In True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey returns to the harsh, brutal world of Australian history, so brilliantly evoked in earlier novels such as Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda. Set in the desolate settler communities north of Melbourne in the late 19th century, the novel is told in the form of a journal, written by the famous outlaw and "bushranger" Ned Kelly, to a daughter he will never see. As Kelly explains, "I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lies may I burn in hell if I speak false".

The salty, colloquial, unpunctuated style of Kelly's journal is reproduced with great skill, as Carey recounts the outlaw's early life with a cross-dressing, Irish immigrant sheep worker, and a beautiful but headstrong mother, always on the wrong side of the law. Inadvertently causing the arrest and death of his father, Ned realises that "there were a drought and nothing flourishing there but misery I were the oldest son I thought it time to earn my place", a decision that ultimately leads him into conflict with the law, and to form the notorious Kelly Gang.

The novel contains some wonderfully lyrical and deeply moving moments, as Ned struggles to articulate the harsh injustice of the world around him, but some readers might find Carey's epistolary style rather restrictive and colourless after the first 100 pages, and lacking in the imaginative excitement of Carey's earlier novels. --Jerry Brotton

Masterful portrayal of the social conditions of the time, 15 Sep 2007
I don't know enough about the history of Ned Kelly to comment on the historical accuracy of the events, though I gather that the novel is quite well researched. What makes the book such an enjoyable read though is the remarkable portrayal of life in colonial Australia. You get a visceral sense of how it might have felt to be poor in the dog-eat-dog world of Ned Kelly's time, of the desperate struggle to conquer the Australian bush, of the constant oppression by authorities for whom laws rarely provide an effective check on power, of the solidarity of human beings brought together by their shared trials and tribulations. Carey has managed to convey a sense of this era in a way that few writers are able to. It is a portrait of social conditions that can be compared to the novels of Charles Dickens.

work of genius, 19 Sep 2005
This is a truly wonderful book. The sense of place and the evocation of the era are fabulous. It's an adventure story and a love story. Above all, the absolutely incredible narrative voice make this a hilarious and also moving read.

An engaging style that brings Kelly to life, 11 Aug 2005
This is an absorbing book, written as a sequence of letters supposedly penned by Kelly himself - his attempt to explain his life and death to a daughter he will not live to see. Carey has written the book without punctuation in a conversational style. I quickly got used to this and found that the technique gave weight and realism to the story. Carey tells us about the paper used for each set of letters and we can imagine Kelly coming across some scraps on which he can continue his story - it is a charming touch.

Although this is a fictional work, it is so well-written and Carey's mode of writing is so persuasive that it seems entirely plausible that Ned Kelly is speaking to us from beyond the grave. I enjoyed it enormously - it is imaginative, clever and very entertaining.

The song of Australia, 20 Aug 2004
Mr Carey's novel relates the epic life of Ned Kelly in Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The text comes in the form of 13 parcels of varying length (from 7 to 50 pages). Sometimes they are sheets of National Bank or Bank of New South Wales letterhead, a cloth booklet, octavo pages, open envelopes providing space for text, a pocket diary or the reverse side of advertising fliers. They cover Ned's adventurous life until the manuscript abruptly terminates when he was 26 years old and it is told in a tone so wild and passionate that the reader often believes that the bushranger is speaking to him from the grave! It is a breathtaking account of an existence marked by a cascade of events where Ned is in turn a reformer, a criminal, a horse thief, a farmer, a bushranger and an orphan. Ned's voice is very convincing, continually creating new surprises on every page despite the plainness of his language, or rather perhaps because of it. Actually his uneducated voice is very much part of the originality of Mr Carey's novel.
The critics have ranked Mr Carey next to Charles Dickens and Lawrence Sterne - very rightly so, in my opinion.

Peter Carey's novel attempts to find Ned Kelly's voice, 02 Aug 2004
I suspect for many Americans their first introduction to the legend of Ned Kelly was when the Australian icon of his helmet was incorporated into the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Of course there are those who knew of Kelly from Tony Richardson's 1970 film "Ned Kelly," where Mick Jagger played the title role, or even the 1993 film "Reckless Kelly" with Yahoo, which updated the Kelly legend, for lack of a better word, to the present. That idea that Kelly is the Robin Hood of Australia is enough of a touchstone for most to understand Kelly's importance to the Australian psyche, but there are those who consider him to be nothing more than a glorified outlaw, more like Jesse James than Robin Hood. Significantly, those views break down all ethnic lines, with Irish-Australians seeing the hero and Anglo-Australians insisting on the villain. Gregor Jordan's 2003 film "Ned Kelly," based on Robert Drewe's "Our Sunshine" and starring well known Australian actors Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts will renew interest in the true story and may well lead viewers to this volume.

Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang" is, despite the title a fictional novel which won the Booker Prize in 2001. The novel is inspired in part by Sidney Nolan's famous series of paintings of Ned Kelly and is told in a first person narrative style that is based on Kelly's own "Jerilderie Letter," which provided his version of the events that led to him being an outlaw with a 8,000 pound reward on his head, the largest in the world up to that time. The conceit is that Kelly has written these words, intended them to be read by a daughter who was born and raised in California, trying to explain his life.

Carey's book is not a substitute for the true history it purports to be, including people and events that are not part of the historical record (to wit, Mary and the baby), as he attempts to connect the dots of Ned Kelly's life. Ultimately this is a character study wherein Carey emphasizes Kelly's strong Irish-Australian identity, his fierce loyalty to family and friends, and his native wit and inherent shrewdness. We know from the letters he dictated and the transcript of his trial that Kelly was intelligent and Carey plays that up throughout the book, because essentially what is happening here is that he is justifying the icon image of Kelly that exists in the popular mind of Australia. At the same time there is humanizing, for Kelly has a strong attachment to his mother and forges a new relationship with his brother Dan as the Kelly Gang heads towards its fate. He also hates the English as much as they hate them, which is no mean feat. In the end what you get out of this book is not Ned Kelly's story but rather his voice, although its authenticity is, of course, open to debate.

Ultimately "True History of the Kelly Gang" is not meant as an introduction to the story of Ned Kelly. Jordan's film is out on DVD now so it can serve that function as others as it did for me. Carey will give us more of a notion of what Kelly might have been thinking and certainly a more complete picture of the world in which Kelly lived and died. The climax of this book is not the battle at Glenrowan but a conversation with a school teacher named Curnow, who is able to raise questions that go beyond the legal points on which Kelly's trial, convinction, and execution turned. This is a discussion held through the prism of history and needs to be read in that light and reaffirms once again the cultural axiom "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Masterful portrayal of the social conditions of the time, 15 Sep 2007
I don't know enough about the history of Ned Kelly to comment on the historical accuracy of the events, though I gather that the novel is quite well researched. What makes the book such an enjoyable read though is the remarkable portrayal of life in colonial Australia. You get a visceral sense of how it might have felt to be poor in the dog-eat-dog world of Ned Kelly's time, of the desperate struggle to conquer the Australian bush, of the constant oppression by authorities for whom laws rarely provide an effective check on power, of the solidarity of human beings brought together by their shared trials and tribulations. Carey has managed to convey a sense of this era in a way that few writers are able to. It is a portrait of social conditions that can be compared to the novels of Charles Dickens.

work of genius, 19 Sep 2005
This is a truly wonderful book. The sense of place and the evocation of the era are fabulous. It's an adventure story and a love story. Above all, the absolutely incredible narrative voice make this a hilarious and also moving read.

An engaging style that brings Kelly to life, 11 Aug 2005
This is an absorbing book, written as a sequence of letters supposedly penned by Kelly himself - his attempt to explain his life and death to a daughter he will not live to see. Carey has written the book without punctuation in a conversational style. I quickly got used to this and found that the technique gave weight and realism to the story. Carey tells us about the paper used for each set of letters and we can imagine Kelly coming across some scraps on which he can continue his story - it is a charming touch.

Although this is a fictional work, it is so well-written and Carey's mode of writing is so persuasive that it seems entirely plausible that Ned Kelly is speaking to us from beyond the grave. I enjoyed it enormously - it is imaginative, clever and very entertaining.

The song of Australia, 20 Aug 2004
Mr Carey's novel relates the epic life of Ned Kelly in Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The text comes in the form of 13 parcels of varying length (from 7 to 50 pages). Sometimes they are sheets of National Bank or Bank of New South Wales letterhead, a cloth booklet, octavo pages, open envelopes providing space for text, a pocket diary or the reverse side of advertising fliers. They cover Ned's adventurous life until the manuscript abruptly terminates when he was 26 years old and it is told in a tone so wild and passionate that the reader often believes that the bushranger is speaking to him from the grave! It is a breathtaking account of an existence marked by a cascade of events where Ned is in turn a reformer, a criminal, a horse thief, a farmer, a bushranger and an orphan. Ned's voice is very convincing, continually creating new surprises on every page despite the plainness of his language, or rather perhaps because of it. Actually his uneducated voice is very much part of the originality of Mr Carey's novel.
The critics have ranked Mr Carey next to Charles Dickens and Lawrence Sterne - very rightly so, in my opinion.

Peter Carey's novel attempts to find Ned Kelly's voice, 02 Aug 2004
I suspect for many Americans their first introduction to the legend of Ned Kelly was when the Australian icon of his helmet was incorporated into the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Of course there are those who knew of Kelly from Tony Richardson's 1970 film "Ned Kelly," where Mick Jagger played the title role, or even the 1993 film "Reckless Kelly" with Yahoo, which updated the Kelly legend, for lack of a better word, to the present. That idea that Kelly is the Robin Hood of Australia is enough of a touchstone for most to understand Kelly's importance to the Australian psyche, but there are those who consider him to be nothing more than a glorified outlaw, more like Jesse James than Robin Hood. Significantly, those views break down all ethnic lines, with Irish-Australians seeing the hero and Anglo-Australians insisting on the villain. Gregor Jordan's 2003 film "Ned Kelly," based on Robert Drewe's "Our Sunshine" and starring well known Australian actors Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts will renew interest in the true story and may well lead viewers to this volume.

Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang" is, despite the title a fictional novel which won the Booker Prize in 2001. The novel is inspired in part by Sidney Nolan's famous series of paintings of Ned Kelly and is told in a first person narrative style that is based on Kelly's own "Jerilderie Letter," which provided his version of the events that led to him being an outlaw with a 8,000 pound reward on his head, the largest in the world up to that time. The conceit is that Kelly has written these words, intended them to be read by a daughter who was born and raised in California, trying to explain his life.

Carey's book is not a substitute for the true history it purports to be, including people and events that are not part of the historical record (to wit, Mary and the baby), as he attempts to connect the dots of Ned Kelly's life. Ultimately this is a character study wherein Carey emphasizes Kelly's strong Irish-Australian identity, his fierce loyalty to family and friends, and his native wit and inherent shrewdness. We know from the letters he dictated and the transcript of his trial that Kelly was intelligent and Carey plays that up throughout the book, because essentially what is happening here is that he is justifying the icon image of Kelly that exists in the popular mind of Australia. At the same time there is humanizing, for Kelly has a strong attachment to his mother and forges a new relationship with his brother Dan as the Kelly Gang heads towards its fate. He also hates the English as much as they hate them, which is no mean feat. In the end what you get out of this book is not Ned Kelly's story but rather his voice, although its authenticity is, of course, open to debate.

Ultimately "True History of the Kelly Gang" is not meant as an introduction to the story of Ned Kelly. Jordan's film is out on DVD now so it can serve that function as others as it did for me. Carey will give us more of a notion of what Kelly might have been thinking and certainly a more complete picture of the world in which Kelly lived and died. The climax of this book is not the battle at Glenrowan but a conversation with a school teacher named Curnow, who is able to raise questions that go beyond the legal points on which Kelly's trial, convinction, and execution turned. This is a discussion held through the prism of history and needs to be read in that light and reaffirms once again the cultural axiom "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

What a great theft of expectations, 19 Sep 2008
I decided to read Theft A Love Story partly as a way of introducing myself to the work of Peter Carey. After all, twice winner of the Booker prize, I felt that in not having read any of Carey's novels I was missing out on an important literary experience. I could have chosen to read one of the two Booker winners, namely Oscar and Lucinda or the True history of the Kelly Gang. I chose to read Theft simply because it is Carey's most recent novel. However, it was an unmitigated mistake which have probably turned me off the work of Carey for good.

This is a pretentious and overrated novel. I suspect that its high praise rests on Carey's previous work. I normally finish novels even struggle to finish them when it is clear that I am not enjoying them and can see no literary merit. However, in respect of Theft, I failed to finish it. Quite frankly it was not worth the effort.

At least up to the point where I read, the story thus far was uninteresting. There are claims that the book is funny. Perhaps it is if you like shallow and obvious comedy. I prefer comedy that is subtle and sophisticated. I did not find a reason to laugh. Here is an example of its crude comedy one of the two narrators, Hugh, tells us that his mother: "had a terror of knives, dear mum, poor mum, and who could blame here when you saw Blue Bones or Grandpa Bones walk in the back door? Big men always in a towering rage. Each night my mother took the knives and hid them in the Chubb safe. She had her left breast taken by amputation. God bles her. Therefore it follows. Hide the knives."

Theft greatest pretentiousness is that it attempts to explore the world of art: who exploits whom, fraudlent behaviour is alleged to be exposed and the question who creates and owns a work of art is raised. I must say that I did not care and do not care for such a world. Not that I don't like and admire works of art it is rather I do not think that Carey had anything of significance to say about art.

There is no reason to recommend reading this novel.

Exhilarating, exuberant tour-de-force, a literary gem of a book, 14 Aug 2008
Peter Carey's "Theft: A Love Story" is a literary tour-de-force, a brilliant book, a witty spoof on the art world, a tale of two brothers and a story about love, a story taking us from Australia to Japan and to New York, to sum it up: a magnificent book.
How often do you find yourself multiply re-reading sentences, phrases, even pages- not for the sake of understanding it, but out of sheer joy of re-enjoying the just-read phrases, sentences and pages. Not all too often, I would think. Peter Carey's writing is so exuberantly enjoyable, that there is actually no way avoiding multiple re-reading, enjoying the prose melt on your tongue. Scenes, sentences, phrases, which I just wanted to read to my friends, but where to start, each and every page is just full of excerpts you want to share with others.
"Theft: A Love Story" is the tale of two brothers, one of them a previously well known painter, now taking care of his art dealer's offbeat located home, also taking care of his huge and "slow" brother Hugh. It's a tale of love too, of brotherly love- they just don't seem to be able to live with each other, but obviously can't live without each other either. The story is told in turn (chapterwise) by the two brothers, and although both are rather huffy, grumpy characters (brothers all the way), who both really seem to have a ball verbally whacking each other, it is, due to master ventriloquist Peter Carey's intriguing prose, easy to recognize, whose narrative we are reading at that moment. Of course, the "Love Story" mentioned as un undertitle is the love story of Marlene (who walks into the lives of Michael and Hugh one rainy night, starting off the story there) and Michael. "Theft" is also a story of an art fraud, of mischief, even of murder, but never (at least I don't recall) have frauds and thieves been more overtly likeable than Peter Carey's characters in this novel.
"Theft: A Love Story" is sheer enjoyment, a literary masterpiece, a gem of a novel. One of the novels, which leaves you (though sad- for having finished reading it) with a big big smile, happy for having been fortunate to have read this book.

I tried..., 14 May 2008
I give this book two stars instead of one because I could not bring myself to finish it. I hate not finishing a book once I start it, especially one such as 'THEFT' that I was so looking forward to reading, so believe me I tried. I suffered through page after page of this book for over two weeks only to get a little more than halfway through. You heard right, it took me two weeks to just get to the halfway mark, that is because every time I read a page or two I found myself falling asleep, as this had to be one of the most boring books that I have ever read! 'THEFT' has a promising concept, a former world renowned painter finds himself, after being bankrupt on the verge of making a comeback only to get involved with a mysterious woman who threatens to bring down all that he has worked for. It sounds as though the book has a lot of suspense and intrigue. There is a promise of adventure as the clues unravel about the art theft & murder but at least for the first half of this story those things come in the smallest of doses. I couldn't even give a proper synopsis of the book because as far as I could tell, not much happened other than two brothers complaining an awful lot about each other. Every time you would see a hint of the story taking shape the focus of the story would change and it ended up being dragged out.

Again, I give this book two stars instead of one because since I did not finish it, something, somewhere down the line could happen to make this a more interesting book. However, I personally couldn't suffer through another 100 pages before that happened.

I must be missing something...., 24 Feb 2008
This was my first Peter Carey and if it wasn't on my reading group list I would never have chosen it. I can see the book's merits, however I really didn't enjoy this book at all and found its negative, cynical tone quite depressing.

However, the characterisations of the brothers, the evocation of their individual voices, the imagery and the tangible descriptions of life in small town Australia are masterful. The problem for me is that these make the plot line almost invisible. I was so involved in the inner dialogues that I couldn't figure out what was happening in the plot.

The book's themes are very interesting and thought-provoking, and I loved the final sentence of the whole thing (admittedly partly because it was just that)for its wise, prophetic tone.

I'm glad to have read this, and it's likely that I will dip into it again, because the writing is stunning in parts. But I am not a Carey convert through this offering.

(For an interesting counterpoint to the themes of this book check out Lewis Hind's The Gift - especially the first part exploring the value vs giftedness of art.)

I admire this book a great deal, but I can't say that I really enjoyed it, 19 Jan 2008
Carey does well in creating two distinct voices for Butcher and his brother and really does a great job in conveying their personalities. Butcher is a selfish, self-centred man, fully focused on creating his work and bitter that he is no longer in fashion and thereby unable to command high prices. Hugh is an idiot-savant (at times, too savant for my liking) and with a tendency to TALK IN CAPITALS at odd times in his narration. In reality, the story is about the relationship between these two men - the resentment that Butcher feels for having to look after his damaged brother and the resentment that Hugh feels for never being allowed to do what he wants to do - and is explored through a plot concerning the theft of a painting by Leibovitz (Butcher's favourite artist and the person whose work inspired him to paint in the first place).

We meet Butcher and Hugh in the small outback town of Bellingen, where they're living in a house belonging to Butcher's patron, Jean-Paul, maintaining it for him whilst Butcher paints. Into their life crashes Marlene, a woman Butcher assumes is American, trying to get to Butcher's neighbour, Dozy (who owns the Leibowitz painting) in order to authenticate it. When the painting later goes missing, it's Butcher who is suspected of the crime and he's forced to return to Sydney, where he again meets up with Marlene and when she tells him she can help revitalise his career with a show in Tokyo, they become lovers and embark on a journey that takes them to Tokyo and Manhattan. On the way, Butcher and Hugh learn more about the Leibowitz family and Marlene's connection to them and also the dark scam at the heart of the story.

Carey is a lyrical writer and he excels at setting scenes and creating a sense of place. However, compared with the richness of the Butcher and Hugh characters, I felt that Marlene was too slight and trite a character to be truly believable and really wanted to know more about her and her relationship with Olivier than what we get on the page. Ultimately, Butcher was too bitter and unpleasant a character for me to feel drawn to, but I did feel tremendous sympathy for Hugh, albeit there were times when I'd have liked to see Carey play down the savant quality and show him as a simpler human being. Also, I felt that the plot hinged on a huge improbability (one that I'm not going to give away because I don't want to spoil it), but it was a fact that really irritated me because I'd been hoping for a more fulfilling pay off to the scam than what we're given.

