2015 read #63: Illywhacker by Peter Carey.

Illywhacker by Peter Carey
600 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 4 to November 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

You wouldn't think it would take me two weeks to read a Peter Carey novel, but here we are. Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America was among the first of my new favorite books, barely two weeks into my vow to read more and to blog about it; I loved (was, in fact, "amazed" by) its "delightful frolic of language used well." Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which I read later that same year, didn't reach the same exuberant ecstasy of wordcraft, but the hardy eloquence and rough poetry of its vernacular was quite impressive. Illywhacker, Carey's second novel, published fourteen years before Parrot & Olivier, lacks much in the way of distinctive prose, relying more on shuffled timelines and unreliable narration to earn its modern lit cred. Where it fails, in my estimation, is in sheer length -- I think the damn thing just goes on too long.

The first 200 pages or so, if excised and allowed to breathe on their own, would make for a slim but outstanding novel following a small-time conman in 1910s Australia, a zippy through-line from the crackup of his airplane to his increasingly grandiose schemes to his rooftop love affair with his patron's daughter, Phoebe. The succeeding 200 pages are something of a step down, interest-wise, but seeing the conman and his new family scraping through the Depression by sleeping in a car and doing magic shows had quite a bit of potential. The final third of the novel is where it lost me, abandoning the energetic presence of its heretofore central character for the thicker, duller tale of his alienated son's reach for respectability in the international pet trade, and the sort of literalizing of domestic tensions (his wife Emma finds herself most fulfilled living in a cage!) that could be clever but more often feels silly and try-hard. Except that, in the end, it all ties back together (this talk of cages, mirroring -- I had essentially forgotten it before the last few pages reminded me -- Phoebe building a figurative birdcage for herself in the first third of the novel; it's actually quite clever) into some vast, inelegant metaphor for Australian dependence on and inferiority complex toward Britain and America.

If I had the energy for it, and could remember the earlier sections better, I could unpack something about what seems to be a current of misogyny throughout the novel, mostly Phoebe's scheming and Emma's cowlike placidity in the cages, but I don't recall how Carey's other novels portrayed women, and honestly I wouldn't know what to say about it beyond pointing it out before moving on.