This chapter will discuss the later work of Peter Carey, arguing that it is far more politically progressive and formally daring than critics have assumed, and suggesting that Carey’s extensive engagement with the United States – as aspiration, foil and enemy – speaks to the heart of how contemporary Australian fiction can challenge the banalities of neoliberalism. In this, Carey’s first novel of the twenty-first century is exemplary.

Ned Kelly after Joyce and Freud

When  Carey wrote a novel about Ned Kelly (published in 2000 as True History of the Kelly Gang) it was a case of one Australian icon writing about another. It was quite daring, as, despite efforts by Robert Drewe, Douglas Stewart and others, no Australian novelist (as opposed to historians such as Manning Clark) had so confidently taken on the historical episode of Kelly and his gang of bush outlaws. This gap in Australian literature was especially striking given Sidney Nolan had depicted Kelly with such originality and aptitude in his series of paintings on the theme. (Carey saw Nolan’s paintings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1994, while he was working on The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith.)

True History of the Kelly Gang was spectacularly successful: it won Carey his second Booker Prize and was acclaimed as at once a stirring tale and a masterpiece of narrative voice. It was read as both an anti-colonial book and as a continuation of Carey’s interest in fictive documents and forged history. Carey’s iteration of Kelly’s voice is tangible, vernacular, and limited. Although far more articulate than Bobby Blue in Alex Miller’s Coal Creek, Kelly also struggles with language, lacking the words fully to express himself, but developing an engaging verbal idiom that can passionately and pointedly relate his grievances and hopes:

Carey’s Kelly is brilliantly observant and descriptive, but ungrammatical; totally rational in thought process but unpunctuated by any normative markers; a proud outlaw but a reluctant warrior; and, as I will discuss below, a man who cares for and is sympathetic to the women in his life. Kelly’s voice is more than just “authentic”. It has strengths despite its weaknesses; it is not so much inadequate as an alternative form of adequacy. Where does Carey get this language? Necessarily, from the Jerilderie Letter, a document dictated if not written by Kelly and read by Carey in adolescence. It was influential on Carey’s style from the beginning.2 The Jerilderie Letter has a similar incongruous combination of eloquence and illiteracy, exclusion and confidence, something which Carey’s own style tries to embody as seen in the following passage from the novel:

There are clear differences between the novel’s voice and the Jerilderie Letter: the letter’s style is much more paratactic and annalistic in mode, lacking the introspection and descriptiveness of Carey’s Kelly. But Carey’s hypothetical idiom is a plausible extrapolation of the letter’s. Carey has pointedly said that he observed an Irish quality in Kelly’s voice, and associated it not only with the Irish oral tradition already extant in Australian culture, such as in the ballad of “The Wild Colonial Boy”, but with the quintessentially modernist style of James Joyce.3 Carey’s voicing of Kelly, as Alex McDermott put it in his introduction to a 2001 edition of the Jerilderie Letter, “prefigures the ambition of modernist literature to make the written and spoken words indivisible, as exemplified in James Joyce’s Ulysses”.4 In Carey’s rendition, there is a convergence of linguistic inventiveness and oral proliferation, as Ned Kelly both experiences his own travails and imaginatively amplifies them even as they are occurring. Graham Huggan suggests that Carey’s Kelly may reflect a vestigial white privilege, “an oppositional history that disguises other more significant oppositional histories”.5 Yet the novel realistically depicts Chinese people living in rural Victoria, and Ned’s proto-Joyceanism makes him an aesthetic as well as an ethnic rebel. The verbal performance in the book is not about Carey as a writer but about Ned Kelly as a writer. Carey’s humility and grace enable him to present Kelly’s imagination as, however stunted and limited by circumstances, a powerful expressive vehicle. Carey conjures a Kelly who, in spite of what the system says is the truth, is capable of voicing his own.

There is an element of pastiche in the book, deriving from a series of allusions to Rolf Boldrewood’s 1888 Robbery Under Arms, with its bushranger-protagonist and male argot, and to Joseph Furphy’s 1903 Such Is Life, with its sense of modernity, its (adjectival) energy, and characters who sound the depths of cognitive experience even in their remote Riverina location (Carey also alludes to the Riverina in the name of Wodonga Townes, the left-wing tycoon in his 2014 novel Amnesia). Boldrewood’s novel was first serialised just after the Kelly saga unfolded and Furphy’s is set not far from Kelly country. Both books seemed even more rebellious after the introduction of censorship regarding plays and films about bushrangers, widely known as the “Bushranger Ban”. The bush in this era was associated with insurgency.

With True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey brought the flavour and achievement of these vernacular Australian writers, generally known only within Australia, into a field of transnational cultural production. In doing so, he insisted on the modernity of Furphy, Boldrewood, and Kelly himself. The late colonialism of the Kelly era and the high modernism of Joyce were not temporally very far apart. Yet a combination of spatial distance and snobbish and/or ignorant derogation of the antipodes meant there had seemed to many a vast gulf between them. Carey’s narrative bridges this gap and, more crucially, posits the modern as the intersection of Kelly’s colonial experience and Carey’s own contemporary articulation of that experience. Again, Nolan’s paintings provided a precedent to this, emphasising the abstract qualities of Kelly’s homemade armour against a typification of the Australian landscape.

If the exclusion of Australian literature from standard accounts of international modernism has had to do with the assumption that the default mode of Australian representation was realism, Nolan’s Kelly posited an Australia that was always already abstract. The point is that Ned Kelly as referent is not just colonial but also modern, in both a positive and negative way, and that Peter Carey in being historical is talking about conditions that have persisted. If, as Bruno Latour opined, “we have never been modern”, then Carey is not necessarily “rewriting” history, even when he seems to be doing so.6 Jonathan Miller’s phrase “writing science fiction of the past” is pertinent here.7 Besides, it only takes a look at Ned Kelly’s armour to see the medievalism in it, as Louise D’Arcens has recently pointed out.8 All histories gesture to even deeper histories. Just because something is in the past does not mean it has ceased to affect the present.

So far so obvious. More speculatively, however, another aspect of Ned Kelly warrants attention: his relationship with his mother. It might be easy, as with Sam in The Man Who Loved Children, to see this presence of parental rule as an allusion to the residual potency of British colonialism. The postcolonial interpretation is all the more tempting because when Carey began work on the novel, the 1999 republic referendum in Australia was yet to be held. Many observers were predicting that Australia would vote for a republic in 1999, host the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and then perhaps be rewarded another Nobel Prize for literature in time for the centenary of federation in 2001. Although the likeliest winner of this speculative Nobel was Les Murray, Carey was also considered a strong candidate. In the end, the only element of this envisioned trifecta to come to pass was the Olympics, which provoked an international interest in Sydney that Carey addressed in his ingenious and playful account of his re-engagement with the city in Thirty Days in Sydney (2002). But the very premise of the speculation showed the danger of relying on narratives of emergence from colonialism: they make the colonial legacy, which is undeniably an important factor in Australian literature, the only factor.

In terms of reading Ned Kelly’s relationship with his mother in Carey’s novel, the earlier methodology of Freudian psychoanalysis might be as interesting as the postcolonial reading rendered in exemplary fashion by Huggan. In the novel, Ned’s mother insinuates Kelly into life as a bushranger by apprenticing him to her. Kelly’s idealisation of his mother is a motivating force behind his behaviour. It bars him from successfully integrating into society. Carey shares with Christina Stead an ability to affirm social ideals while also permitting real critiques of those ideals. Even though Carey presents Kelly as a man who, although a rebel, did not intend to be hurtful, we are meant to understand Kelly’s fixation on his mother as disabling. This is reminiscent of James Billington’s argument in his study of nineteenth-century revolution, Fire in the Minds of Men, that much of the ideological energy of nineteenth-century radicals and anarchists was fuelled by sexual frustration.9

Carey, however, is not using Kelly’s emotional entanglement with his mother to mock him. The book at once paints a heroic portrait of Kelly while seeing him as vulnerable. It is no accident that in trying to understand Kelly’s behaviour, Carey turns to Freud rather than to Marx, even though Marx might be thought a better fit for a political insurgent. The Marxist tradition, however, has always been hostile to the rural peasantry, from the French Vendée of the 1790s (mentioned in Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America) onward, and the closest global analogy to Kelly may be more recent Latin American insurgents such as Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas, or the rebels of Canudos, led by Antonio Conselheiro in the 1890s. The latter was documented by the Brazilian journalist Euclides da Cunha in his Rebellion in the Backlands (1902), and his book informed Mario Vargas Llosa’s acclaimed novel The War of the End of the World (1981) much as the Jerilderie Letter, and the novels of Furphy and Boldrewood, informed Carey’s. But the Canudos rebellion, although rural and poor in origin, was religiously motivated in a way Kelly’s was not. Kelly’s rebellion was much more a quest for the fair go and for social justice; any residual Catholicism had been long forgotten (Carey has observed that the same was true in his family). The word “fair” is a leitmotif in the novel, occurring over thirty times in a myriad of uses. Another index of the novel’s cry for fairness is Carey’s ventilation of Kelly’s real-life reading of Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, which literary critics might see as a historical romance but which Kelly, percipiently, saw as the story of how a man who perceives himself as ordinary, unspectacular and marginalised, the country-dweller John Ridd, nonetheless won the day in both private and public realms over far more entitled adversaries.