Masterful portrayal of the social conditions of the time, 15 Sep 2007
I don't know enough about the history of Ned Kelly to comment on the historical accuracy of the events, though I gather that the novel is quite well researched. What makes the book such an enjoyable read though is the remarkable portrayal of life in colonial Australia. You get a visceral sense of how it might have felt to be poor in the dog-eat-dog world of Ned Kelly's time, of the desperate struggle to conquer the Australian bush, of the constant oppression by authorities for whom laws rarely provide an effective check on power, of the solidarity of human beings brought together by their shared trials and tribulations. Carey has managed to convey a sense of this era in a way that few writers are able to. It is a portrait of social conditions that can be compared to the novels of Charles Dickens.

work of genius, 19 Sep 2005
This is a truly wonderful book. The sense of place and the evocation of the era are fabulous. It's an adventure story and a love story. Above all, the absolutely incredible narrative voice make this a hilarious and also moving read.

An engaging style that brings Kelly to life, 11 Aug 2005
This is an absorbing book, written as a sequence of letters supposedly penned by Kelly himself - his attempt to explain his life and death to a daughter he will not live to see. Carey has written the book without punctuation in a conversational style. I quickly got used to this and found that the technique gave weight and realism to the story. Carey tells us about the paper used for each set of letters and we can imagine Kelly coming across some scraps on which he can continue his story - it is a charming touch.

Although this is a fictional work, it is so well-written and Carey's mode of writing is so persuasive that it seems entirely plausible that Ned Kelly is speaking to us from beyond the grave. I enjoyed it enormously - it is imaginative, clever and very entertaining.

The song of Australia, 20 Aug 2004
Mr Carey's novel relates the epic life of Ned Kelly in Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The text comes in the form of 13 parcels of varying length (from 7 to 50 pages). Sometimes they are sheets of National Bank or Bank of New South Wales letterhead, a cloth booklet, octavo pages, open envelopes providing space for text, a pocket diary or the reverse side of advertising fliers. They cover Ned's adventurous life until the manuscript abruptly terminates when he was 26 years old and it is told in a tone so wild and passionate that the reader often believes that the bushranger is speaking to him from the grave! It is a breathtaking account of an existence marked by a cascade of events where Ned is in turn a reformer, a criminal, a horse thief, a farmer, a bushranger and an orphan. Ned's voice is very convincing, continually creating new surprises on every page despite the plainness of his language, or rather perhaps because of it. Actually his uneducated voice is very much part of the originality of Mr Carey's novel.
The critics have ranked Mr Carey next to Charles Dickens and Lawrence Sterne - very rightly so, in my opinion.

Peter Carey's novel attempts to find Ned Kelly's voice, 02 Aug 2004
I suspect for many Americans their first introduction to the legend of Ned Kelly was when the Australian icon of his helmet was incorporated into the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Of course there are those who knew of Kelly from Tony Richardson's 1970 film "Ned Kelly," where Mick Jagger played the title role, or even the 1993 film "Reckless Kelly" with Yahoo, which updated the Kelly legend, for lack of a better word, to the present. That idea that Kelly is the Robin Hood of Australia is enough of a touchstone for most to understand Kelly's importance to the Australian psyche, but there are those who consider him to be nothing more than a glorified outlaw, more like Jesse James than Robin Hood. Significantly, those views break down all ethnic lines, with Irish-Australians seeing the hero and Anglo-Australians insisting on the villain. Gregor Jordan's 2003 film "Ned Kelly," based on Robert Drewe's "Our Sunshine" and starring well known Australian actors Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts will renew interest in the true story and may well lead viewers to this volume.

Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang" is, despite the title a fictional novel which won the Booker Prize in 2001. The novel is inspired in part by Sidney Nolan's famous series of paintings of Ned Kelly and is told in a first person narrative style that is based on Kelly's own "Jerilderie Letter," which provided his version of the events that led to him being an outlaw with a 8,000 pound reward on his head, the largest in the world up to that time. The conceit is that Kelly has written these words, intended them to be read by a daughter who was born and raised in California, trying to explain his life.

Carey's book is not a substitute for the true history it purports to be, including people and events that are not part of the historical record (to wit, Mary and the baby), as he attempts to connect the dots of Ned Kelly's life. Ultimately this is a character study wherein Carey emphasizes Kelly's strong Irish-Australian identity, his fierce loyalty to family and friends, and his native wit and inherent shrewdness. We know from the letters he dictated and the transcript of his trial that Kelly was intelligent and Carey plays that up throughout the book, because essentially what is happening here is that he is justifying the icon image of Kelly that exists in the popular mind of Australia. At the same time there is humanizing, for Kelly has a strong attachment to his mother and forges a new relationship with his brother Dan as the Kelly Gang heads towards its fate. He also hates the English as much as they hate them, which is no mean feat. In the end what you get out of this book is not Ned Kelly's story but rather his voice, although its authenticity is, of course, open to debate.

Ultimately "True History of the Kelly Gang" is not meant as an introduction to the story of Ned Kelly. Jordan's film is out on DVD now so it can serve that function as others as it did for me. Carey will give us more of a notion of what Kelly might have been thinking and certainly a more complete picture of the world in which Kelly lived and died. The climax of this book is not the battle at Glenrowan but a conversation with a school teacher named Curnow, who is able to raise questions that go beyond the legal points on which Kelly's trial, convinction, and execution turned. This is a discussion held through the prism of history and needs to be read in that light and reaffirms once again the cultural axiom "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

What a great theft of expectations, 19 Sep 2008
I decided to read Theft A Love Story partly as a way of introducing myself to the work of Peter Carey. After all, twice winner of the Booker prize, I felt that in not having read any of Carey's novels I was missing out on an important literary experience. I could have chosen to read one of the two Booker winners, namely Oscar and Lucinda or the True history of the Kelly Gang. I chose to read Theft simply because it is Carey's most recent novel. However, it was an unmitigated mistake which have probably turned me off the work of Carey for good.

This is a pretentious and overrated novel. I suspect that its high praise rests on Carey's previous work. I normally finish novels even struggle to finish them when it is clear that I am not enjoying them and can see no literary merit. However, in respect of Theft, I failed to finish it. Quite frankly it was not worth the effort.

At least up to the point where I read, the story thus far was uninteresting. There are claims that the book is funny. Perhaps it is if you like shallow and obvious comedy. I prefer comedy that is subtle and sophisticated. I did not find a reason to laugh. Here is an example of its crude comedy one of the two narrators, Hugh, tells us that his mother: "had a terror of knives, dear mum, poor mum, and who could blame here when you saw Blue Bones or Grandpa Bones walk in the back door? Big men always in a towering rage. Each night my mother took the knives and hid them in the Chubb safe. She had her left breast taken by amputation. God bles her. Therefore it follows. Hide the knives."

Theft greatest pretentiousness is that it attempts to explore the world of art: who exploits whom, fraudlent behaviour is alleged to be exposed and the question who creates and owns a work of art is raised. I must say that I did not care and do not care for such a world. Not that I don't like and admire works of art it is rather I do not think that Carey had anything of significance to say about art.

There is no reason to recommend reading this novel.

Exhilarating, exuberant tour-de-force, a literary gem of a book, 14 Aug 2008
Peter Carey's "Theft: A Love Story" is a literary tour-de-force, a brilliant book, a witty spoof on the art world, a tale of two brothers and a story about love, a story taking us from Australia to Japan and to New York, to sum it up: a magnificent book.
How often do you find yourself multiply re-reading sentences, phrases, even pages- not for the sake of understanding it, but out of sheer joy of re-enjoying the just-read phrases, sentences and pages. Not all too often, I would think. Peter Carey's writing is so exuberantly enjoyable, that there is actually no way avoiding multiple re-reading, enjoying the prose melt on your tongue. Scenes, sentences, phrases, which I just wanted to read to my friends, but where to start, each and every page is just full of excerpts you want to share with others.
"Theft: A Love Story" is the tale of two brothers, one of them a previously well known painter, now taking care of his art dealer's offbeat located home, also taking care of his huge and "slow" brother Hugh. It's a tale of love too, of brotherly love- they just don't seem to be able to live with each other, but obviously can't live without each other either. The story is told in turn (chapterwise) by the two brothers, and although both are rather huffy, grumpy characters (brothers all the way), who both really seem to have a ball verbally whacking each other, it is, due to master ventriloquist Peter Carey's intriguing prose, easy to recognize, whose narrative we are reading at that moment. Of course, the "Love Story" mentioned as un undertitle is the love story of Marlene (who walks into the lives of Michael and Hugh one rainy night, starting off the story there) and Michael. "Theft" is also a story of an art fraud, of mischief, even of murder, but never (at least I don't recall) have frauds and thieves been more overtly likeable than Peter Carey's characters in this novel.
"Theft: A Love Story" is sheer enjoyment, a literary masterpiece, a gem of a novel. One of the novels, which leaves you (though sad- for having finished reading it) with a big big smile, happy for having been fortunate to have read this book.

I tried..., 14 May 2008
I give this book two stars instead of one because I could not bring myself to finish it. I hate not finishing a book once I start it, especially one such as 'THEFT' that I was so looking forward to reading, so believe me I tried. I suffered through page after page of this book for over two weeks only to get a little more than halfway through. You heard right, it took me two weeks to just get to the halfway mark, that is because every time I read a page or two I found myself falling asleep, as this had to be one of the most boring books that I have ever read! 'THEFT' has a promising concept, a former world renowned painter finds himself, after being bankrupt on the verge of making a comeback only to get involved with a mysterious woman who threatens to bring down all that he has worked for. It sounds as though the book has a lot of suspense and intrigue. There is a promise of adventure as the clues unravel about the art theft & murder but at least for the first half of this story those things come in the smallest of doses. I couldn't even give a proper synopsis of the book because as far as I could tell, not much happened other than two brothers complaining an awful lot about each other. Every time you would see a hint of the story taking shape the focus of the story would change and it ended up being dragged out.

Again, I give this book two stars instead of one because since I did not finish it, something, somewhere down the line could happen to make this a more interesting book. However, I personally couldn't suffer through another 100 pages before that happened.

I must be missing something...., 24 Feb 2008
This was my first Peter Carey and if it wasn't on my reading group list I would never have chosen it. I can see the book's merits, however I really didn't enjoy this book at all and found its negative, cynical tone quite depressing.

