New Peter Carey

[Richard Romeo]

Hi all you nabokovian freakoids

new peter carey zounds a bit like pale fire

In his remarkable new novel, the two-time
Booker-winning author Peter Carey creates a Creature
as indelible as Frankenstein.

In Melbourne in the 1950s, an arrogant young
Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to
teach his country a lesson about pretension and
authenticity. Choosing as his target the trendiest of
the literary magazines, he submits for publication the
entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working class
poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently
dead at twenty-four and entirely the product of
Chubb’s imagination. Not only does the magazine fall
for the hoax, but the local authorities also sue its
editor for publishing obscenity. At the trial someone
uncannily resembling the faked photograph of the
invented McCorkle leaps to his feet. At this moment a
horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being
he has himself manufactured.

Using as a springboard a real literary hoax that
transfixed Australia in his boyhood, Peter Carey
wickedly and ruefully explores how the phantom poet
taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker,
pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to a seedy, sweaty,
bitter ending in the tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur.
Inexorably the Creature steals Chubb’s life, eclipsing
him as a poet and a man. In a twist that is truly
devilish, Chubb’s own existence finally comes to
depend on the Creature’s “real” unpublished poems.

Peter Carey has composed a manic, endearing and
penetrating ode to fakery at its most truthful and
truth at its most fake, a novel that penetrates to the
heart of the alchemy of literature itself. 





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