The modernity of the novel, however, is not just political and stylistic but also psychological. Joyce is present in the novel’s textual mediation of its content but so, less obviously, is Freud. Psychoanalysis as a method first made news by its positing of roadblocks to a stable, secure self, but the actual point of Freud’s working techniques, as reframed by later commentators such as Paul Ricoeur and Adam Phillips, is to point out that these roadblocks can be dissolved and that the talking cure is a gradualist amelioration of them.10 As W. H. Auden put it in his elegy for Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst “hoped to improve a little by living”.11 Psychoanalysis is seen by Auden as being as palliative as it is subversive, sounding the darkness ultimately to ballast the light, sourcing the irrational so as to succour “Eros, builder of cities”. In its combination of individual agency, clinical expertise and belief in systemic power, Freudianism was an ideology of modernity, one which, to Christina Stead’s resentment, many believed spoke to the modern condition more than Marxism.

Carey is living in the twenty-first century and often writing about the nineteenth. But his sensibility gestated in the twentieth. Contemporary writers who set a book in the nineteenth century are sometimes assumed to be nostalgic for a road not taken, as though, despite the failures of the twentieth century, the nineteenth century could still provide a source of optimism. Especially given the association of “the short twentieth century”, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, with Soviet communism, a recourse to the nineteenth century could be seen as a tacit form of post-communism, a regeneration of liberal optimism avoiding the tragedy of the modern, as well as its critique of bourgeois society.12 Kelly’s circumstances and grievances are colonial, but both the author and the reader encounter them through a modern filter, a filter replete with both the aesthetic experimentation and the social tragedy with which the twentieth century is indelibly associated. Carey’s Kelly is both a product and an example of colonial modernity. Robert Dixon defines colonial modernity as taking issue with “the assumption that modernity is first invented in the metropolitan centre and then exported to the colonial peripheries, which are always, by definition, belated”.13 In writing a historical novel of colonial modernity, Carey is showing the world that Australia was as modern as anywhere else when the world was first becoming modern. It is widely recognised that settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada had achieved stable governments and prosperous societies by the end of the nineteenth century. But the intellectual consensus tends to remain doubtful that their culture was sufficiently cutting-edge to be relevant to discussions of modernity, especially when modernity is conceived not just as progress, but as a kind of crisis.

There is a distinct sense of crisis throughout True History of the Kelly Gang, however. Ned’s convict father is dead, and Ned goes to prison in his early teens. By the time he is released his mother, Ellen Quinn Kelly, has married an American named George King, who instructs Ned in the art of bushranging but whose usurpation of Ned’s father’s role wounds the young man and inflames his more general resentment of class privilege. When Kelly’s mother is jailed, the state, like Claudius in Hamlet, takes over the role of Oedipal usurper. Thus Kelly’s resentment against the state is not just political and jurisprudential, but also psychosexual. Kelly is haunted by the loss of his mother, first to King and then to the state, and this comes out in the inchoate rage that lands him in progressively more trouble in Wangaratta and Glenrowan. His triumphs and tragedies are modern ones into which psychoanalytic methods lend insight.

Putting Ned “on the couch” in Freudian terms is not to undercut him but to treat him with particular respect as a herald of twentieth-century humanity whose pathologies can be addressed by psychoanalytic methods. If Christina Stead’s Sam Pollit, or any of the male villains of Elizabeth Harrower’s novels, were treatable by psychoanalysis, they would not be at once so abject and so pathological. When Clemency James in Harrower’s The Catherine Wheel thinks of her relationships with Christian and Rollo, she reflects that these men are far more depraved than a “normal, intelligent neurotic” such as herself.14 This exemplifies the anthropological assumptions of post-Freudian humanity – that to have a mother fixation, as Carey’s Ned does, is a problem, but one that is clinically treatable. (Similarly, there is a popular Freudianism in Nolan’s Kelly paintings, as Kelly’s self-manifestation is equivalent to a visual rendering of unconscious energies.) The problems of the characters in Stead’s and Harrower’s novels are gripping because they are insoluble by psychoanalytic means, whereas Ned’s problems would be very differently evaluated were he not so disempowered. The psychological problems are barely visible to the first-time reader as they are, to use the popular phrase, “First World problems”, and Ned is distinctly a part of the settler-colony “Second World”, as defined a generation ago by Stephen Slemon.15 Ned Kelly may be a criminal in the eyes of the colonial legal system, but he is not authoritarian like Stead’s and Harrower’s men. Had he lived in the late-modern milieu of mid-twentieth-century Australia, he might well have been a typical, if more boisterous than average, modern citizen. Certainly he would seem downright normal compared to, say, Waldo in Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala, if the two were to bump into each other in Pitt Street Mall.

Kelly, however, is trapped in the Victorian in two senses. He is writing in 1879, twenty years before Australia will become a self-governing nation. Ned’s life is firmly set in the colony of Victoria, although the physical proximity of the Kelly country to New South Wales gives it a liminality that can also be seen in Furphy’s Riverina in Such Is Life. Kelly country is a border district. That Victoria in Ned’s context applies to a place as well as to a time, to the polity under whose laws he is unjustly tried as well as to the queen who epitomises those laws, makes us see that if the source of Ned’s maladjustment is psychological to the small degree it is not socioeconomic, the ways in which he is misperceived are spatio-temporal. Ned is both back in time and distant from the metropolitan. It is for this that he writes a long confession, an apologia to his unseen daughter.

That the daughter is in San Francisco alludes to the transpacific connections already evident in the Kelly era.16 These can be seen in the American characters in Rolf Boldrewood’s novels, not just Robbery Under Arms, which features an American card game and American characters, but also in The Miner’s Right (1891), in which many of the diggers are either American or have passed through the United States. These connections increased after 1898, when American naval power moved into the western Pacific. The role of the American consul in Ada Cambridge’s Thirty Years in Australia also bespeaks a growing American diplomatic and economic interest in Australia. The invention of a daughter for Kelly gives the bushranger a future dimension in both space and time, one that the coercive governmental response to his self-assertion has forbidden him.

Why a daughter and not a son? A son, in Kelly’s situation, would only carry on the Oedipal scenario already staged by the absence of his father, his veneration of his mother, and his resentment of King (in a Freudian reading, this would be a stand-in for Oedipal resentment felt towards his real father for possessing his mother).17 A son might cast Kelly in the role of Laius rather than Oedipus, but the psychosexual skirmishes would continue. A daughter offers a way out of all that, while also perpetuating the presence of the feminine already latent in the Kelly story by the presence of Kate Kelly, Ned’s sister, who was a highly effective member of Ned’s outlaw gang. Kate Kelly has appeared in a number of Australian literary works, among them Jean Bedford’s Sister Kate (1982).