However, the characterisations of the brothers, the evocation of their individual voices, the imagery and the tangible descriptions of life in small town Australia are masterful. The problem for me is that these make the plot line almost invisible. I was so involved in the inner dialogues that I couldn't figure out what was happening in the plot.

The book's themes are very interesting and thought-provoking, and I loved the final sentence of the whole thing (admittedly partly because it was just that)for its wise, prophetic tone.

I'm glad to have read this, and it's likely that I will dip into it again, because the writing is stunning in parts. But I am not a Carey convert through this offering.

(For an interesting counterpoint to the themes of this book check out Lewis Hind's The Gift - especially the first part exploring the value vs giftedness of art.)

I admire this book a great deal, but I can't say that I really enjoyed it, 19 Jan 2008
Carey does well in creating two distinct voices for Butcher and his brother and really does a great job in conveying their personalities. Butcher is a selfish, self-centred man, fully focused on creating his work and bitter that he is no longer in fashion and thereby unable to command high prices. Hugh is an idiot-savant (at times, too savant for my liking) and with a tendency to TALK IN CAPITALS at odd times in his narration. In reality, the story is about the relationship between these two men - the resentment that Butcher feels for having to look after his damaged brother and the resentment that Hugh feels for never being allowed to do what he wants to do - and is explored through a plot concerning the theft of a painting by Leibovitz (Butcher's favourite artist and the person whose work inspired him to paint in the first place).

We meet Butcher and Hugh in the small outback town of Bellingen, where they're living in a house belonging to Butcher's patron, Jean-Paul, maintaining it for him whilst Butcher paints. Into their life crashes Marlene, a woman Butcher assumes is American, trying to get to Butcher's neighbour, Dozy (who owns the Leibowitz painting) in order to authenticate it. When the painting later goes missing, it's Butcher who is suspected of the crime and he's forced to return to Sydney, where he again meets up with Marlene and when she tells him she can help revitalise his career with a show in Tokyo, they become lovers and embark on a journey that takes them to Tokyo and Manhattan. On the way, Butcher and Hugh learn more about the Leibowitz family and Marlene's connection to them and also the dark scam at the heart of the story.

Carey is a lyrical writer and he excels at setting scenes and creating a sense of place. However, compared with the richness of the Butcher and Hugh characters, I felt that Marlene was too slight and trite a character to be truly believable and really wanted to know more about her and her relationship with Olivier than what we get on the page. Ultimately, Butcher was too bitter and unpleasant a character for me to feel drawn to, but I did feel tremendous sympathy for Hugh, albeit there were times when I'd have liked to see Carey play down the savant quality and show him as a simpler human being. Also, I felt that the plot hinged on a huge improbability (one that I'm not going to give away because I don't want to spoil it), but it was a fact that really irritated me because I'd been hoping for a more fulfilling pay off to the scam than what we're given.

Too clever, 19 Sep 2008
This book is one that has a good idea at its heart and would have been excellent had the author not overcomplicated the prose. At times you will be frowning as your neurons try to process any sense from the word. It is essentially a great idea and if you can bear with it then you will be glad you did, although its a painful process.

quite confusing, 29 Aug 2008
I found this quite a confusing book to read. There were many times when I simply didn't understand what was happening. My lack of knowledge about either the revolution or the Australian outback meant that I could not follow all that was happening. I had to re read certain parts and even then I was not completely sure what was happening. The absence of speech marks was also challenging. But I did want to keep reading to find out what happened so in some ways it was compelling. I probably would understand it better if I read it a second time, but I don't particularly want to.

Awkward Pacing Dooms This Dud, 25 Jun 2008
I've read a few of Carey's novels and generally found them to be quite good, even gripping in ways I hadn't expected. Like some of these, the premise of his latest book didn't sound that promising, but I decided to take a chance since he had surprised me in the past. Unfortunately, his usual captivating prose isn't enough to disguise the plodding dud of a story.

Set around 1972, the story starts in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where we meet 7-year-old Jay/Che and his ultra-wealthy WASP guardian/grandmother. They are met by a striking young woman named Dial, who has just taken a job as professor at Vassar. She's apparently an old friend of Che's mother, and has agreed to a mysterious mission to escort Che to meet his on-the-run-from-the-law mother for an hour. However, within a scant number of pages this simple rendezvous has gotten drastically complicated. Dial and Che hop on a bus to Philadelphia, Che's mother is killed, and Dial inexplicably kidnaps Che and takes him to Australia.

I was going along fine with the book until this sequence of events, which struck me as so wildly incomprehensible that I never regained any confidence in the story. Dial and Che's mother were both involved in the student radical movements of the 1960s, in particular the Students for a Democratic Society. But while the working-class girl Dial saw through the romantic allure of the radical movement, Che's blue-blood mother drifted into the more extreme violent fringes of the movement, and became a wanted woman. Dial's decision to help engineer the mother-son reunion seems based on some rather unlikely desire to prove her radical credentials in the face of having joined the establishment (eg. Vassar). However her flustered panic when the arrangement goes awry seems totally at odds with her tough Greek upbringing in South Boston.

When Dial and Che arrive in Australia, she seems even more implausibly inept, and they soon find themselves a hideout in a kind of nasty hippie commune. Carey himself apparently lived in such a commune, and it shows in the rich language he uses to describe the huts, the surrounding jungle, and the rather prickly relationships between its members. They try to make a kind of "back-to-nature" primitive life of it, with the semi-assistance of an illiterate hippie named Trevor. Many readers will probably find the most meaningful aspect of the book to be the attempt between Dial and Che to form some kind of mother-son bond, and while it works to a certain extent from his side, I never bought into her maternal desire.

Ultimately, the murkiness of motivations throughout the book left me more confused than moved. And unlike the other books I've read of Carey's the pacing is very awkward and a general narrative lethargy pervades the story. Unless you're really into the era or settings, or can't live without Carey's descriptive prose, I'd say give this one a miss.

Don't Be Put Off, 20 Apr 2008
Carey's prose is all about words and the sounds of words. Forget all the guff about hippy colonies in Queensland and bizarre student radicals in the 70s. This novel's about those pesky human relationships that so often blow people's lives off course, about those moments when emotion defeats rationalism and we all end up struggling to figure out why we've ended up where we are.

Savour every word.

A Love Letter To Nature, 02 Mar 2008
"With our protagonists no longer on the run, it finally becomes apparent what this novel is really about. It is a love letter to nature, and to the Australian wilderness in particular. Through the characters of this boy and woman, both cosseted urbanites who find themselves forced to live against their will in a tough, back-to-the-soil community, both of whom slowly and reluctantly come to terms with their changed circumstances, Carey pays moving homage to the kind of "hippy" lifestyle that is more commonly given comic or dismissive treatment." William Sutcliffe

Peter Carey has written a novel that is difficult to interpret. While engrossed in the reading, I kept thinking "Is this all there is"? Something is missing here. And, I never found that something. The writing is pure prose, brilliant, sweet and uplifting and coarse and gritty. The story centers around Che, or Jay as his grandmother calls him, Selnick. A seven year old living with his grandmiother in the glass windows of New York. They have money and security, but the boy is cut off from the world. He cannot watch television. He is told by a next door neighbor that his mother and father are radicals from Harvard, part of the SDS movement and on the lam. Grandmother won't mention them. Che is left with a vision, long lost of his father. On one fine day, the front door opens and a woman called 'Dial' comes into his life, and off they go to adventure. His world has opened. First on the subway and then to Philadelphia and it is there that Dial discovers that Che's mother has blown herself up attepting to make a bomb. Plans change, a trip to the west coast and then they are sent to Australia.

Along the way we learn that Dial was a babysitter for Che when his mom was at Harvard. Dial has left her job as assistant professor at Vassar to help her old friends. Why? Che thinks of Dial as his mother and as time moves on that is what she becomes. She is a little naive- not understanding what Australia is about or what life outside of the US is all about. And, why Australia, wouldn't Canada seem more logical? Life in Australia in a commune is the life that Che grows up with. Some communication is made to grandmother via a lawyer who is sent to NYC to make things ok again. Time heals all wounds, we are told. Really? We are looking for the timebomb and all along the real hero is Che. Che taken willingly from what he knows with grandmother, to a new world on the other side of the ocean. He absorbs all of this and the new culture he finds he is ready, able and willing. He has struggled to make sense of this new world and it is his.

"Carey's emotional choreography isn't sure-footed enough to make Che's story live up to its dramatic opening. As you'd expect, he does a good job of creating a lively - and carefully Americanised - idiom for his central characters. And having lived in one himself, he clearly knows a lot about alternative communities in Queensland. Yet, coming as it does on the heels of such books as True History of the Kelly Gang, the new novel seems badly paced and weirdly dull. Carey is a formidable writer, and this isn't a complete disaster by any means, but it's hard not to see it getting filed under "occasional misfires". Christopher Taylor

What is this story all about? The 1970's and radicalism is but a part of the plot that entices. The trip to Australia and the story told from Che's point of view, and then from Dials viewpoint intercept and the real story is left with Che. The writing of Peter Carey is the best there is, the writing of a master.

Recommended. prisrob 03-01-08

Theft

My Life as a Fake

As a novelist, Peter Carey is hardly a stranger to the 19th century: his Oscar and Lucinda was a veritable treasure-trove of Victoriana. In this novel, however, Carey has set himself an even more complicated task--reinterpreting not only a vanished era but one of that era's masterpieces. Jack Maggs is a variation on Great Expectations, in which Dickens's tale is told from the viewpoint of Australian convict Abel Magwitch. The names, it's true, have been tinkered with, but the book's literary paternity is unmistakable. So, too, is the post- colonial spin that Carey puts on Dickens's material: this time around, the prodigal Maggs is perceived less as an invading alien than a righteous (if not particularly welcome) refugee.

