Peter Carey: the two-time Booker Prize-winning author tells the story of a child of 60s radicals who have gone underground.

In Peter Carey's latest novel, His Illegal Self, a young boy comes of age during the militant radical underground of the early 1970s. Starting in Manhattan's Upper East Side, his journey ends in a hippie commune in Queensland with a woman who "had no idea of what Australia even was"--a fitting passage for the celebrated Australian author, who lives in New York and explores Australian identity, history, and culture. "We are still inventing our country," says Carey about his native Australia, once under British colonial rule. In many of his novels and short stories, he considers how the nation projects itself to the world and how, in turn, we perceive it (Newsday, 1/29/95).

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Far more than a chronicler of Australia, Carey is an unusually versatile writer whose influences include magical realism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. Casting a modern light on history, he blends the comedic, ordinary, and surreal while challenging readers' ideas of reality. "Faulkner's As I Lay Dying had an immense effect on me, and most of my novels bear the burn marks of this experience, those short chapters with their conflicting points of view, truth expressed by multiple perspectives," he says (Observer, 1/7/01). Carey plays with literary convention in Jack Maggs (1997), a spin-off on Dickens's Great Expectations, and explores nationhood, cultural identity, and social values in his two Booker Prize--winning novels, Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). (J. M. Coetzee is the only other writer who has won this prestigious award twice.) In all of his works, the down-and-out, the political, and the absurd coalesce into gripping fiction.

Australia was Carey's testing ground, and he knows this terrain well. Born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1943, Carey attended a prestigious grammar school before enrolling in Melbourne's Monash University, where he studied science--and discovered the 20th century's great European and American literature. After a year, he turned to copywriting for advertising agencies. For the next decade, Carey worked part-time in advertising in London, Sydney, and Melbourne and pursued his literary career. Although he had started three novels by the late 1960s, none were published. Influenced by Borges, Beckett, and Kafka, he published short stories in magazines and newspapers (collected in The Fat Man in History, 1974). In 1976 he joined an alternative community, Yandina, in Queensland--perhaps the inspiration for the commune in His Illegal Self--which allowed him time to write the fiction collected in War Crimes (1979) and Bliss (1981), his first novel. After he founded his own advertising agency, he continued to write; he published Illywhacker (1985) the same year he married his second wife, theater director Alison Summers, and then Oscar and Lucinda. In 1990, the couple moved to New York, where Carey joined Hunter College as the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. He continues to churn out best sellers, including the recent Theft (****, Sept/Oct 2006). Carey has been awarded three honorary degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Australian Academy of Humanities, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

THE FIRST NOVEL

Bliss (1981)

* MILES FRANKLIN AWARD; NATIONAL BOOK COUNCIL BANJO AWARD

Carey's first novel, a black comedy and self-conscious work of metafiction, offers an intoxicating inquiry into life, death, hypocrisy, imprisonment, and moral poverty.

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THE STORY: When 39-year-old advertising executive Harry Joy suffers a heart attack on his front lawn, he lies dead for nine minutes. After being resuscitated, he starts to understand his personal hell. The evidence? His philandering wife (cavorting with his business partner), his delinquent teenage children (selling sex and drugs), and his morally bankrupt career (supporting carcinogenic products). Soon, Harry starts to recognize the true nature of things and sets out to rectify past wrongs. But how many times must he die to find happiness?

"You will be won over by this tour de force. ... Bliss is a work of fiction that is extremely entertaining, and it remains so while it explores such rugged heights as moral responsibility, sin, atonement and the fear of cancer." JILL NEVILLE, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, 10/10/81

"If you wanted a one-line description you could say that it glitters, in a specially dark kind of way. ... The mixture of fact and fantasy, commonplace events extravagantly embroidered and parodies is the extension of carey's short story style." ELIZABETH RIDDELL, BULLETIN, 10/6/81

THE AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY

ILLywhacker (1985)

* BOOKER PRIZE SHORT LIST; THE AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD; NATIONAL BOOK COUNCIL BANJO AWARD; DITMAR AWARD FOR BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE FICTION; VANCE PALMER PRIZE FOR FICTION

Carey's 600-plus-page second novel was a best seller in his native land. Inspired by his grandfather's experiences as Australia's first mailman, Illywhacker symbolizes decades of Australian identity, history, attitudes, and culture.