Carey also invents Mary Hearn, Ned’s beloved, who bears his daughter. Has Carey perhaps invented Mary to indicate that Ned’s psychosexual, Oedipal aspects did not preclude him from forming a mature and passionate attachment with a woman? Mary injects some gender parity into bush rebellion, and leavens the homosocial milieu in which the biographical Ned largely moved. Carey uses the relationship with Mary Hearn to show that Kelly lives a tragic life but has potential for psychological growth; he is not calcified into authoritarianism like Sam Pollit. It is this potential that makes him not just a pitiable loser but, in Bourdieu’s terms, a loser who wins. In Sidney Nolan’s paintings Kelly was a loser who became modernist, which in the twentieth century, was, in aesthetic terms, winning. Similarly, subjecting Kelly to psychoanalysis claims him for modernity. As Perry Meisel says, both literary modernity and psychoanalysis are structured by “antithetical and schismatic traditions”.18 Carey’s Kelly is a bush-grown, rambunctious version of these schismatic antithetical traditions.

Freudian theory can also help us to understand the novel’s relationship to its source material, both the Jerilderie Letter and Kelly’s own life, and the larger context of nineteenth-century Australian popular culture, lore, history and fiction which Carey is at once plundering and salvaging for the international reader. If the historical novel is defined precisely by its relationship with its source material, then psychoanalysis, which relates affective identities to psychic source material, figures the relation of symptom to source.19 A psychoanalytic understanding of the book helps the reader to understand why Kelly became a legend and why it matters, and why Kelly’s life, although sad and even pathetic, was not a waste. Kelly had the potential to live a constructive life, and, although a ruffian and an outlaw, was neither a terrorist nor an authoritarian. The adjustment psychoanalysis made to democratic individualism is to include the potential as well as the realised aspects of constructive life. A Freudian Australia, one in which flawed individuals in need of fundamental repair are nonetheless welcomed as citizens and participants in the community, is a democratic, possibly egalitarian Australia, in which Ned Kelly’s dream of fairness has at least a scintilla of plausibility.

One could, however, argue that to champion Kelly at this late date – after the rise of multiculturalism and Indigenous rights, and at a time when the refugee crisis was becoming a ground of contention in Australian politics – is to privilege whiteness, to substitute a white dissident for non-white dissidence. Yet Carey’s Kelly is a bridge between white, privileged Australia and a more culturally heterodox model. A modern reformism that refuses to yield to a contemporary radicalism, that stays in a comfortable mid-twentieth century cocoon of the liberalism of white privilege and does not acknowledge contemporary issues of race and identity, becomes retrograde. But a contemporary radicalism that is unable to track its genealogy back through modern reformism is in danger of becoming boutique dissent in a neoliberal polity. Carey’s Kelly is shut out in his Australia the way Indigenous people, refugees and detainees are today. The character of Kelly ties these derogated subjects to a tradition of rebellion and resistance, and to a humane individualism guaranteed by the acknowledgement of sentient will, both avowed and wayward, in Freud’s work.

The contemporary era, having largely eliminated psychoanalysis and talk therapy in favour of an emphasis on prescription drugs to cure mental ailments, denies this wayward but humane sentience. As Danny in Barracuda finds out, in the twenty-first century one is only a winner or a loser. In the era of neoliberalism, as The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith shows brilliantly, Kelly’s only way to be successful would be to play a simulated version of himself, to join the circus and exhibit himself to the metropolis between colonial failure and contemporary spectacle. Modernity provided a middle way of normally neurotic pathos between extremes of success and failure. It is Kelly’s Freudian vulnerabilities that render his tragic heroism particularly modern.

Global Carey, Subversive Carey

Even before True History of the Kelly Gang cemented Carey’s global stature, he was the Australian author to make the largest impact on the world stage. This is true even though Patrick White won the Nobel and even though, as David Carter has argued, many other writers, from Henry Handel Richardson to Eleanor Dark and Jon Cleary, had moments when they seemed to be poised to make this sort of breakthrough.20 But it was Carey’s work, in the reputation-making Illywhacker and the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda, that solicited a permanent world audience for Australian literature, and rescued it from being dismissed as marginalia or curio.

Carey was in the right place at the right time. A few months before Illywhacker was published in the USA, in the fall of 1985, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece by the Australian journalist and cultural commentator Craig McGregor, one of the most substantive essays on Australian literature that had ever run in a major American periodical. McGregor argued that Australian literature had “performed a series of comings of age”, and spoke of the “sheer bigness” of the arts in Australia.21 McGregor’s approach was decidedly pop (possibly marking the only time that Men at Work and Air Supply have been mentioned in association with Australian literary culture). Although he advocated radicalism in the arts, this was radicalism of a political, not a formal, stripe. Thus a template was sketched for the kind of Australian novel that might be successful abroad: ambitious, politically radical in a vaguely optimistic way, full of life but also outrageously inventive. That Carey’s Illywhacker fit the bill so nicely was a tribute to the vigour of that engaging novel – but in the 1980s, thanks to the Australian film boom, the growing ease of travel and communications, and the waning of Cold War certainties, such a writer was almost bound to emerge.

Another candidate for the role might have been Rodney Hall, widely published internationally and on the verge, by the 1980s, of being seen as the Australian equivalent of Gabriel García Márquez. Paul Giles speaks of the appeal, for Americans, after the success of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, of Carey’s “ludic picaresque” style; the characterisation could just as well have been made of Hall’s Just Relations (1982).22 Another in the running was Blanche D’Alpuget, strongly backed by the then-influential New York editor Robert Asahina. D’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach (1981), in a weird instance of precognitive coincidence, was reviewed widely just after Australia momentarily burst into the news after the election of Prime Minister Bob Hawke, whom D’Alpuget later married. Turtle Beach involved Australia with Asian themes, while also offering the Australian perspective on the world as a refreshing and invigorating one, showing how an Australian transnationalism might complement or contradict rather than simply reproduce an American one. Glenda Adams’ Dancing On Coral (1987) intertwined Australia, America, Pacific island peoples and Sixties radicalism in a dynamic and intellectually demanding way. But neither Hall nor D’Alpuget nor Adams, nor any of the many other Australian writers active in the 1980s, broke through in the USA the way Peter Carey was about to.

Carey’s novels have not only received positive reviews in the major Anglophone outlets for high-literary book reviewing such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, eliciting deep and insightful criticism from first-rate critics such as Galen Strawson, John Updike and Frank Kermode. He has also been blessed with many fine academic critics, including Andreas Gaile, Anthony J. Hassall, Sue Ryan-Fazilleau and Bruce Woodcock.23 Yet there has also been a second stream of Carey criticism, beginning with Karen Lamb’s 1992 book Peter Carey and the Genesis of Fame, that has seen his work more as publishing phenomenon than art.24 Graeme Turner, in a far more sophisticated fashion than Lamb, has spoken of Carey as a literary celebrity who, even though he lives abroad, lends identity to the nation.25 Carey has been both privileged and punished for his success, which is particularly odd given his success was more or less on par with that of other authors of his generation – Julian Barnes, Richard Ford, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan – who have not been seen by critics as totally under the aegis of their own good literary fortune as Carey has been. This was compounded by Carey living in the USA since 1989. There has long been a certain anti-Americanism in Australian letters, running alongside an at times heedless enthusiasm for current American trends. An expatriate who moved to Britain, like Peter Porter, might seem in danger of becoming irrelevant to Australian literature – McGregor, describing Porter’s work as “sophisticated” and “structured”, made him seem very nearly that. But he would not be seen to have “sold out” the way an Australian writer who moved to America might be.26

Australian cultural taste has long seen success in the USA as a barometer of merit. Yet Carey’s immense popularity on the American scene, and his taking up permanent residence in New York, was apparently too much of a good thing for the more sensitive among the Australian commentariat, or perhaps more justly the precariat of that commentariat. As early as 1996, Bruce Woodcock spoke of a “Carey backlash in some Australian circles”.27 Carey has been punished for his success in a way that not only is an unbecoming instance of tall poppy syndrome but also bespeaks little faith in the potential for the literary pie to grow. This unfortunate posture was also brutally negligent of Carey’s tireless attempts to promote the work of other Australian writers in the United States, and to acknowledge great masters of the past such as Patrick White and Xavier Herbert, whose Poor Fellow, My Country, for all its flaws, is a special favourite of Carey’s.

Carey was envied for his sheer marketability. Some japed that, as a former advertising man, he knew how to promote his own books. This sort of comment reflected a highly unsophisticated view of how writers make their way in the world. Bryce Courtenay was also an advertising man turned writer, who aimed at a far more popular audience than did Carey and achieved it – in Australia. In the USA, only one of Courtenay’s books has been published, and with less commercial and critical success than the average Carey novel. A background in advertising does not guarantee success, and success in one country does not mean success everywhere.