Of course, rewriting a page-turner from the past offers some major perils, not the least of them being comparisons to the original. Carey, however, more than withstands the test of time, alluding to the formality of Victorian prose without ever bending over backward to duplicate it. In addition, his eye for physical detail--and the ways in which such details open small or large windows onto character--is on par with that of Dickens. Here, for example, he pins down both the body and soul of a household servant: "Miss Mott was lean and sinewy and there was nowhere much for such a violent shiver to hide itself. Consequently it went right up her spine and disappeared inside her little white cap and then, just when it seemed lost, it came out the other side and pulled up the ends of her thin mouth in a grimace." Throw in a wicked mastery of period slang, a subplot about Victorian mesmerism (of which Dickens was, in fact, a practitioner) and an amazing storytelling gift, and you have a novel which meets and exceeds almost any expectation one might bring to it.

Masterful portrayal of the social conditions of the time, 15 Sep 2007
I don't know enough about the history of Ned Kelly to comment on the historical accuracy of the events, though I gather that the novel is quite well researched. What makes the book such an enjoyable read though is the remarkable portrayal of life in colonial Australia. You get a visceral sense of how it might have felt to be poor in the dog-eat-dog world of Ned Kelly's time, of the desperate struggle to conquer the Australian bush, of the constant oppression by authorities for whom laws rarely provide an effective check on power, of the solidarity of human beings brought together by their shared trials and tribulations. Carey has managed to convey a sense of this era in a way that few writers are able to. It is a portrait of social conditions that can be compared to the novels of Charles Dickens.

work of genius, 19 Sep 2005
This is a truly wonderful book. The sense of place and the evocation of the era are fabulous. It's an adventure story and a love story. Above all, the absolutely incredible narrative voice make this a hilarious and also moving read.

An engaging style that brings Kelly to life, 11 Aug 2005
This is an absorbing book, written as a sequence of letters supposedly penned by Kelly himself - his attempt to explain his life and death to a daughter he will not live to see. Carey has written the book without punctuation in a conversational style. I quickly got used to this and found that the technique gave weight and realism to the story. Carey tells us about the paper used for each set of letters and we can imagine Kelly coming across some scraps on which he can continue his story - it is a charming touch.

Although this is a fictional work, it is so well-written and Carey's mode of writing is so persuasive that it seems entirely plausible that Ned Kelly is speaking to us from beyond the grave. I enjoyed it enormously - it is imaginative, clever and very entertaining.

The song of Australia, 20 Aug 2004
Mr Carey's novel relates the epic life of Ned Kelly in Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The text comes in the form of 13 parcels of varying length (from 7 to 50 pages). Sometimes they are sheets of National Bank or Bank of New South Wales letterhead, a cloth booklet, octavo pages, open envelopes providing space for text, a pocket diary or the reverse side of advertising fliers. They cover Ned's adventurous life until the manuscript abruptly terminates when he was 26 years old and it is told in a tone so wild and passionate that the reader often believes that the bushranger is speaking to him from the grave! It is a breathtaking account of an existence marked by a cascade of events where Ned is in turn a reformer, a criminal, a horse thief, a farmer, a bushranger and an orphan. Ned's voice is very convincing, continually creating new surprises on every page despite the plainness of his language, or rather perhaps because of it. Actually his uneducated voice is very much part of the originality of Mr Carey's novel.
The critics have ranked Mr Carey next to Charles Dickens and Lawrence Sterne - very rightly so, in my opinion.

Peter Carey's novel attempts to find Ned Kelly's voice, 02 Aug 2004
I suspect for many Americans their first introduction to the legend of Ned Kelly was when the Australian icon of his helmet was incorporated into the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Of course there are those who knew of Kelly from Tony Richardson's 1970 film "Ned Kelly," where Mick Jagger played the title role, or even the 1993 film "Reckless Kelly" with Yahoo, which updated the Kelly legend, for lack of a better word, to the present. That idea that Kelly is the Robin Hood of Australia is enough of a touchstone for most to understand Kelly's importance to the Australian psyche, but there are those who consider him to be nothing more than a glorified outlaw, more like Jesse James than Robin Hood. Significantly, those views break down all ethnic lines, with Irish-Australians seeing the hero and Anglo-Australians insisting on the villain. Gregor Jordan's 2003 film "Ned Kelly," based on Robert Drewe's "Our Sunshine" and starring well known Australian actors Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts will renew interest in the true story and may well lead viewers to this volume.

Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang" is, despite the title a fictional novel which won the Booker Prize in 2001. The novel is inspired in part by Sidney Nolan's famous series of paintings of Ned Kelly and is told in a first person narrative style that is based on Kelly's own "Jerilderie Letter," which provided his version of the events that led to him being an outlaw with a 8,000 pound reward on his head, the largest in the world up to that time. The conceit is that Kelly has written these words, intended them to be read by a daughter who was born and raised in California, trying to explain his life.

Carey's book is not a substitute for the true history it purports to be, including people and events that are not part of the historical record (to wit, Mary and the baby), as he attempts to connect the dots of Ned Kelly's life. Ultimately this is a character study wherein Carey emphasizes Kelly's strong Irish-Australian identity, his fierce loyalty to family and friends, and his native wit and inherent shrewdness. We know from the letters he dictated and the transcript of his trial that Kelly was intelligent and Carey plays that up throughout the book, because essentially what is happening here is that he is justifying the icon image of Kelly that exists in the popular mind of Australia. At the same time there is humanizing, for Kelly has a strong attachment to his mother and forges a new relationship with his brother Dan as the Kelly Gang heads towards its fate. He also hates the English as much as they hate them, which is no mean feat. In the end what you get out of this book is not Ned Kelly's story but rather his voice, although its authenticity is, of course, open to debate.

Ultimately "True History of the Kelly Gang" is not meant as an introduction to the story of Ned Kelly. Jordan's film is out on DVD now so it can serve that function as others as it did for me. Carey will give us more of a notion of what Kelly might have been thinking and certainly a more complete picture of the world in which Kelly lived and died. The climax of this book is not the battle at Glenrowan but a conversation with a school teacher named Curnow, who is able to raise questions that go beyond the legal points on which Kelly's trial, convinction, and execution turned. This is a discussion held through the prism of history and needs to be read in that light and reaffirms once again the cultural axiom "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

What a great theft of expectations, 19 Sep 2008
I decided to read Theft A Love Story partly as a way of introducing myself to the work of Peter Carey. After all, twice winner of the Booker prize, I felt that in not having read any of Carey's novels I was missing out on an important literary experience. I could have chosen to read one of the two Booker winners, namely Oscar and Lucinda or the True history of the Kelly Gang. I chose to read Theft simply because it is Carey's most recent novel. However, it was an unmitigated mistake which have probably turned me off the work of Carey for good.

This is a pretentious and overrated novel. I suspect that its high praise rests on Carey's previous work. I normally finish novels even struggle to finish them when it is clear that I am not enjoying them and can see no literary merit. However, in respect of Theft, I failed to finish it. Quite frankly it was not worth the effort.

At least up to the point where I read, the story thus far was uninteresting. There are claims that the book is funny. Perhaps it is if you like shallow and obvious comedy. I prefer comedy that is subtle and sophisticated. I did not find a reason to laugh. Here is an example of its crude comedy one of the two narrators, Hugh, tells us that his mother: "had a terror of knives, dear mum, poor mum, and who could blame here when you saw Blue Bones or Grandpa Bones walk in the back door? Big men always in a towering rage. Each night my mother took the knives and hid them in the Chubb safe. She had her left breast taken by amputation. God bles her. Therefore it follows. Hide the knives."

Theft greatest pretentiousness is that it attempts to explore the world of art: who exploits whom, fraudlent behaviour is alleged to be exposed and the question who creates and owns a work of art is raised. I must say that I did not care and do not care for such a world. Not that I don't like and admire works of art it is rather I do not think that Carey had anything of significance to say about art.

There is no reason to recommend reading this novel.

Exhilarating, exuberant tour-de-force, a literary gem of a book, 14 Aug 2008
Peter Carey's "Theft: A Love Story" is a literary tour-de-force, a brilliant book, a witty spoof on the art world, a tale of two brothers and a story about love, a story taking us from Australia to Japan and to New York, to sum it up: a magnificent book.
How often do you find yourself multiply re-reading sentences, phrases, even pages- not for the sake of understanding it, but out of sheer joy of re-enjoying the just-read phrases, sentences and pages. Not all too often, I would think. Peter Carey's writing is so exuberantly enjoyable, that there is actually no way avoiding multiple re-reading, enjoying the prose melt on your tongue. Scenes, sentences, phrases, which I just wanted to read to my friends, but where to start, each and every page is just full of excerpts you want to share with others.
"Theft: A Love Story" is the tale of two brothers, one of them a previously well known painter, now taking care of his art dealer's offbeat located home, also taking care of his huge and "slow" brother Hugh. It's a tale of love too, of brotherly love- they just don't seem to be able to live with each other, but obviously can't live without each other either. The story is told in turn (chapterwise) by the two brothers, and although both are rather huffy, grumpy characters (brothers all the way), who both really seem to have a ball verbally whacking each other, it is, due to master ventriloquist Peter Carey's intriguing prose, easy to recognize, whose narrative we are reading at that moment. Of course, the "Love Story" mentioned as un undertitle is the love story of Marlene (who walks into the lives of Michael and Hugh one rainy night, starting off the story there) and Michael. "Theft" is also a story of an art fraud, of mischief, even of murder, but never (at least I don't recall) have frauds and thieves been more overtly likeable than Peter Carey's characters in this novel.
"Theft: A Love Story" is sheer enjoyment, a literary masterpiece, a gem of a novel. One of the novels, which leaves you (though sad- for having finished reading it) with a big big smile, happy for having been fortunate to have read this book.

