Kindle. Kate recommended this one to me after I told her I'm not a fan of Carey. I have vague memories of abandoning Oscar and Lucinda after the first 100 or so pages; perhaps I extracted it from mrak's Ashfield abode a long time ago. Ah yes, I did read Bliss. The Chicago Public Library had the ebook of Theft, and I was glad to find that my membership still works.
It is indeed an agreeable read, putting me in mind of Patrick White's The Vivisector and David Malouf's Harland's Half Acre that I read too long ago. (Here is Andrew Reimer expressing similar sentiments about Malouf, and Patrick Ness relating this book to a few of White's.) Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Carey owes something to these predecessors, given he published this in 2006. Fundamentally these are all riffs on class and how art of all forms is somehow a weird conceit in this country; it seems that all Australian painters come from rough stock, and their art grants access to women and places otherwise denied to the likes of them. Carey goes to extremes with location specificity, naming streets, pubs, creeks, dating a place by the arrival of refrigeration and the presence of wonder (here in the patriarchal butcher). I liked the jag up to Bellingen but Japan and New York struck me as superfluous. The perspective switching between the first-person narration of the two brothers works well; Hugh in particular is a reactionary voice from an almost-extinct Australia. Marlene is from Benalla, for which I retain a soft spot. I have no idea if their high school was ever burnt down, let alone by a gamine.
The language here is completely unaffected, with both brothers trying to act normal, and the artist anti-snobbily refusing to dumb down technique and palette. Bacchus Marsh is where Carey was born, says Radhika Jones. James Wood.