Carey’s concerns from 1990 onward mirrored and sagaciously anticipated those of other major contemporary Australian writers: a sense of historical trauma; of Australia’s highly compromised legacy of racism and hypocrisy; and of the status of fiction itself in a milieu where a naive realism was no longer possible. In addition, from the Aboriginal characters in Oscar and Lucinda to the Chinese in True History of the Kelly Gang to the Malay elements in My Life as a Fake, Carey has represented Australia beyond whiteness.

Carey similarly extends the representation of America in the Australian novel. Australian writers old enough to fight in World War II – the contemporaries of American GIs like Herbert Jaffa, who as an American serviceman was stationed in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1942, the year before Carey was born there – admired America not just as a wartime ally but as a place of freedom far from the oppressive colonial residue of Australia, a sentiment visible in David Rowbotham’s 2002 Poems for America. Yet for Carey, the United States has been far more the villain than the hero.28 The dystopia of “The Fat Man in History” (1974) is impossible without the dark spectre of an American-fostered future dictatorship.

Even more directly, “American Dreams”, a short story collected in the 1974 volume The Fat Man in History, sees America as a metaphor for iconic, gratifying wish-fulfilment. And in Bliss (1981), the opposite of the refuge that Harry Joy finds with Honey Barbara is the bleak, greed-ridden metropolitan landscape of the very New York where Carey would one day dwell. Indeed, if one were to read the early work of Peter Carey, rife with smouldering criticisms of the American presence abroad and the American way of life, and then the depiction of America in Gerald Murnane’s A Lifetime on Clouds – as a land of splendid if exalted dreams – one might pick Murnane as the writer more likely to migrate to the USA. That Murnane has never left Australia at all and that Carey has lived in and been productive and popular in New York for a quarter of a century shows both that one cannot extrapolate life from writing, and that Carey’s depiction of America is a curious kind of investment, what Paul Giles calls a “principled deracination”.29 It is not one of outright opposition, or of capitulation. It is a fine-grained challenge. Carey infiltrates the USA, not antagonistically, but with a determination to maintain his foreign eye.

Like Tristan Smith, Carey gravitated to the centre of an empire he loathed. Unlike the sometimes-hapless Tristan, however, Carey had the skill and the wit overtly to attack the American right whose actions he saw as so malevolent and so destructive of American idealism – an idealism Carey has made clear he admires. The best rebuke to those who see Carey as a mere exporter of Australia is that to be an exporter one must be an exponent, and Carey has not only been critical of Australia but has taken the contemporary world as his subject. Paul Giles observes, in response to Hassall’s work on Carey, that there is a tendency to see Carey as “one-dimensional”, as a simple relayer of Australia to the world.30 Carey is something more than that: a global writer of global scope responding to an age of global crisis.

Unofficially but palpably, critical opinion has tended to discriminate between “global Carey” and “subversive Carey”. Global Carey includes works like Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang: books that win prizes and are accepted abroad as iconic renditions of Australian life and imagination. Subversive Carey includes the early short stories with their dystopian metafiction, matched only in Australian literature by John A. Scott’s St Clair (1984); and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, with its conscious roots in postcolonial theory as represented by Homi K. Bhabha and the Australian critics Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, and its portrayal of an artificial Pacific fantasy world. Once these rubrics are established it is easy to divide Carey’s books into these two categories: Jack Maggs (1997), with its exploration of the Australian margins of Dickens’ life and writing, is global Carey because of Dickens’ own popular celebrity; The Tax Inspector (1991) is subversive Carey because neither the Catchprices nor Maria Takis is particularly likeable, and the overall tone of the novel is dark. Carey is prone to throw his implied audience off-course, to prevent them from getting too anchored in a comfort zone. If, as some have argued, he “fails to solve the problems of realism and fabulism”, he could be seen as deploying realism and fabulism against each other, to forestall an overly crystallised version of either.31

From The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith onward, Carey provides a series of portraits of artists. Tristan himself, clown and spy, combines metafiction and testimonio in multiple ways, most importantly in that he tells the entire narrative to his audience, a Voorstand jury, as he is on trial. Tristan is speaking to the enemy, the people who – and we can see a foreshadowing of Kelly here – killed his mother, at once assailing them and appealing to them. Paradox about the metropolitan pervades Tristan Smith. Saarlim is the most powerful city in the world, yet it is dilapidated and badly maintained, and its inhabitants, although privileged in wealth, are often misshapen, gross in form, and both vulnerable and vulgar, as in the case of Peggy Kram, a stand-in for a certain kind of American lay reader. The Franciscan Free Church started off as a combination of Calvinist austerity and romantic nature-worship, but has become an exploitative peddler of simulacra. Dissent has become normative and controlling. But none of this critique would be possible if Tristan had never gone to the centre: his willingness to confront the centre at its core makes him a true dissident. Carey is anchored in New York like a dagger at the very heart of the establishment.

Carey in the Twenty-First Century

The very titles of the three novels that followed True History of the Kelly Gang – My Life as a Fake (2003), Theft (2006) and His Illegal Self (2008) – reveal Carey’s concern with inauthenticity, appropriation, and not being what one seems to be or thinks one is. This concern even came into Carey’s nonfiction in this period, as is evident in the subtitle of Thirty Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, and in the title of his 2005 book on Japan, Wrong about Japan. As with Ned Kelly and his armour, Butcher Bones in Theft is a home-grown modernist, a congenial Aussie swindler writing his way into modernity by hoaxing it. If modernist art is suffused with irony and inauthenticity, then Australia will not be left behind, but will “forge” its way in: “forge” in the double sense of faking and making.

This is where Carey’s world is very different from that of modernism. There was a tradition in modernism of Kunstlerschuld, artist-guilt (as sketched in Martin Seymour-Smith’s history of modern world literature).32 Writers such as André Gide, in Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1925), pondered the inauthenticity of art, much as does My Life as a Fake, while the first great American postmodern novel, William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (1955), is all about the forgery of artwork, much as Theft is. Gide and Gaddis, however, describe characters who forge and fake in an effort to be losers who win, whereas the only possible reason to forge in the contemporary era is for money – to be a winner who wins. Neoliberal forgers are just entrepreneurs by other means.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the corporate world had embraced self-reference. So much of finance had to do with making up figures and results and did not pretend to correspond to any reality. What Emily Apter has termed “paranoid globalism” – the sense that everything is interconnected, that the world is even smaller than it in fact is – led to a sense of at least mock total awareness of everything that was going on.33 The literary world had become commoditised. Modernist forgers may have simulated art for the sake of money but art and money were separate enough for forgery to seem not only criminal but conceptually audacious, as art and money were so diametrically opposed. The postmodern works of Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons, however, often deliberately represented commodity fetishism, which was no longer suppressed for the sake of rarefied Art. Thus to say that art was fake was no longer to expose it or to question it. It was to tell everybody something he or she already knew and felt cynically indifferent about.34

Theft periodises fakery. The motifs of the mechanical Golem and mechanical Charlie Chaplin, as contemplated by the character Leo Stein, evoke the traumas of twentieth-century history and the Holocaust, as if to say that the period after modernity can only simulate these sorts of traumas. That Butcher Bones is released from Long Bay prison in 1980, one of the possible foundation-years for the neoliberal era, alludes to the possibility of the intertwining of fakery with the financialisation of the public sphere. Taking up this theme would have pulled the novel towards more contemporary relevance. In Parrot and Olivier in America, Carey was later to prove that he was consummately able to make these contemporary parallels: so why not here?

One of the keys to Theft, and – even though it is not directly about forgery or art – His Illegal Self concerns the relationship of modernism to Australia: put bluntly, there was not thought to be one. The Ern Malley hoax, the animating crux of Theft, was notable because it represented both an attempt to parody modernism in Australia, and, in the view of critics from Paul Kane to Michael Heyward, a surreptitious, malgré lui manifestation of that same modernism, one possibly outdoing in aesthetic achievement the “actual” poems of James McAuley and Harold Stewart.35 That Carey has his Ern Malley figure, Bob McCorkle, literally come to life is but a dramatisation of the idea that the Ern Malley poems were interesting poems even if their creators had not intended them to be. The book is a warning that aesthetic eidolons may become material realities, and peripheries may be able to write back to centres in more than name only.