I tried..., 14 May 2008
I give this book two stars instead of one because I could not bring myself to finish it. I hate not finishing a book once I start it, especially one such as 'THEFT' that I was so looking forward to reading, so believe me I tried. I suffered through page after page of this book for over two weeks only to get a little more than halfway through. You heard right, it took me two weeks to just get to the halfway mark, that is because every time I read a page or two I found myself falling asleep, as this had to be one of the most boring books that I have ever read! 'THEFT' has a promising concept, a former world renowned painter finds himself, after being bankrupt on the verge of making a comeback only to get involved with a mysterious woman who threatens to bring down all that he has worked for. It sounds as though the book has a lot of suspense and intrigue. There is a promise of adventure as the clues unravel about the art theft & murder but at least for the first half of this story those things come in the smallest of doses. I couldn't even give a proper synopsis of the book because as far as I could tell, not much happened other than two brothers complaining an awful lot about each other. Every time you would see a hint of the story taking shape the focus of the story would change and it ended up being dragged out.

Again, I give this book two stars instead of one because since I did not finish it, something, somewhere down the line could happen to make this a more interesting book. However, I personally couldn't suffer through another 100 pages before that happened.

I must be missing something...., 24 Feb 2008
This was my first Peter Carey and if it wasn't on my reading group list I would never have chosen it. I can see the book's merits, however I really didn't enjoy this book at all and found its negative, cynical tone quite depressing.

However, the characterisations of the brothers, the evocation of their individual voices, the imagery and the tangible descriptions of life in small town Australia are masterful. The problem for me is that these make the plot line almost invisible. I was so involved in the inner dialogues that I couldn't figure out what was happening in the plot.

The book's themes are very interesting and thought-provoking, and I loved the final sentence of the whole thing (admittedly partly because it was just that)for its wise, prophetic tone.

I'm glad to have read this, and it's likely that I will dip into it again, because the writing is stunning in parts. But I am not a Carey convert through this offering.

(For an interesting counterpoint to the themes of this book check out Lewis Hind's The Gift - especially the first part exploring the value vs giftedness of art.)

I admire this book a great deal, but I can't say that I really enjoyed it, 19 Jan 2008
Carey does well in creating two distinct voices for Butcher and his brother and really does a great job in conveying their personalities. Butcher is a selfish, self-centred man, fully focused on creating his work and bitter that he is no longer in fashion and thereby unable to command high prices. Hugh is an idiot-savant (at times, too savant for my liking) and with a tendency to TALK IN CAPITALS at odd times in his narration. In reality, the story is about the relationship between these two men - the resentment that Butcher feels for having to look after his damaged brother and the resentment that Hugh feels for never being allowed to do what he wants to do - and is explored through a plot concerning the theft of a painting by Leibovitz (Butcher's favourite artist and the person whose work inspired him to paint in the first place).

We meet Butcher and Hugh in the small outback town of Bellingen, where they're living in a house belonging to Butcher's patron, Jean-Paul, maintaining it for him whilst Butcher paints. Into their life crashes Marlene, a woman Butcher assumes is American, trying to get to Butcher's neighbour, Dozy (who owns the Leibowitz painting) in order to authenticate it. When the painting later goes missing, it's Butcher who is suspected of the crime and he's forced to return to Sydney, where he again meets up with Marlene and when she tells him she can help revitalise his career with a show in Tokyo, they become lovers and embark on a journey that takes them to Tokyo and Manhattan. On the way, Butcher and Hugh learn more about the Leibowitz family and Marlene's connection to them and also the dark scam at the heart of the story.

Carey is a lyrical writer and he excels at setting scenes and creating a sense of place. However, compared with the richness of the Butcher and Hugh characters, I felt that Marlene was too slight and trite a character to be truly believable and really wanted to know more about her and her relationship with Olivier than what we get on the page. Ultimately, Butcher was too bitter and unpleasant a character for me to feel drawn to, but I did feel tremendous sympathy for Hugh, albeit there were times when I'd have liked to see Carey play down the savant quality and show him as a simpler human being. Also, I felt that the plot hinged on a huge improbability (one that I'm not going to give away because I don't want to spoil it), but it was a fact that really irritated me because I'd been hoping for a more fulfilling pay off to the scam than what we're given.

Too clever, 19 Sep 2008
This book is one that has a good idea at its heart and would have been excellent had the author not overcomplicated the prose. At times you will be frowning as your neurons try to process any sense from the word. It is essentially a great idea and if you can bear with it then you will be glad you did, although its a painful process.

quite confusing, 29 Aug 2008
I found this quite a confusing book to read. There were many times when I simply didn't understand what was happening. My lack of knowledge about either the revolution or the Australian outback meant that I could not follow all that was happening. I had to re read certain parts and even then I was not completely sure what was happening. The absence of speech marks was also challenging. But I did want to keep reading to find out what happened so in some ways it was compelling. I probably would understand it better if I read it a second time, but I don't particularly want to.

Awkward Pacing Dooms This Dud, 25 Jun 2008
I've read a few of Carey's novels and generally found them to be quite good, even gripping in ways I hadn't expected. Like some of these, the premise of his latest book didn't sound that promising, but I decided to take a chance since he had surprised me in the past. Unfortunately, his usual captivating prose isn't enough to disguise the plodding dud of a story.

Set around 1972, the story starts in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where we meet 7-year-old Jay/Che and his ultra-wealthy WASP guardian/grandmother. They are met by a striking young woman named Dial, who has just taken a job as professor at Vassar. She's apparently an old friend of Che's mother, and has agreed to a mysterious mission to escort Che to meet his on-the-run-from-the-law mother for an hour. However, within a scant number of pages this simple rendezvous has gotten drastically complicated. Dial and Che hop on a bus to Philadelphia, Che's mother is killed, and Dial inexplicably kidnaps Che and takes him to Australia.

I was going along fine with the book until this sequence of events, which struck me as so wildly incomprehensible that I never regained any confidence in the story. Dial and Che's mother were both involved in the student radical movements of the 1960s, in particular the Students for a Democratic Society. But while the working-class girl Dial saw through the romantic allure of the radical movement, Che's blue-blood mother drifted into the more extreme violent fringes of the movement, and became a wanted woman. Dial's decision to help engineer the mother-son reunion seems based on some rather unlikely desire to prove her radical credentials in the face of having joined the establishment (eg. Vassar). However her flustered panic when the arrangement goes awry seems totally at odds with her tough Greek upbringing in South Boston.

When Dial and Che arrive in Australia, she seems even more implausibly inept, and they soon find themselves a hideout in a kind of nasty hippie commune. Carey himself apparently lived in such a commune, and it shows in the rich language he uses to describe the huts, the surrounding jungle, and the rather prickly relationships between its members. They try to make a kind of "back-to-nature" primitive life of it, with the semi-assistance of an illiterate hippie named Trevor. Many readers will probably find the most meaningful aspect of the book to be the attempt between Dial and Che to form some kind of mother-son bond, and while it works to a certain extent from his side, I never bought into her maternal desire.

Ultimately, the murkiness of motivations throughout the book left me more confused than moved. And unlike the other books I've read of Carey's the pacing is very awkward and a general narrative lethargy pervades the story. Unless you're really into the era or settings, or can't live without Carey's descriptive prose, I'd say give this one a miss.

Don't Be Put Off, 20 Apr 2008
Carey's prose is all about words and the sounds of words. Forget all the guff about hippy colonies in Queensland and bizarre student radicals in the 70s. This novel's about those pesky human relationships that so often blow people's lives off course, about those moments when emotion defeats rationalism and we all end up struggling to figure out why we've ended up where we are.

Savour every word.

A Love Letter To Nature, 02 Mar 2008
"With our protagonists no longer on the run, it finally becomes apparent what this novel is really about. It is a love letter to nature, and to the Australian wilderness in particular. Through the characters of this boy and woman, both cosseted urbanites who find themselves forced to live against their will in a tough, back-to-the-soil community, both of whom slowly and reluctantly come to terms with their changed circumstances, Carey pays moving homage to the kind of "hippy" lifestyle that is more commonly given comic or dismissive treatment." William Sutcliffe

Peter Carey has written a novel that is difficult to interpret. While engrossed in the reading, I kept thinking "Is this all there is"? Something is missing here. And, I never found that something. The writing is pure prose, brilliant, sweet and uplifting and coarse and gritty. The story centers around Che, or Jay as his grandmother calls him, Selnick. A seven year old living with his grandmiother in the glass windows of New York. They have money and security, but the boy is cut off from the world. He cannot watch television. He is told by a next door neighbor that his mother and father are radicals from Harvard, part of the SDS movement and on the lam. Grandmother won't mention them. Che is left with a vision, long lost of his father. On one fine day, the front door opens and a woman called 'Dial' comes into his life, and off they go to adventure. His world has opened. First on the subway and then to Philadelphia and it is there that Dial discovers that Che's mother has blown herself up attepting to make a bomb. Plans change, a trip to the west coast and then they are sent to Australia.

Along the way we learn that Dial was a babysitter for Che when his mom was at Harvard. Dial has left her job as assistant professor at Vassar to help her old friends. Why? Che thinks of Dial as his mother and as time moves on that is what she becomes. She is a little naive- not understanding what Australia is about or what life outside of the US is all about. And, why Australia, wouldn't Canada seem more logical? Life in Australia in a commune is the life that Che grows up with. Some communication is made to grandmother via a lawyer who is sent to NYC to make things ok again. Time heals all wounds, we are told. Really? We are looking for the timebomb and all along the real hero is Che. Che taken willingly from what he knows with grandmother, to a new world on the other side of the ocean. He absorbs all of this and the new culture he finds he is ready, able and willing. He has struggled to make sense of this new world and it is his.

"Carey's emotional choreography isn't sure-footed enough to make Che's story live up to its dramatic opening. As you'd expect, he does a good job of creating a lively - and carefully Americanised - idiom for his central characters. And having lived in one himself, he clearly knows a lot about alternative communities in Queensland. Yet, coming as it does on the heels of such books as True History of the Kelly Gang, the new novel seems badly paced and weirdly dull. Carey is a formidable writer, and this isn't a complete disaster by any means, but it's hard not to see it getting filed under "occasional misfires". Christopher Taylor

What is this story all about? The 1970's and radicalism is but a part of the plot that entices. The trip to Australia and the story told from Che's point of view, and then from Dials viewpoint intercept and the real story is left with Che. The writing of Peter Carey is the best there is, the writing of a master.

