peteg's blog - noise - books - 2017 02 05 PeterCarey Amnesia

Peter Carey: Amnesia. (2014)

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Kindle. This is his latest novel, from 2014. Again I scraped this from the Chicago Public Library, but probably would have been better off giving it a miss. Carey knows he's not in a position to write a great cuberpunk / steampunk / Gen Y novel and so pads it out with extraneous conspiracies and historical detail that he's far more comfortable with. Are all of Carey's male leads born in Bacchus Marsh? He stumbles into David Malouf territory by canvassing wartime Brisbane (specifically the Battle of Brisbane), and I didn't see the relevance of the Dismissal or Gough Whitlam's gastronomics, though love letters to the latter are always welcome. This is ethnic lit of the kind Nam Le derides, and is why I won't seek out more from Carey.

Structurally we have two men and a woman in the foreground, her daughter and the daughter's lover in the inner story. There's a touch of Assange-like hacker-god sexual deviancy, a nod to generics like Jackman's risible Swordfish. The foreground settings change regularly but pointlessly, and annoyingly it is about the same for the story the journo is charged with telling. The endless staving-off of plot progression saps the thing of tension, and we're often stuck most uncomfortably between verifiable fact and light fiction. The burning house evoked Manchester by the Sea. I'm bored by Carey's alcoholic normalism, and his descriptions are far weaker than those he managed for high art. He really shows his lack of chops when championing the Nintendo, so thoroughly rubbished by Clune in his memoir of 80s gameplaying. Zork is beyond anachronistic, and who has even seen an acoustic coupling modem? The main weakness is probably that he has nothing to say.