarly Carey supplies enough corroborative, authenticating detail in the story "'Do You Love Me?"' to make us accept the proposition that unloved regions, buildings, and people will begin to dematerialize.

A different but related effect is achieved when Carey self-consciously explores his role as artificer, as he does in "Report on the Shadow Industry." Here he sees even fiction as part of a product line of diaphanous, deceptive, unsubstantial, and unsatisfying "shadows," supplied by a consumption-based culture to meet manufactured needs.

Such techniques—sometimes grouped under the rubric "magic realism" to suggest a matter-of-fact rendering of the physically impossible and blatantly symbolic—are used to varying degrees in Carey's fiction, and he is quite capable of abandoning them altogether. When he does it is often in favor of a probing psychological realism such as that of "A Schoolboy Prank," in which middle-aged men gather to honor, but end by tormenting, a former teacher because he reminds them of adolescent homoerotic experiments they would rather forget. In his novels, too, Carey demonstrates repeatedly that he knows as much about human nature as he does about postmodern literary pyrotechnics.

In several ways, then, the stories are kin to the novels. But they also have their own rewards for the reader. More tightly choreographed than the longer works, they shift the emphasis from character development to theme and fictional premise. In so doing they not only delight with their inventiveness and virtuosity but offer themselves as compact fables or parables for our times. Appropriately, the theme to which Carey recurs in the stories is power: political, financial, emotional, and psychological. As he explores its permutations, he is interested in how power is sought, acquired, wielded, defended, abused, and withheld from its victims. Many of his stories are set in a vaguely futuristic time and an ill-defined place, tactics that increase the reader's sense that these are universally applicable allegories of our age.

It may be a useful oversimplification to think of Carey's first volume of short stories, The Fat Man in History, as concerned with victimization and impotence, while the second collection, War Crimes, emphasizes the wrongly or lethally empowered. Fat Man is full of people caught in a variety of "Catch-22s." There is Crabs ("Crabs"), whose car is disabled by a gang of parts thieves. They leave him trapped in a drive-in theater to which other crippled vehicles and their occupants are delivered daily. When he finally escapes the theater he finds nothing outside: all life is within the drive-in, from which he is now excluded. In another story, "Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion," the first-person narrator is employed by a nameless company to tend horses, who keep drowning in a pool the company won't fence. When the narrator gives up trying to save the horses and drives them into the pool, the company simply delivers another lot. The narrator's profound disorientation—his inability to grasp who, where, or what he's supposed to be—is mirrored by the protagonist of "A Windmill in the West," a soldier left alone in central Australia who shoots down a plane because he can no longer distinguish what he was ordered to guard from whom. In these stories faceless authorities manipulate their underlings by imposing ignorance and isolation.

Those in power may also turn the disenfranchised against each other, as they do in the volume's title story. Here, the fat men's attempt to oppose the revolution by consuming it ends in their consumption of one of their own instead. Their leader is killed and eaten, his place usurped by another member of the group. In a final irony Carey reveals that the whole takeover was engineered by an outside agent, whose job is to inspire disruptive internal squabbling within the ranks of a potentially subversive element.

Like Fat Man, War Crimes is peopled with victims: the vaporizing father of "'Do You Love Me?,"' the battered young woman of "The Uses of Williamson Wood," and the retired schoolmaster whose dead dog is nailed to his door in "A Schoolboy Prank." But in this volume Carey more thoroughly examines the dynamics by which victims may become victimizers and power may become an addictive drug. A case in point is the architect of "Krista-Du," who designs a magnificent gathering place for the feuding tribes of a third-world nation but whose good intentions actually make him the accomplice of the brutal dictator who hired him. The architect consoles himself that when the tribes come together under the lofty dome of his "Krista-Du," they will unite to overthrow the dictator. Instead the hot breath of so many people rises to form clouds under the dome, a phenomenon that the dictator uses to subdue his superstitious peoples with evidence of his prowess as a sorcerer.

Self-deception, Carey warns, can threaten others as much as oneself. In "The Chance" the narrator tries to convince his lover that she needn't be ugly and malformed to be a sincere ideological revolutionary. Undeterred by his arguments, she destroys her beauty and their relationship in a misconceived political act. Spectacular examples of legitimate motives run amok and power misused occur in the title story, "War Crimes," whose first-person narrator carries out his mandate to reverse the sales slump at a frozen-foods factory by means of intimidation, torture, and treachery. Finally he launches a full-scale war.

Critics of Carey's short fiction have frequently pointed to the surprising sense of truth and reality emanating from texts marked by fabulous plots and fantastic characters. This effect probably arises from the alchemy through which, as Carey remarked in an interview with Ray Willbanks, "lies becom[e] truths." "One can look at the fact of imagination," Carey says, "as a way of actually shaping the future." A fictional plot, in other words, can become a prediction.

He goes on in the interview to explain the "great responsibility" that accrues to the writer because of this tendency of the imagined to transmogrify into reality. The responsibility is to "tell the truth," both about those ugly lies that have already hardened into fact and about "the potential of the human spirit" to reimagine and so reinvent something better. For these reasons, as critic Robert Ross has observed, stories and storytelling really matter to Carey. He has admired the power and the potency in Borges; his own readers recognize the same qualities in Carey's work.

—Carolyn Bliss

See the essay on "American Dreams."