Carey used the theme of the hoax at a time of widespread fascination with the topic. In the controversies surrounding B. Wongar, Mudrooroo and Helen Demidenko, authors claimed to be, or believed they were, what they were not: Indigenous Australian, Ukrainian-Australian. Paul Genoni attributes this preoccupation to a 1990s concern with establishing identity.36 But, equally, the interest might exude from a sense of the fragility of identity. In Ern Malley’s case, the phantom conjured by the hoax was that of an Australian modernism. This was a modernism that Max Harris, the avant-garde editor who was hoaxed by Malley because the hoax fit his poetic enthusiasms, wanted. It was one that James McAuley and Harold Stewart in no way wanted. But somehow, in the form of the Malley poems, they gave a forced and agonising birth to it. Carey’s novel operates in the wake of this nearly stillborn modernism.

The Ern Malley topic thus figured a perceived crisis within Australian literature: that it did not have enough of a modernism; it had a postmodernism, as Carey’s work demonstrated, but not a modernism. The title of C. K. Stead’s 1979 essay on New Zealand poetry, “From Wystan to Carlos”, was notable not so much because, in saying New Zealand poets had shifted from being influenced by W. H. Auden to being influenced by William Carlos Williams, it suggested a shift from British to American precedents but because Williams, born in 1883, was a full generation older than Auden, born in 1907. Thus for antipodean poets suddenly to embrace modernism of the sort found in Williams meant they were going backwards in time.37 It could be argued that part of the exclusionary and elitist aspects of modernism lay in its exclusion of literatures such as the Australian: that modernism simply canonised a few writers resident in or on the fringes of the metropolitan who conformed to certain experimental or avant-garde norms, and ignored the rest. Or, to put it another way, that Australian late modernity, as figured consummately in Patrick White’s Sarsaparilla novels and in the fiction of Elizabeth Harrower, was ignored by non-Australians because it embodied all of the restraints and paralyses of the modern period without any of its rebellions and insurgencies. The iconoclasm of the 1960s is what has led to the decade being described (borrowing from Hobsbawm) as a “very short twentieth century”, a decade that epitomised in miniature the self-assertion of the century as a whole.38

His Illegal Self is about a group of radicals on the run in Queensland in the 1970s (as is widely known, Carey himself lived in a hippie commune at Bellingen on the north coast of New South Wales at a slightly later date). The upheaval of the 1960s reached Australia somewhat belatedly: Gough Whitlam was not elected until 1972 and, as David McCooey has argued, the poetic generation of ’68 in Australia could just as well be termed the generation of ’79; it was only by the end of the 1970s that they had written their career-establishing work.39 Moreover, there were no Australian equivalents of terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and anti-Vietnam War activity only began on a large scale in Australia in 1970, when the war was beginning to wind down. In writing about Vietnam-era American radicalism in His Illegal Self, Carey was writing about what he had missed. Carey draws upon his Bellingen experience and attempts to write himself into the American setting by making references in the novel to such upstate New York communities as Jeffersonville and Poughkeepsie, places in the hinterland of New York’s metropolitan area which Carey knows now but which someone living in Australia at the time would not have known about.

His Illegal Self is haunted by an inherent unease. James Bradley commented that it seemed to him Carey’s “least successful novel by some distance”.40 In addition, novels with similar themes, written by Philip Roth, Susan Choi, Sigrid Nuñez, Dana Spiotta and Jonathan Lethem garnered more attention in the USA because of their surer grasp of the psychic and imaginative territory.41

The chief character of His Illegal Self is an American woman, Anna Xenos – the surname denoting, obviously, “stranger” – who has taken the name Dial, short for “Dialectic”. She takes care of her lover’s child, a little boy known as Jay or Che, after the Latin American guerrilla leader. Carey’s depiction of Dial, not the boy’s natural mother but his mostly responsible caretaker, adds to his portrait galleries of parenthood, real and surrogate, and, more generally, of caring and what might be called a familiar version of “concern”. One of Carey’s early stories was entitled “Do You Love Me?” In his later books, a recurring question is “Do you care about me? Does my survival and comfort matter to you?” That Carey tells half the book from the viewpoint of the child is bravura, not so much because of the audacity of an adult simulating a child’s voice, but because Carey was already an adult during the period depicted. The asymmetries of a sensitive child-narrator can stand for other outsider perspectives – such as the Australian.

Parrot and Olivier: Ingenious Social Hope

Parrot and Olivier in America (2009) is an exciting and exacting book, a novel at once historical and contemporary. With it, Carey revealed himself as a diarist of the present who uses history and fantasy as his preferred means of notation. He not only delves into the archive, but also uses the archive as an idiolect of expression, turning it into, in a Wittgensteinian sense, a language-game that embodies meaning that may have been otherwise conceivable, but not otherwise articulable.42

Parrot and Olivier in America contrasts in alternate chapters the hauteur of Paris and the incipient democratic chants of the American experiment. Olivier de Garmont, an expatriate French aristocrat somewhat modelled on Alexis de Tocqueville, at first seems somebody so fussy and vulnerable as hardly to be able to interact with a hustling, vibrant frontier society. This comes through in the style of Olivier’s chapters, which is accomplished but not expressive. That at book’s end we see that there is some merit in Olivier amounts to a recognition that his aristocratic pretensions do bring with them value, or at least panache.

Carey’s ability to accept asymmetries is shown not only in his multi-faceted portrait of Olivier, but also in the more discrete and historically situated aspects of the book. Some of the cameos of contemporary figures are outstanding, such as that of Washington Irving, “a lawyer and comic novelist of some renown” (188).43 In a way this sort of legerdemain is most impressive when done with real people, but in Carey’s novel, spearheaded by one character based loosely on a real person and another entirely made up (albeit with stock elements), there is a pleasing sense of the novelist using history to create a distinct fictional world, distinct from the present time and from other fictional worlds but also distinct from the very history from which it draws its pulse. Parrot and Olivier in America is the product of enormous diligence, but its sources dance and pack an integrated cumulative punch. Carey attends to every nuance for its own sake, and this attention to detail, exemplifying, to use Coleridge’s word, the “esemplastic” aspect of Carey’s imagination, is in full gear in this novel.

Carey has commented that, while many Americans romanticise Tocqueville as the outsider discerning enough to praise American democracy, there are indeed many snobbish and condescending moments in his treatment of the United States, many of them cogent, as in the monotony de Tocqueville observes across the country,44 a sameness more recently described by the Australian historian Bruce Grant as “the absence of surprise”.45 But the book is a fantasia on de Tocqueville, not a commentary on him. Olivier also hints at earlier French visitors to America, such as Citizen Genêt (in marrying the local aristocrat) and Hector St John de Crèvecoeur (in settling down on an American homestead). Olivier is largely without Tocqueville’s genuine idealism. He is much more a figure of reaction, somebody whose family is too conservative to thrive in France even under the moderate July monarchy, never to be mistaken for the Terror. Parrot’s relation of parodic servitude to both “Lord Migraine” (i.e. Olivier) and the Marquis de Tilbot makes him a jaded but surprisingly bright-eyed backspring against Olivier’s fear of American tumult and levelling.

There is also a third level of New World identity in this book, what we might call the Australian. Before he meets up with Olivier, John “Parrot” Lariat goes to New South Wales at age twelve aboard a convict ship. There, he marries an Irish woman. Parrot is at home everywhere: in Australia, in America, and even – or especially – in Paris, where he marries Mathilde, with whom he has a warm and supportive relationship of the sort Olivier can never attain. Despite being the model for Delacroix’s painting of liberty leading the masses, Mathilde is less idealistic and more cynical than Parrot, but they both have an inability to interact with people of a higher class without becoming captivated or overtaken by them. It is not just that Parrot is more successfully American than the arrogant and cavalier Olivier; in many ways he is more successfully French. His very nickname, “Parrot”, or Perroquet in French, refers to the abundance of these birds in Australia, as well as the idea of the parrot as a mimic, as Parrot Larritt successfully ingratiates himself with all manner of authorities and superiors, only to show the reader that he is never entirely within their grasp. Birds are an important motif in the novel: they are migratory, beautiful, but also full of violence. Algernon Watkins, Parrot’s employer, a forger like Butcher Bones and an etcher of birds, is a clear calque of John James Audubon, who himself was rumoured to be the rescued and anonymous Louis XVII, the boy Dauphin who in fact died young. In this book, nobody is what they seem, and Parrot’s ability to parrot is, paradoxically, what maintains his authenticity, even as the free-to-say-what-he-wants Olivier is hamstrung by his own sense of privilege and authority.