Recommended. prisrob 03-01-08

Theft

My Life as a Fake


A riveting yarn, 04 Apr 2008
Not sure what I was expecting when I bought this book, other than to say the synopsis caught my interest. The first pages didn't lead me to suspect it was going to reel me in as surely as it did. The main character was written superbly; a tough, scarred and tortured soul, a deported criminal forever exiled, sneaking back home to London in 1837 after the harshest years served in a penal colony in Australia and after having made his fortune. For thirty years Jack Maggs has been away, and now he's back on a mission.

Everything here worked splendidly, the mood, the many characters, the story's unfolding. Pointless making the Dickens comparison simply because it's Victorian England. Judge this tale on its own merits. It ended too quickly for me!

Superbly Atmospheric Novel, 08 Mar 2008
I'd read "Oscar and Lucinda", but this book is far better; more pace, and stunningly atmospheric in its immersion in mid-19C London. Loads of historical details that take you back in time, not just in the 'history book' facts but also in the way people were and how they got through from day to day. Easy to read, fascinating interplay of human relationships. Superb!

Sublime storytelling, 06 Jan 2007
I've always had a fondness for crime novels set in Victorian London (the book is set in the first year of her reign actually), but few of the many I've read can equal 'Jack Maggs' for the quality of its plot, characters, and language.

This is one of those rare books where you're torn between the constant urge to read on and the awareness that this selfsame act unfortunately brings you ever closer to the end.

Something a bit weird but quite interesting, 13 Jul 2006
The book I have to read for my English entrance examination... Took a while to get into this book, and get what it was about. After 50 pages I was still totally uninspired... But then it got better. When the backgound of the characters was explained it was easier to be interested in them and get what the book was about.

What is it about then? The book is set in London of 1839. Jack Magg is a criminal who has been deported to Australia, but has now returned to the city of his younth to make up with his past. "Storey of mesmerism and possession, of dangerous bargains and illicit love", according to the backcover of the book.

This book probably is concidered a very good book, since the university uses it in the entrance examination. Not just any criminal story or anything... I agree that it indeed is a quite interesting book. But nothing I would normally read. The criminal isn't bad..., not really..., his just human...

Tracks of the cat, 09 Nov 2004
Jack Maggs arrives in London carrying a dark secret in his baggage. He's escaped the ferocity of Captain Logan's Moreton Bay penal colony. Maggs also carries evidence that Logan inflicted more whippings than any other camp commandant in the colony. His back betokens applications of the "double cat". Invented in Australia, the multi-stranded lash was used to discipline the lags. If caught, Maggs'll immediately be hanged, but his quest overcomes his fear of the noose. He's seeking someone important in his life. But fate throws impediments in his way. Among them is Peter Carey's appropriation of Charles Dickens as an investigative journalist.

Carey's engrossing story is his finest effort. He's created a character that only an author imbued with accounts of transportee [convicts, lags] travails could achieve. The Australian penal colony system was the antithesis of our concept of Victorian morality. Escaped prisoners were rare in Australia - there was nowhere to go. A lag returning to England was unheard of. In any case, the character of every lag underwent a change. They became two people; one the Englishman of a previous life and the other the result of the dehumanizing conditions suffered in that remote continent. Carey captures that duality with finesse and ardor. Driven by his quest, Maggs must adopt a servant's mien, even as his past experiences and cunning born of survival places him above the devious people he encounters daily. He has, after all, been sent to Australia, not for his crimes, but through an unparalleled act of self sacrifice. Maggs must mentally dodge and weave, moving between the worlds of Percy Buckle, Tobias Oates and the street urchin he was before being sent across the seas. Carey's fashioned a tormented figure set in the chaotic venue of 19th Century England.

Equating Carey with Charles Dickens is misleading. Dickens was an investigative journalist turned novelist. In a later age, Theodore Roosevelt would brand such people "muckrakers". Carey's isn't reporting what he's observed, driven by championing the poor Dickens divulged to his Victorian readers. Carey's account is pure fiction, no matter how many real characters and true life conditions he imparts. His creative qualities quite set him apart from Dickens. Simply setting this story in mid-19th Century London doesn't limit it to a Dickensian framework. Dickens, his outlook confined to the British Isles, couldn't have written this book. Carey's Australian background brings subtle nuances to Jack in his characterization. It's unlikely that any Anglo-American author could impart the moods Carey achieves in his portrayal of Maggs. This book is a true prize. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Masterful portrayal of the social conditions of the time, 15 Sep 2007
I don't know enough about the history of Ned Kelly to comment on the historical accuracy of the events, though I gather that the novel is quite well researched. What makes the book such an enjoyable read though is the remarkable portrayal of life in colonial Australia. You get a visceral sense of how it might have felt to be poor in the dog-eat-dog world of Ned Kelly's time, of the desperate struggle to conquer the Australian bush, of the constant oppression by authorities for whom laws rarely provide an effective check on power, of the solidarity of human beings brought together by their shared trials and tribulations. Carey has managed to convey a sense of this era in a way that few writers are able to. It is a portrait of social conditions that can be compared to the novels of Charles Dickens.

work of genius, 19 Sep 2005
This is a truly wonderful book. The sense of place and the evocation of the era are fabulous. It's an adventure story and a love story. Above all, the absolutely incredible narrative voice make this a hilarious and also moving read.

An engaging style that brings Kelly to life, 11 Aug 2005
This is an absorbing book, written as a sequence of letters supposedly penned by Kelly himself - his attempt to explain his life and death to a daughter he will not live to see. Carey has written the book without punctuation in a conversational style. I quickly got used to this and found that the technique gave weight and realism to the story. Carey tells us about the paper used for each set of letters and we can imagine Kelly coming across some scraps on which he can continue his story - it is a charming touch.

Although this is a fictional work, it is so well-written and Carey's mode of writing is so persuasive that it seems entirely plausible that Ned Kelly is speaking to us from beyond the grave. I enjoyed it enormously - it is imaginative, clever and very entertaining.

The song of Australia, 20 Aug 2004
Mr Carey's novel relates the epic life of Ned Kelly in Australia in the second half of the 19th century. The text comes in the form of 13 parcels of varying length (from 7 to 50 pages). Sometimes they are sheets of National Bank or Bank of New South Wales letterhead, a cloth booklet, octavo pages, open envelopes providing space for text, a pocket diary or the reverse side of advertising fliers. They cover Ned's adventurous life until the manuscript abruptly terminates when he was 26 years old and it is told in a tone so wild and passionate that the reader often believes that the bushranger is speaking to him from the grave! It is a breathtaking account of an existence marked by a cascade of events where Ned is in turn a reformer, a criminal, a horse thief, a farmer, a bushranger and an orphan. Ned's voice is very convincing, continually creating new surprises on every page despite the plainness of his language, or rather perhaps because of it. Actually his uneducated voice is very much part of the originality of Mr Carey's novel.
The critics have ranked Mr Carey next to Charles Dickens and Lawrence Sterne - very rightly so, in my opinion.

Peter Carey's novel attempts to find Ned Kelly's voice, 02 Aug 2004
I suspect for many Americans their first introduction to the legend of Ned Kelly was when the Australian icon of his helmet was incorporated into the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Of course there are those who knew of Kelly from Tony Richardson's 1970 film "Ned Kelly," where Mick Jagger played the title role, or even the 1993 film "Reckless Kelly" with Yahoo, which updated the Kelly legend, for lack of a better word, to the present. That idea that Kelly is the Robin Hood of Australia is enough of a touchstone for most to understand Kelly's importance to the Australian psyche, but there are those who consider him to be nothing more than a glorified outlaw, more like Jesse James than Robin Hood. Significantly, those views break down all ethnic lines, with Irish-Australians seeing the hero and Anglo-Australians insisting on the villain. Gregor Jordan's 2003 film "Ned Kelly," based on Robert Drewe's "Our Sunshine" and starring well known Australian actors Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush and Naomi Watts will renew interest in the true story and may well lead viewers to this volume.

Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang" is, despite the title a fictional novel which won the Booker Prize in 2001. The novel is inspired in part by Sidney Nolan's famous series of paintings of Ned Kelly and is told in a first person narrative style that is based on Kelly's own "Jerilderie Letter," which provided his version of the events that led to him being an outlaw with a 8,000 pound reward on his head, the largest in the world up to that time. The conceit is that Kelly has written these words, intended them to be read by a daughter who was born and raised in California, trying to explain his life.

Carey's book is not a substitute for the true history it purports to be, including people and events that are not part of the historical record (to wit, Mary and the baby), as he attempts to connect the dots of Ned Kelly's life. Ultimately this is a character study wherein Carey emphasizes Kelly's strong Irish-Australian identity, his fierce loyalty to family and friends, and his native wit and inherent shrewdness. We know from the letters he dictated and the transcript of his trial that Kelly was intelligent and Carey plays that up throughout the book, because essentially what is happening here is that he is justifying the icon image of Kelly that exists in the popular mind of Australia. At the same time there is humanizing, for Kelly has a strong attachment to his mother and forges a new relationship with his brother Dan as the Kelly Gang heads towards its fate. He also hates the English as much as they hate them, which is no mean feat. In the end what you get out of this book is not Ned Kelly's story but rather his voice, although its authenticity is, of course, open to debate.

Ultimately "True History of the Kelly Gang" is not meant as an introduction to the story of Ned Kelly. Jordan's film is out on DVD now so it can serve that function as others as it did for me. Carey will give us more of a notion of what Kelly might have been thinking and certainly a more complete picture of the world in which Kelly lived and died. The climax of this book is not the battle at Glenrowan but a conversation with a school teacher named Curnow, who is able to raise questions that go beyond the legal points on which Kelly's trial, convinction, and execution turned. This is a discussion held through the prism of history and needs to be read in that light and reaffirms once again the cultural axiom "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

What a great theft of expectations, 19 Sep 2008
I decided to read Theft A Love Story partly as a way of introducing myself to the work of Peter Carey. After all, twice winner of the Booker prize, I felt that in not having read any of Carey's novels I was missing out on an important literary experience. I could have chosen to read one of the two Booker winners, namely Oscar and Lucinda or the True history of the Kelly Gang. I chose to read Theft simply because it is Carey's most recent novel. However, it was an unmitigated mistake which have probably turned me off the work of Carey for good.

