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Literature & Criticism (29)
Biography & Memoir (11)
Politics & Economics (3)
History & Classics (2)
Psychology & Anthropology (2)
Philosophy & Law (1)
Pooka
by Peter Carey​.
Faber, 328 pp., £15.99, September 1997, 9780571190881Show More
"... is 'by the author of Oscar and Lucinda'. It is in some respects unlike that novel, being shorter, darker and less furiously though still adequately inventive. Its economy may shock some folk, for PeterCarey is known to be an exuberant novelist, copious, various and fantastic. It is possible to admire his books for their lack of respect for boundaries, for the qualities they share with the work of ..."
Faber, 296 pp., £6.50, November 1981, 0 571 11769 4Show More
Exotic Pleasures
Picador, 192 pp., £1.95, October 1981, 0 330 26550 4Show More
"... When I started reading Bliss I hadn't read Mr Carey's first book, The Fat Man in History, though like everybody else I had heard the stories acclaimed in terms which made the prospect of his first novel very attractive. It is therefore both ..."
Phattbookia Stupenda
Nicholas Spice
Illywhacker
Faber, 600 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 571 13207 3Show More
"... slim. Not that its content is thin, but that its stories are so splendidly tall, making the fatness proportionate and proving again that longueurs have less to do with length than with pace, which PeterCarey controls like a master, thwacking his prose along with all the exuberant free energy of a boy thwacking a hoop with a stick. To Herbert Badgery – funny man, raconteur and compère ..."
Feral Hippies
Theo Tait: Peter Carey​ goes astray
His Illegal Self
Faber, 272 pp., £16.99, February 2008, 978 0 571 23151 5Show More
"... Queensland in the early 1970s was, according to the narrator of PeterCarey's new novel, 'a police state run by men who never finished high school'. This intriguing throwaway remark turns out to be not much of an exaggeration. For twenty years from 1968, Queensland was ..."
Principia Efica
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith
Faber, 422 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 0 571 17197 4Show More
"... Like his near-namesake, Tristram Shandy, the unlikely hero of PeterCarey's new novel begins the story of his life at the very beginning. While he doesn't go into quite as much detail about the moment of his conception, he appears to have a very clear memory of the ..."
Damaged Beasts
James Wood: Peter Carey's 'Theft'
Theft: A Love Story
Faber, 269 pp., £16.99, June 2006, 0 571 23147 0Show More
"... drawing to the authenticity of the authenticator, why shouldn't the final verdict lie with the buyer, who in a Stanley Fishy way has simply asserted his right to authenticate? Floreat emptor. Or as PeterCarey ends his new novel, 'How do you know how much to pay if you don't know what it's worth?' Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the ..."
Thomas Jones: Darwinians & Creationists
"... design theory is what it has in common with the teleological excesses of fanatical Darwinism: where one demands cause, the other demands purpose; both recoil from the random and the accidental. PeterCarey has deservedly won the Booker Prize for True History of the Kelly Gang. The WHSmith Book Award, continuing its flight from elitism, has renamed itself 'The People's Choice'. To have a go ..."
Australian Circles
The Tax Inspector
The Second Bridegroom
by Rodney Hall.
Faber, 214 pp., £13.99, August 1991, 9780571164820Show More
"... Both of these Australian novels describe circles. Carey, forsaking the confident historical sweep of Oscar and Lucinda and Illywhacker to focus once again on the horrors of modern suburbia, traces the vicious circles of a family history in which ..."
Thomas Jones: Peter Carey​
Faber, 352 pp., £16.99, January 2001, 0 571 20987 4Show More
"... as well could be'; when a traveller comes along, 'we took him in, and giv him to eat and drink, and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.' It is in pursuit of such myths that PeterCarey's Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack ..."
Forged, Forger, Forget
Nicholas Spice: Peter Carey​
"... Connecticut (which Tocqueville also visited), takes on the character of an éducation sentimentale for Olivier, a life crisis that pushes his intellectual concerns into second place. One can see why Carey had to ditch Beaumont. In background, temperament and intellect, Tocqueville's friend was too close to him to be much use to a novelist. Two broadly similar characters in the same novel won't ..."
Gravel in Jakarta's Shoes
Benedict Anderson
Generations of Resistance
by Steve Cox and Peter Carey​.
Cassell, 120 pp., £55, November 1995, 9780304332502Show More
"... � with crucial support at the outset from the United States, and later, to lesser extents, of the Governments of the big EEC states, Japan and Australia. The course of events is ably outlined by PeterCarey in the tightly-packed text that accompanies the grim pictures taken in 1991 by the courageous British photographer Steve Cox. No anti-colonial guerrilla resistance had developed in this remote ..."
Whitlam Fictions
Zachary Leader
Kisses of the Enemy
by Helen Garner.
Bloomsbury, 180 pp., £11.95, January 1989, 0 7475 0272 2Show More
Forty-Seventeen
by Frank Moorhouse.
Faber, 175 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 571 15210 4Show More
"... in 1973, by the Whitlam Labour Government, of the Literature Board of the newly-formed Australia Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now PeterCarey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from ..."
Margaret Walters
Oscar and Lucinda
Faber, 512 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 571 14812 3Show More
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 131 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 224 02553 8Show More
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
by Hilary Mantel.
Viking, 299 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 670 82117 9Show More
"... PeterCarey's Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it's a family history, and we're ..."
Humiliations
Michael Irwin
Collected Short Stories
by Kingsley Amis.
Hutchinson, 303 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 143430 0Show More
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 211 pp., £6.50, October 1980, 0 241 10447 5Show More
by Richard Stern.
Sidgwick, 151 pp., £5.95, November 1980, 0 283 98689 1Show More
Oxbridge Blues
by Frederic Raphael.
Cape, 213 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 9780224018715Show More
The Fat Man in History
Faber, 186 pp., £4.95, October 1980, 0 571 11619 1Show More
"... But if they can be decoded, does not the decoding dispose of them, explain them away? It will do so unless the vision is interinfused with common experience. In a sufficient number of these stories Carey achieves this delicate adjustment, notably in 'Exotic Pleasures' and 'The Puzzling Nature of Blue', but most notably in 'The Chance'. The future in which this story is set allows people ..."
Up from Under
John Bayley
The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories
edited by Murray Bail.
"... or even the British. That was the beginning of disidentification, and almost all the stories in this book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, PeterCarey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found ..."
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