Another Australian referent in the book is the role of the Tombs prison in Manhattan, where “everything is suffocating hot”, and the emphasis on the prison in Olivier’s sociological study of America (167). This reminds us not just of de Tocqueville’s own writings on prisons, but also that American prisons in this era were one of Foucault’s principal sources in Discipline and Punish.46 The Tombs was a prison in a former colony; Australia was an entire prison colony unto itself, and anything Carey says about penology inherently resonates on an Australian plane. In a very distant but unmistakeable way, Parrot and Olivier in America is a convict novel, and the United States it depicts is reminded that its rhetoric of freedom necessarily entails a considerable number of prisons. America in the novel is at once a respite from the hierarchies of Olivier’s natal France, and a kinder, gentler continuation of them by other means, despite the Americans’ “enthusiasm for self-congratulation” that they have effaced aristocracy entirely (161). Beyond this dichotomy, there is a vision of Australia as a place where the excluded might aspire to a genuinely egalitarian society, less money-centred than the American, but are inhibited from putting it into practice by a hierarchy as cruel as ever existed in Europe.

This Australian shadow hovers over the protagonists’ desire to find both personal and social happiness in the New World. Olivier’s eventually unhappy relationship with Miss Amelia Godefroy is indicative of this. It is also a clear example of Carey’s ingenious referentiality. Carey uses names as tactical code, as witness his deployment of his own maternal family name, Warriner, in Jack Maggs. Godeffroy, with two f’s, is a small town in upstate New York. There is plausible reason to believe that Carey knows it, given the mentions of Jeffersonville and Poughkeepsie, both about an hour’s drive from Godeffroy, in His Illegal Self. Amelia Godefroy, however, comes from Connecticut, not upstate New York, and this provides the perfect referent for the intrusion of commerce into pastoral utopia: the coast of Connecticut is lamented as “the most shocking monument to avarice one could ever have witnessed, its ancient forests gone, smashed down and carted off for profit” (144). Any American beauty is ephemeral and perishable, and likely as not to be pulverised by the inchoate desire of the mob.

Amelia represents the America that has melodramatically renounced rank and hierarchy in name only to yearn for them in actuality; she presents a vista not so far from that of Danny Kelly’s school in Tsiolkas’ Barracuda. Interestingly, however, there is another layer to Amelia. Godeffroy, the town, is named after railroad executive Adolphus Godeffroy.47 But there was also a German businessman of that era, Johann Cesar Godeffroy, who did lucrative trade in the South Pacific, and who helped to finance collections of Australian ichthyologic paintings.48 Whether or not Carey knew of Johann Christoph Godeffroy, the name itself is diasporic. A Godeffroy, like an Oliver and even a Larritt, does not come to North America except through diaspora. The surname Godeffroy is Huguenot, and so ended up both in Germany and in the USA because of persecution by the French Catholic establishment. The USA, Prussia and South Africa would not have been the same without the Huguenots, which itself is a lesson in the variability of the benignity of historical outcomes, and there is the same implicit contrast between New York and Dutch-ruled South Africa as there was in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, where Carey’s dystopian hegemonic country of Voorstand is equal parts contemporary New York and apartheid-era South Africa.49

That Godefroy’s name has a South Pacific connection may be a happy accident, but once referents become diasporic they have a better than average chance of being Australian; Carey distils a sense of the Australian that operates suggestively even when it is only thinly articulated on the literal level. It is palpable, yet not insistent; it demands to be heard, yet is not stridently nationalist. Analogously, Parrot and Olivier weave themselves around each other, as in their contrasting marriages (Olivier at least at one point to an Anglo woman, albeit one with a Huguenot surname; Parrot to a Frenchwoman, Mathilde).

Parrot’s final speech, however, both decisively differentiates him from Olivier and is a clarion call to awareness:

He ends the book with a peroration in his character’s future, but about his own present:

The America Carey saw after 1990 could hardly have corresponded to these utopian visions. In some ways, Carey’s political trajectory and context is like that of Les Murray in reverse. Murray criticised a late modern, elitist, bien-pensant left-wing ascendancy (like the Howards in Harrower’s In Certain Circles), but then his work confronts and is received by an at least somewhat different neoliberal ascendancy. Carey has said that he was attracted to New York because it was full of people who, like him, “carried two places in their heart, the land of their childhood and their chosen home”. Immigrants to America “did not come all this way, as one of them said to me, ‘to stay the way I were’”, and neither do the societies to which people migrate stay the same.50

Parrot’s exuberant salutation to Olivier at the end of the book carries a bitter aftertaste of dramatic irony: we know that the idiot will be elected, class disparities will overtake egalitarianism, America will end up being more “European”, in terms of inequality, than it ever hoped or feared. Carey is very attentive to class and to the danger of class inequality in this novel, indeed more so than many Marxist theorists such as Alain Badiou, for whom, as Thomas Piketty remarks in the final footnote of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “questions of capital and of class inequality are of only moderate interest”.51

Amnesia: Trauma and Anamnesis

Amnesia (2014) traces the US–Australia relationship over a trajectory of seventy years, its hinge being the 1975 dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Some might suspect here that Carey is holding on to grievances from his youth, and that he is romanticising the cultural position of Australian dissent. But one of the most compelling aspects of Amnesia is the imperfect status of its moral protagonists: Felix Moore, from whose point of view the first part of the novel is told, is Carey severely manqué (like Carey, he hails from Bacchus Marsh, Victoria). It is almost as if Carey is poking fun at those people who try to see his narrators as stand-ins for himself, for Moore is not Carey. Carey, although an admirer of Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country, judged that Herbert was too close to his fictional stand-in, Jeremy Delacy, and Carey shies away from this mistake, always interposing an ironic distance between his own authorship and his narrators, even those who may resemble him. Moore is an “unlovely old scoundrel”, a veteran writer in his seventies with little but sheer endurance to show for it.52 His best-known work, Barbie and the Deadheads (134), is a rather slight satire. Most of his work has been polemical – and forgettable – journalism.

Moore’s career has been neither brilliant nor particularly honourable. Wodonga “Woody” Townes is a shady left-wing billionaire, a “collector of first editions” but “most of all, a property developer”, (22) an eidolon of Les Murray’s darkest nightmares about what the combination of financial entitlement and left-wing views might generate but also, the novel makes clear, someone who could not have risen to the top anywhere but Australia. Gaby, the epitome of the next generation (born on the very day, 11 November 1975, that Gough Whitlam was dismissed) is willing to make moral compromises in pursuit of her ideological aims, yet is passionately moral. Although Frederic Matovic, her Julian Assange-like collaborator, is sinister in more than one sense of the word, Carey, through Gaby, celebrates the liberating political potential of cyberspace. In the 1990s the pessimistically inclined might have suspected that cyberspace would come to see the same hegemony that controlled other media spaces. By the 2010s, however, a disjunctive and subversive vision of cyberspace had arisen, one in which freedom, even at great moral peril, could be obtained for Gaby’s generation.

Carey remains vitally engaged not just with the material facts of the Australian condition in the twenty-first century but with the cultural themes and preoccupations that have arisen from them. The name of the character Gaby Baillieux in Amnesia possibly alludes to the former Victorian state premier of that name, who was himself from a prominent Melbourne family, a reference visible to Australians but almost totally invisible to global readers. This is a textbook instance of subversive Carey and global Carey being tethered together. In Amnesia, Carey is exploring ground similar to writers younger than he is, writers who still live in Australia, and writers of different heritages.

