After losing his umpteenth libel suit at the hands of the people who own Australia's mines, newspapers, politicians, and — it seems at that moment at least — judges, veteran journalist Felix also manages to estrange his wife and daughters and finds himself out on the street. He then gets shanghaied by his old college friend and party comrade Cecile into writing an apologia for her daughter Gaby, an environmentalist who has been arrested for computer hacking and seems to be at risk of extradition to the USA.

This somehow takes Felix back into the history of the "Battle of Brisbane" — rioting caused by the presence of large numbers of US servicemen in Queensland in November 1942 — and the Constitutional Crisis of 1975, which Felix sees as a coup instigated by the CIA and Rupert Murdoch to frustrate Whitlam's policy of closing down US bases in Australia. He contrasts the committed direct action of Gaby and her friends with the ineffectual posturings of the left back then, divided as it was between middle-class hippies (like Felix and Cecile), socially-conservative trade unionists and pragmatic politicians.

There's a lot of good stuff here about the evolution of Melbourne society in the 80s and 90s, and the running joke about the writer's ineffectiveness as an agent of political change is handled cleverly (and with a nice final twist), but Carey gets a bit too fascinated by the story of Gaby and her progress as a hacker, where he lets himself — or Felix on his behalf — be seduced by the jargon without really seeming to know what he's talking about. ( )

Enjoyed all the interactions between Felix and Woody, but for everything else, I got lost. For me, a bit too much noise. ( )

One of the most spectacularly mis-marketed novels of recent memory. Amnesia is supposedly about "the cyber underworld" and "international power politics." Yes. In much the same way that Pride and Prejudice is about the cyber underworld and international power politics.

Carey actually wrote a book that's metafictional in a tedious way (journalist is ordered to write a portrait of a cyber-terrorist type... said portrait is the second half of the novel... can we trust him oh no author is unreliable who would have thought it). He combines ultra-realistic characters with funny caricatures (always fatal for a certain kind of reader; the kind who once read E. M. Forster's bit about round and flat characters, and just assumes that all characters must be "round"). And then (here tolls the death-knell for my interest in the book), instead of taking those perfectly bearable ingredients and whipping up a good spy thriller, he (or perhaps that ever unreliable author) serves us... a teenage love story. I don't give any shits.

As I say, it's just possible that this is all meant to be metafictional, which makes it artistically and intellectually reputable: the journalist is separated from his wife, so of course he'll focus on the love story instead of the actually interesting parts of the story he's meant to be telling. And since Carey is just telling the story of the journalist, he has to tell that story, rather than the story that his readers want.

None of which makes actually reading the second half of the book anything other than tedious. Quite a shame. On the upside, it's very readable, and at least he's trying to do something interesting.

Oh, one small thing: Carey throws in a lot of Oz slang and geography and so on, and a lot of it felt pretty thin. Particularly thin was his reference to an Italian restaurant thirty kilometres East of Monash University. Carey went to Monash, briefly, but I went there for rather too long, and I assure you, if you are thirty kays east of Monash, you are in Port Phillip Bay, and nowhere near land, let alone any restaurants. ( )

I don't understand why people are down on this, I thought it was a cracker. First Carey I've wholeheartedly enjoyed for many years. I am only uneasy because it reads like a movie. When you can see the movie reeling along as you turn the page - it makes me wonder whenever I read a novel which seems like it's waiting to become a movie. If the author wrote the novel aiming for the screen is this okay? Are we reading a movie pitch or a novel?

If you want a book to read on a plane which is well-written, a nicely evoked picture of Australia starting at WWII and ending when children are computer hackers, stereotypical characters whom we all know - really well done, I thought - this is it. I won't read it again, but I'm glad I've read it once. ( )

I don't understand why people are down on this, I thought it was a cracker. First Carey I've wholeheartedly enjoyed for many years. I am only uneasy because it reads like a movie. When you can see the movie reeling along as you turn the page - it makes me wonder whenever I read a novel which seems like it's waiting to become a movie. If the author wrote the novel aiming for the screen is this okay? Are we reading a movie pitch or a novel?

If you want a book to read on a plane which is well-written, a nicely evoked picture of Australia starting at WWII and ending when children are computer hackers, stereotypical characters whom we all know - really well done, I thought - this is it. I won't read it again, but I'm glad I've read it once. ( )