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THE STORY: At the outset, Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator, lets us know that he's a charlatan and an inveterate liar--about everything except, apparently, his age. A teller of tall tales, Herbert recounts his life and the lives of those around him in Australia in the 20th century, jumping back and forth in time. The book's epigraph, a quotation by Mark Twain, sums up Herbert's adventures: "Australian history does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies."

"It's a big, garrulous, funny novel, touching, farcical and passionately bad tempered. ... The talk is bawdy, the jokes are throw away and rank, the sex is avid but democratic." HOWARD JACOBSON, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, 11/17/85

"It gives our vanities and failings a wholesome thrashing, but in the end refreshes our sense of human possibility. ... [A] huge and hugely rewarding second novel. ... Illywhacker is a triumph." CURT SUPLEE, WASHINGTON POST, 8/18/85

THE FIRST BOOKER PRIZE--WINNING NOVEL

Oscar and Lucinda (1988)

* BOOKER PRIZE; MILES FRANKLIN AWARD; NATIONAL BOOK COUNCIL BANJO AWARD

A satire about star-crossed lovers set in the 19th century, Oscar and Lucinda brought its author greater international recognition. As in Illywhacker, Carey reimagines Australian history--specifically, the introduction of Christianity onto the continent.

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THE STORY: On the boat over to Australia to found a ministry, Oscar Hopkins, an English Anglican minister and obsessive gambler, meets his match in Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who purchases a glassworks family. A gambler as well, the independent-minded feminist bets that Oscar can't transport a glass cathedral to the outback. A tentative romance blossoms as Oscar's gambling jeopardizes his career--and his promises take unexpected turns.

"In the end oscar and Lucinda seems to me impressive but imperfect, poised halfway between being a genuinely big book and a merely large one." JOHN GROSS, NEW YORK TIMES, 5/24/88

"Except for the fact that the book is new, it is every inch a 19th century novel. ... The pleasure of discovering [the Victorian era] is a little like opening a dusty trunk and finding an unpublished manuscript by Charles Dickens, but [the novel's] startling, unexpected conclusion is a reminder of the dark side of that repressive and over-sentimentalized time." GLENDA WINDERS, SAN DIEGO UNION, 7/3/88

MOVIE: 1997, starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett, and directed by Gillian Armstrong.

REIMAGINING GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Jack Maggs (1997)

* THE AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD; MILES FRANKLIN AWARD

Modeled after Dickens's Great Expectations but with a 20th-century, postcolonial flair, Jack Maggs explores class distinctions and conflict, corruption and the criminal underclass, and respectability in 1830s London. Most critics called the novel a worthy successor to Dickens's masterpiece. Despite winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Carey, citing personal reasons, declined to meet the Queen.

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THE STORY: In 19th-century England, the thieving Jack Maggs is convicted and deported to Australia's penal colony. He illegally returns to London, now rich, in search of an orphan boy--now a gentleman--who once showed him kindness and whom Maggs has since supported. When Maggs enters a wealthy household as a footman, he meets Tobias Oates, an adulterous writer and hypnotist who offers to help find Maggs's heir in return for hypnosis practice. Nothing, of course, goes as planned.

"Bringing together a motley throng of vigorously alive characters in a 19th-century London of pea-souper fogs and flaring gaslights, escutcheoned carriages in the West End and child-felons in the slums of seven dials, Jack Maggs is the most Dickensian novel Dickens never wrote. ... [Carey's] empathy with his characters, combined with his psychological sharp-sightedness, has them almost jumping off the page in full human complexity." PETER KEMP, SUNDAY TIMES (LONDON), 9/21/97

"Mr. Carey's great achievement here is to superimpose so many different levels of meaning onto this relatively straightforward story. Without ever descending into postmodernist boredom, he crafts a quintessentially postmodern tale." MARC CARNEGIE, WALL STREET JOURNAL, 2/4/98

THE SECOND BOOKER PRIZE--WINNING NOVEL

The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)

* BOOKER PRIZE; VANCE PALMER PRIZE FOR FICTION