In exploring the hacker psychology of Gaby, Carey tries as hard as he can to understand the psychology of the younger generation, and to envision cyberspace as a place where the bimodalities of neoliberalism are complicated or burst apart entirely. Gaby is decisively contrasted to the previous generation:

This passage, quoted by Andrew Motion in his review of the novel in the Guardian,53 is an explicit engagement with the periodisation that is at the centre of my argument in this book, although I have used the terms “late modernity” and “neoliberalism” for what Carey calls “the geological age” and “the Anthropocene” (366). As much as a misfire as His Illegal Self may have been, its experiment in representing a younger mentality pays off in the depiction of Gaby in Amnesia. Gaby is a younger member of Generation X, someone who heard Rickie Lee Jones songs as a toddler and played computer games as a preteen. Carey extends his reach to the next generation not just to keep up with the times but also to fill out his depiction of the moral history of his own generation by acknowledging its consequences for the next. Amnesia’s ties to Carey’s Australian youth and to the political wounds of the late twentieth century notwithstanding, it is a novel that fully addresses and comes to terms with twenty-first-century Australia.

Amnesia gives a panoply of Australia over the last several decades. Rozelle in Sydney is tawdry and bohemian; Monash University in the 1970s a “sea of mud that had been a market garden” (29). The book covers much of the Australian landscape, from “the oil-slicked water of the Brisbane River” (81) to the “pretty red flowers with yellow hearts” (157) along the Hawkesbury. The novel’s temporal coverage is also wide. Moore had known Gaby’s mother, Celine Baillieux, at university in the 1970s, and the story stretches back to World War II and to the experiences of Celine’s mother and her staunch Methodist grandmother. The novel thus gives four generations of an Australian family – and takes us back to the mid-twentieth century. Celine is conceived during World War II when her mother, Doris, is raped by an American; during Celine’s undergraduate days at Monash University she mentions this when the issue of Vietnam-era anti-Americanism comes up. One of Celine’s contemporaries claims that American troops did not even serve in New Guinea during World War II. Carey, who was born in 1943, goes back to high modernity to understand the traumatic roots of the Australian–American relationship, which originated in a heroic moment of solidarity before, like the Franciscan Free Church of Voorstand in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, it all got simulacral.

The French ancestry of Celine’s family recalls the French elements in Parrot and Olivier in America and The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. But the name “Celine” is also a reminder of one of the collaborationist and modernist Louis-Ferdinand Céline – one of the century’s great writers, who succumbed to the allure of totalitarian politics – and so links contemporary Australian traumas to past European ones. The contemporary Australia presented so panoramically in Amnesia is dark and troubled above all by political menace. The issue of “freeing boat people from Australian custody” (5) is mentioned in the book’s early pages. Many readers in the USA would be unaware of the asylum-seeker issue in Australia, but Carey remains attuned to Australian media space, and is out to make his polemical mark on the twenty-first-century Australian scene.

After a few years of relative neglect of Carey by Australian academics, who, as Paul Giles observes, regarded him with “so much suspicion”54, a new wave of graduate students now seems to be reversing that trend, and beginning to do the sort of historicist and archival work on Carey that needs to be done to take Carey studies beyond plot summary style appreciation.55 Nonetheless, there remains a mistaken general impression that the most interesting thing about Carey is his American success.

Yet, paradoxically, the Australian writer who has most vigorously fomented an intelligent, critical anti-Americanism is Carey himself. Carey, like Patrick White, was furious at the circumstances of Gough Whitlam’s dismissal from office, and blamed the entire affair on the USA. In a 2014 interview with Melbourne bookseller Mark Rubbo, Carey said, discussing Amnesia, that deep opposition to American foreign policy had long been part of his literary vision:

As it happened, Amnesia’s Australian release coincided with Gough Whitlam’s death, giving the novel an uncanny currency; Carey seemed a sort of literary mourner-in-chief for Whitlam, and the book’s allegations of amnesia provided an occasion for anamnesis, a longer-range remembering. Chapter 25 of Amnesia narrates the events surrounding the end of the Whitlam government. Carey endorses the controversial version of history promulgated by John Pilger, who holds that American intelligence services were directly responsible for Whitlam’s overthrow.57 Marshall Green, the American ambassador to Indonesia in 1965, to Cambodia in 1970, and to Australia in 1975, is seen melodramatically by Carey as the “coup-master” (136), although some might argue that Green’s appointment was intended to be an honourable but low-key post, a kind of quasi-retirement.58 Whitlam himself, as shown in his 1977 speech to the Australian parliament, adamantly believed there had been CIA intervention. In a cruel irony worthy of Orwell or Foucault, the only arena in which this wound can be exhibited to a global audience is an American one. Carey envisions the USA as a crypt of secrets, and much of the drama of his fiction comes from exploring its labyrinthine corridors. By seeing the USA, rather than Britain, as the country with which Australia is most problematically engaged, Carey goes beyond the postcolonial paradigm of liberation and self-assertion through which he has so often been analysed.

Richard Flanagan, in a 2015 address to the PEN World Voices Festival in New York, imagined a dystopian 2050 in which the USA had broken up and the corporate entities of Facebook, Google and Apple were all-powerful.59 Seeing this future scenario as the logical outcome of changes in the world polity since 1980, Flanagan took just as politically radical a line as does Carey in Amnesia, but suggested that the state, even the American state, is withering away, to be replaced by the purely corporate entities of neoliberalism. Carey, on the other hand, sees the state power of the United States as continuing on from the late modernity of his youth to the neoliberal era of his maturity, and sees the structures of sovereignty as being ballasted rather than eroded by the free market. Whereas Flanagan, in his speech, saw the internet as a potential means of mega-corporate surveillance, Carey, through the character of Gaby Baillieux, sees cyberspace as an arena in which to outfox the forces of state authority.

Amnesia promises no liberation, and does not complacently portray Gaby’s generation curing the pathologies of her elders. That would be the path of least resistance for somebody of Carey’s generation to take: trusting that the kids will make it all right. Gaby is a force for hope. But she is wild and unconsoling; she seems more likely to bring an apocalyptic day of wrath than a harmonious resolution. But Amnesia shows a world of multiple forces, in which the dominant powers are challenged by imperfect figures on the margins. It is a world that tries to make us forget its origins, and to jettison dissent by promulgating “the Great Amnesia” (5). This is why the anamnesis – the remembrance – not just of the Whitlam era but also of World War II is so urgent in the book. Amnesia is the dystopian sequel to Parrot’s pastoral imaginings in his final peroration. The future will not bring equality and justice, but inequality and frenetic moral turbulence, a milieu, as Gaby thinks of the Melbourne suburb of Parkville, that is “smudgy. Layer to layer” (149). Carey’s inside track insists on even evident moral polarities being close-up and proximate, so that the reader can discern and imaginatively wrestle with them.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

In the light of the neoliberal dystopia seen in Amnesia, Parrot’s final speech in Parrot and Olivier in America takes on a new valence. His words are prophetic of the erosion of a modern idea of equality that in his day was just coalescing, but which was already in danger from those who wished to heighten, or restore, inequality. As even the Australian Treasury notes, “income distribution in Australia has become more unequal over the last thirty years”.60 Carey is not writing about an exclusively American problem; it is an Australian one as well. Carey, in this passage, is engaging in elegiac mockery, as precisely what Parrot says will never come to pass now has. Yet there is a sense in which Carey means Parrot’s words to be read more generously. The ignoramus, after all, is also Andrew Jackson, representative of the democracy that Parrot is seeking. One gets the sense that, for Carey, Olivier is forever tarnished by his association with political reaction, which brings up difficult issues of how the historical novel itself can resist this tug towards reaction. Like Parrot and Olivier, today’s writers and readers will one day be judged by a future they will never know. This may be the animating dynamic of fiction: it explores problems that will remain unsolvable during the writer’s lifetime. Neither Olivier’s condescending idealism nor Parrot’s subversive irony wins out completely; no single viewpoint can. That is why the counter-neoliberal affects of concern, rancour and idealism can be manifested side-by-side and have similar reverberations, if by different means.