This is a pretentious and overrated novel. I suspect that its high praise rests on Carey's previous work. I normally finish novels even struggle to finish them when it is clear that I am not enjoying them and can see no literary merit. However, in respect of Theft, I failed to finish it. Quite frankly it was not worth the effort.

At least up to the point where I read, the story thus far was uninteresting. There are claims that the book is funny. Perhaps it is if you like shallow and obvious comedy. I prefer comedy that is subtle and sophisticated. I did not find a reason to laugh. Here is an example of its crude comedy one of the two narrators, Hugh, tells us that his mother: "had a terror of knives, dear mum, poor mum, and who could blame here when you saw Blue Bones or Grandpa Bones walk in the back door? Big men always in a towering rage. Each night my mother took the knives and hid them in the Chubb safe. She had her left breast taken by amputation. God bles her. Therefore it follows. Hide the knives."

Theft greatest pretentiousness is that it attempts to explore the world of art: who exploits whom, fraudlent behaviour is alleged to be exposed and the question who creates and owns a work of art is raised. I must say that I did not care and do not care for such a world. Not that I don't like and admire works of art it is rather I do not think that Carey had anything of significance to say about art.

There is no reason to recommend reading this novel.

Exhilarating, exuberant tour-de-force, a literary gem of a book, 14 Aug 2008
Peter Carey's "Theft: A Love Story" is a literary tour-de-force, a brilliant book, a witty spoof on the art world, a tale of two brothers and a story about love, a story taking us from Australia to Japan and to New York, to sum it up: a magnificent book.
How often do you find yourself multiply re-reading sentences, phrases, even pages- not for the sake of understanding it, but out of sheer joy of re-enjoying the just-read phrases, sentences and pages. Not all too often, I would think. Peter Carey's writing is so exuberantly enjoyable, that there is actually no way avoiding multiple re-reading, enjoying the prose melt on your tongue. Scenes, sentences, phrases, which I just wanted to read to my friends, but where to start, each and every page is just full of excerpts you want to share with others.
"Theft: A Love Story" is the tale of two brothers, one of them a previously well known painter, now taking care of his art dealer's offbeat located home, also taking care of his huge and "slow" brother Hugh. It's a tale of love too, of brotherly love- they just don't seem to be able to live with each other, but obviously can't live without each other either. The story is told in turn (chapterwise) by the two brothers, and although both are rather huffy, grumpy characters (brothers all the way), who both really seem to have a ball verbally whacking each other, it is, due to master ventriloquist Peter Carey's intriguing prose, easy to recognize, whose narrative we are reading at that moment. Of course, the "Love Story" mentioned as un undertitle is the love story of Marlene (who walks into the lives of Michael and Hugh one rainy night, starting off the story there) and Michael. "Theft" is also a story of an art fraud, of mischief, even of murder, but never (at least I don't recall) have frauds and thieves been more overtly likeable than Peter Carey's characters in this novel.
"Theft: A Love Story" is sheer enjoyment, a literary masterpiece, a gem of a novel. One of the novels, which leaves you (though sad- for having finished reading it) with a big big smile, happy for having been fortunate to have read this book.

I tried..., 14 May 2008
I give this book two stars instead of one because I could not bring myself to finish it. I hate not finishing a book once I start it, especially one such as 'THEFT' that I was so looking forward to reading, so believe me I tried. I suffered through page after page of this book for over two weeks only to get a little more than halfway through. You heard right, it took me two weeks to just get to the halfway mark, that is because every time I read a page or two I found myself falling asleep, as this had to be one of the most boring books that I have ever read! 'THEFT' has a promising concept, a former world renowned painter finds himself, after being bankrupt on the verge of making a comeback only to get involved with a mysterious woman who threatens to bring down all that he has worked for. It sounds as though the book has a lot of suspense and intrigue. There is a promise of adventure as the clues unravel about the art theft & murder but at least for the first half of this story those things come in the smallest of doses. I couldn't even give a proper synopsis of the book because as far as I could tell, not much happened other than two brothers complaining an awful lot about each other. Every time you would see a hint of the story taking shape the focus of the story would change and it ended up being dragged out.

Again, I give this book two stars instead of one because since I did not finish it, something, somewhere down the line could happen to make this a more interesting book. However, I personally couldn't suffer through another 100 pages before that happened.

I must be missing something...., 24 Feb 2008
This was my first Peter Carey and if it wasn't on my reading group list I would never have chosen it. I can see the book's merits, however I really didn't enjoy this book at all and found its negative, cynical tone quite depressing.

However, the characterisations of the brothers, the evocation of their individual voices, the imagery and the tangible descriptions of life in small town Australia are masterful. The problem for me is that these make the plot line almost invisible. I was so involved in the inner dialogues that I couldn't figure out what was happening in the plot.

The book's themes are very interesting and thought-provoking, and I loved the final sentence of the whole thing (admittedly partly because it was just that)for its wise, prophetic tone.

I'm glad to have read this, and it's likely that I will dip into it again, because the writing is stunning in parts. But I am not a Carey convert through this offering.

(For an interesting counterpoint to the themes of this book check out Lewis Hind's The Gift - especially the first part exploring the value vs giftedness of art.)

I admire this book a great deal, but I can't say that I really enjoyed it, 19 Jan 2008
Carey does well in creating two distinct voices for Butcher and his brother and really does a great job in conveying their personalities. Butcher is a selfish, self-centred man, fully focused on creating his work and bitter that he is no longer in fashion and thereby unable to command high prices. Hugh is an idiot-savant (at times, too savant for my liking) and with a tendency to TALK IN CAPITALS at odd times in his narration. In reality, the story is about the relationship between these two men - the resentment that Butcher feels for having to look after his damaged brother and the resentment that Hugh feels for never being allowed to do what he wants to do - and is explored through a plot concerning the theft of a painting by Leibovitz (Butcher's favourite artist and the person whose work inspired him to paint in the first place).

We meet Butcher and Hugh in the small outback town of Bellingen, where they're living in a house belonging to Butcher's patron, Jean-Paul, maintaining it for him whilst Butcher paints. Into their life crashes Marlene, a woman Butcher assumes is American, trying to get to Butcher's neighbour, Dozy (who owns the Leibowitz painting) in order to authenticate it. When the painting later goes missing, it's Butcher who is suspected of the crime and he's forced to return to Sydney, where he again meets up with Marlene and when she tells him she can help revitalise his career with a show in Tokyo, they become lovers and embark on a journey that takes them to Tokyo and Manhattan. On the way, Butcher and Hugh learn more about the Leibowitz family and Marlene's connection to them and also the dark scam at the heart of the story.

Carey is a lyrical writer and he excels at setting scenes and creating a sense of place. However, compared with the richness of the Butcher and Hugh characters, I felt that Marlene was too slight and trite a character to be truly believable and really wanted to know more about her and her relationship with Olivier than what we get on the page. Ultimately, Butcher was too bitter and unpleasant a character for me to feel drawn to, but I did feel tremendous sympathy for Hugh, albeit there were times when I'd have liked to see Carey play down the savant quality and show him as a simpler human being. Also, I felt that the plot hinged on a huge improbability (one that I'm not going to give away because I don't want to spoil it), but it was a fact that really irritated me because I'd been hoping for a more fulfilling pay off to the scam than what we're given.

Too clever, 19 Sep 2008
This book is one that has a good idea at its heart and would have been excellent had the author not overcomplicated the prose. At times you will be frowning as your neurons try to process any sense from the word. It is essentially a great idea and if you can bear with it then you will be glad you did, although its a painful process.

quite confusing, 29 Aug 2008
I found this quite a confusing book to read. There were many times when I simply didn't understand what was happening. My lack of knowledge about either the revolution or the Australian outback meant that I could not follow all that was happening. I had to re read certain parts and even then I was not completely sure what was happening. The absence of speech marks was also challenging. But I did want to keep reading to find out what happened so in some ways it was compelling. I probably would understand it better if I read it a second time, but I don't particularly want to.

Awkward Pacing Dooms This Dud, 25 Jun 2008
I've read a few of Carey's novels and generally found them to be quite good, even gripping in ways I hadn't expected. Like some of these, the premise of his latest book didn't sound that promising, but I decided to take a chance since he had surprised me in the past. Unfortunately, his usual captivating prose isn't enough to disguise the plodding dud of a story.

Set around 1972, the story starts in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where we meet 7-year-old Jay/Che and his ultra-wealthy WASP guardian/grandmother. They are met by a striking young woman named Dial, who has just taken a job as professor at Vassar. She's apparently an old friend of Che's mother, and has agreed to a mysterious mission to escort Che to meet his on-the-run-from-the-law mother for an hour. However, within a scant number of pages this simple rendezvous has gotten drastically complicated. Dial and Che hop on a bus to Philadelphia, Che's mother is killed, and Dial inexplicably kidnaps Che and takes him to Australia.

I was going along fine with the book until this sequence of events, which struck me as so wildly incomprehensible that I never regained any confidence in the story. Dial and Che's mother were both involved in the student radical movements of the 1960s, in particular the Students for a Democratic Society. But while the working-class girl Dial saw through the romantic allure of the radical movement, Che's blue-blood mother drifted into the more extreme violent fringes of the movement, and became a wanted woman. Dial's decision to help engineer the mother-son reunion seems based on some rather unlikely desire to prove her radical credentials in the face of having joined the establishment (eg. Vassar). However her flustered panic when the arrangement goes awry seems totally at odds with her tough Greek upbringing in South Boston.

When Dial and Che arrive in Australia, she seems even more implausibly inept, and they soon find themselves a hideout in a kind of nasty hippie commune. Carey himself apparently l