Felix Moore in Amnesia says that our “sole responsibility to our ancestors is to give birth to them as they gave birth to us” (88). In this spirit, in Parrot and Olivier in America Carey returns to the divergence between America and Australia. For it is not true that these two English-speaking countries have only discovered each other since World War II. An early incarnation of the US–Australian relationship can be seen in the first Australian nationalism, that of the 1850s. This was the nationalism seen in Victoria’s goldfields and in the “fiction fields” described by the first Australian literary critic, Frederick Sinnett, in the work of “the farthing poet”, Richard Hengist Horne, in the miners’ resistance at the Eureka Stockade and in the chronicling of that resistance by the Italian migrant Raffaello Carboni. Significantly, Felix Moore in Amnesia has a complete signed set of Manning Clark’s multi-volume History of Australia, and Carey’s late work gestures to the entire sweep of settler Australian history. The Australian era evoked indirectly by Parrot and Olivier in America is chronologically slightly later than its American setting, but temperamentally quite similar: it is the Australia of the early part of the fourth volume of Clark’s history, The Earth Abideth Forever, which covers the 1850s to the 1880s. This was the Australia of Daniel Henry Deniehy and his early republicanism, the Australia that Herman Melville might have visited if the tides had carried him that way, the Australia of Louisa Atkinson, whose Gertrude the Emigrant (1857) combined spirituality and romance with feminism and a strikingly precise observation of nature worthy of her contemporary, Thoreau. This is a period too early and too colonial to form the crucible of a rousing Australian nationalism, as would later emerge with the Bulletin school of the 1890s. The individual Australian colonies still had very separate identities. But the tyranny of distance loomed too large for there to be concerted control from London, or for Australia to feel entirely a part of a British Empire. Queen Victoria was not proclaimed Empress of India until 1876; the Suez Canal, which made the logistical integration of Australia possible, was not operational until the 1860s. At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, what the New Zealand historian James Belich has called the “recolonial” effect of subsequent decades had not really begun to kick in.61 In this era, Australia was free to look out across the Pacific rather than back towards Europe. When conditions changed, Atkinson fell out of tune with the time and became diminished as a novelist, as in 1864’s Myra, which is set in England and lacks the perceptiveness of her earlier fiction. From a twenty-first-century perspective, Atkinson is an imperfect writer, not just stylistically but also in her assumptions about race and settler entitlement, assumptions found in most of her white Australian contemporaries. The nineteenth century, in both the USA and Australia, was a time of white privilege and almost instinctual racism, attitudes to which Atkinson’s work succumbs, as do many of the most liberal and advanced white thinkers of that era. Despite the equivalent aura of white privilege around such plucky and underestimated protagonists as Parrot Larritt, Carey in Parrot and Olivier in America is alluding to the liberal optimism of the USA and Australia of that era as a residual possibility.

But Carey’s book is far more overtly centred in America, before the rise of the great corporate trusts in the USA, before the Gilded Age and its rampant inequality, when the country was full of a sense of nourishing possibility. To understand the kind of proto-Australian imaginary Carey is gesturing at here we must gaze more intently at both this period and the way it has re-emerged in recent literary study, as the academics who evoke this period are part of the same project in which, albeit from totally different antecedents and with substantially different audiences, Carey’s project also participates. The literature of this era in Australian history has attracted scholars of the calibre of Ken Stewart, Meg Tasker and Elizabeth Webby. But it found one of its most devoted students in Victor Crittenden (1925–2014), the foundation librarian of the University of Canberra, the publisher of Mulini Press, and the editor of the journal Legacy. Crittenden included 1890s writers in Legacy, but generally emphasised earlier, pre-nationalist, pre-Suez writers. At the centre of his vision was Louisa Atkinson, for whose life and work Crittenden had a particular affection. Crittenden was, in the words of his colleague Andrew Clarke, an autodidact. He dropped out of school at fourteen and returned to university later, garnering advanced degrees in engineering and librarianship. Crittenden’s combination of amateurism and practicality has a scrappiness, an idiosyncratic quality reminiscent of Carey’s awkward and ungainly heroes, waging an individual, valiant and quixotic struggle against forces more standardising and more privileged than they, but nonetheless managing to make their voices heard. Crittenden helps us to see what a Carey hero is: a distinct person trying, in oddness and quirkiness, to make an impact on a world far more cruel and uncaring than he is. The engaged enthusiasm of Crittenden testifies to a resilience much like that which Carey attributes to nineteenth-century America and Australia. If de Tocqueville embodied an America in which both the fruits and the perils of a levelling democracy seemed within reach, writers like Carboni and Atkinson represented the closest thing to a Tocquevillian Australia, an Australia, despite the brutality of colonial governance, of an incipient spirit of self-assertion. Parrot Larritt, as rendered by Carey, has the virtues of this lapsed America and this fugitive Australia: a gumption, a willingness to tackle the problems at hand, and an ambition focused on experiencing life to its fullest rather than simply accumulating the spoils of “winning”. Like the wounded but inquisitive Freudian humanity of modernity, this global but pre-imperial nineteenth-century individualism represents an imperfect but valiant alternative to market forces, a spirit of greater generosity.

The global yet pre-imperial Australia represented by this spirit may now be in abeyance. But it is not yet dead, and may lurk in unexpected corners. To see this, we need to take a brief look at a contemporary Australian who, like Carey, desires to be seen as both an Australian and a world figure, both a home-grown progressive and a cosmopolitan eminence. Bob Carr was premier of New South Wales for ten years (1995–2005) and then foreign minister in the Gillard and second Rudd governments (2012–2013). In his memoir Diary of a Foreign Minister, he records a visit to New York, where he met with the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger (“my greatest friend and supporter”), the former first lady of New York State Happy Rockefeller (now deceased), and the ABC television broadcaster Barbara Walters, among others.62 Carr describes this trip more or less in the manner (to use Bourdieu’s terminology) of the oblate’s pilgrimage to the metropolis, a recapitulation of the picaresque progress made by Letty Fox and Carey’s own Tristan Smith. Carr’s experience in New York, as he records it in his published diary, embodies the basic situation of a Carey hero: coming face to face with the mighty by simply going his own way, he is both exhilarated and somewhat bemused. In the cosmopolitan contemporary arena, a gifted person from a peripheral culture can have intimate access to the centre. That Carr was in his mid-sixties when he made this momentous pilgrimage shows the great age of all his distinguished interlocutors, all of whom were at least octogenarians.

For some readers, Carr’s account of his trip might prompt disappointment. In New York, Carr sought out people who, however extraordinary, were not currently making policy, had no particular relevance to Australia, and did not represent New York even in their own generation, much less in mine or my students’. Since Carr’s portfolio was Foreign Affairs and Trade, he could have met with entrepreneurs or corporate leaders. His amateur enthusiasm for high culture has its virtues, and he is unusually literate for a politician, but in this instance it seemed to lead him to people who were already famous, rather than to those who had the potential to be famous in ten years’ time. Moreover, Carr could apparently find no younger people in New York who shared his values and his cultural sophistication.

The first oversight might reflect a wish for an uninflected arrival in the metropolis, a desire to see the Northern Hemisphere centres as stable and unaffected by neoliberalism. Perhaps Carr was yearning for an essential New York, one that Kissinger, Rockefeller and Walters represented. Perhaps Carr looked at younger people in New York and decided that they all represented various shades of neoliberalism, opportunism and self-interest; Kissinger, Rockefeller and Walters, in contrast, might have appeared as vestigial representatives of late modernity – of a world that, however affluent and conformist, was not relentlessly financialised and capitalised. Carr may have been seeking, in reverse, what I sought in Australia in 1985, what Coetzee glimpsed in an Australia he never fully got to see, and what Carey sensed in an America not yet irretrievably changed: a country where everything was not yet dead; today’s version of pastoral.

Peter Carey’s vision of America, after Parrot and Olivier in America, is far more tough-minded. But Carr’s pilgrimage to New York, with its mixture of nostalgia and veneration, delusion and panache, shows that a transnational voyage – whether by an Australian to New York, or a New Yorker to Australia – is never free from the threats of mischance, anachronism, and insufficient information; this is the cost of pursuing a largely personal vision. There are as many Australias and New Yorks as there are mentalities and temporalities. Carey’s awareness of this range of possibilities, and his rigorous self-interrogation, underpin the merit and acuity of his later work. He faces America as it has existed in his lifetime, even though it contains much that is dispiriting. Perhaps Carey felt, like Tristan Smith, or like Teresa Hawkins in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone, that he had come to the centre in order to speak. Whatever his reasons, he took on the behemoth from within. Through an ingenious and unflinching oeuvre, he has done so with integrity and honour.