The next unread book from my shelf was Illywhaker published in 1985 and shortlisted for the Booker prize. I have to admit that I felt like putting it back on the shelf during a bit of a slog through its 600 pages. Peter Carey is Australian and this is an Australian novel that rambles across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland and describes places such as Jeparit, Bendigo, Geelong and Terang and ending up in Sydney: Great names and I was curious to look up some of these towns on the internet as a theme of the novel is Australian identity.

An Illywhaker is a conman or a liar probably both and is a story told by Herbert Badgery who claims to be 139 years old. He is in hospital at the end of his life and reminisces about his life and times. We first meet him when he is 32 years old in 1919 landing his small aeroplane in a large lot or garden area and meeting Jack McGrath a wealthy former bullock herder. They become good friends and Herbert persuades Jack to invest in an aeroplane factory to make Australian aeroplanes. Herbert marries Jack's daughter Phoebe and the omnipresent narrator continues the story of Herbert's family and the people that fall within their orbit, most of whom are crazy, weird or both. Herbert's plan to make Australian aeroplanes fails because investors insist that parts and specifications must be taken from other countries: tried and tested rather than inventing something new. There are similar issues with automobiles when Herbert turns his talents to selling cars. Herbert's story of failures and catastrophes, of lovers and deaths barrels on across the Australian landscape. Herbert is cynical sometimes contemptuous, but never loses his lust for life. He keeps on keeping on, adapting and surviving in his own self centred way: he claims he wants to be a good person, but of course we do not believe him.

Peter Carey has written a novel packed with tall stories, told in Herbert's inimitable style and it is this style that for me outstayed it's welcome. Herberts jaundiced views dressed up in a sort of garrulous humour that looks down on other people even though the narrator takes the world in his stride, seems to belong to another era. I could not warm to it even though I appreciated that it was well done. it is a novel written to entertain, but it failed to hold my interest throughout its length and so 3.5 stars. ( )

Is this The Great Australian Novel?

Perhaps it's a bit too playful to aspire to such pretensions, but nonetheless it is an admirable attempt.

The book is often categorized as magical realism, due largely to events that could be (and probably are) entirely fabrications of the narrator: a disappearing act, an alleged Chinese sorcerer, and a mysterious Vegemite jar containing either shape-shifting matter or a rotting body part. Don't be dissuaded: there may be some tall tales told, and a fair amount of stunning coincidence, but the bulk of the book is firmly grounded out in the bush.

The novel follows ne'er-do-well Herbert Badgery and two generations of his children, spanning Australia's "coming of age" during the twentieth century. This is the Australia of Walkabout and Wake In Fright, rather than the lawlessness of Ned Kelly's day or the Mad Max franchise.

From the outset, the author informs us that he is 139 years old and that his word is not to be trusted. He then spins a yarn of his incompatible attempts to earn a buck and to foster native transportation industry in Australia ("we can make just as good a car or plane as the English!").

It is this latter character trait, more than the dusty squatter backdrop, that makes this book peculiarly Australian. Resentful of the English and distrustful of the Americans, the country is attempting to claim its birthright as a modern, industrial power, only to be domineered and exploited by the others. The ruling government and the dissident political parties prove helpless in the face of foreign capital: there is a muted call-to-arms for each citizen to make his own way as an independent Australian.

The narrator spends a third of the book in gaol. Mercifully (as jail stories get rather tedious), the author takes this opportunity to relate the maturation and success of his son, setting the stage for a third act in which the narrator returns and once again introduces casual upheaval into the lives of his loved ones. This lends the novel an epic tone, despite having a first-person narrator: we see Australia through the experiences of three generations of the Badgery family,and how their particular craftiness proves more or less fortunate in changing times.

A fun, engaging read. Perfect for the pending summer. ( )

G'day, g'day!
How ya going?
What do you know!
Well, strike a light!
G'day, g'day,
And how ya go-o-oing?
Just say g'day, g'day, g'day,
And you'll be right!
  —Slim Dusty

This is a novel about Australia: the souvenir-shop image of Slim Dusty records and tourist posters, and the romantic but gritty reality that underlies it. It is about how to separate the two: how to celebrate your own history without turning it into a cartoon or a travesty. It is, in short, about ‘the problems of belief and principle’ faced by three generations of proud Australians.

‘I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old,’ our narrator, Herbert Badgery, tells us at the start. ‘I am a terrible liar…My age is the one fact you can rely on.’ His being 139 is, of course, one of the least believable ‘facts’ in here, and so right from the beginning of this long, picaresque novel, there is an in-built lack of trust – an uncertainty which frees you up to concentrate on the emotional and symbolic value of what you're being told without worrying too much about its feasibility.

Just as well, because the plot at times feels like nothing more than a series of tall tales, shaggy dog stories, fireside anecdotes and family legends – albeit brilliantly told ones, because Peter Carey seems incapable of writing a boring sentence. Planes are crashed, children are conceived, narrow escapes are had. At first I thought it was brilliant, but I have to admit that the novel gradually beat me down from four stars to three-and-a-half. The problem is one of focus. There isn't one – or if there is, it's the whole country. The book rambles, and even our aged narrator does not constitute a central character for much of it – many sections do not involve him at all, and although the digressions are enjoyable I found myself wondering what exactly it was adding up to.

But perhaps this is my fault. Characters, central or otherwise, are not the main concern, and Carey tells us as much near the end, in a reference to one character's own literary exploits:

the real subject of Goldstein's work was not the people, but the landscape and its roads, red, yellow, white, ochre, mustard, dun, madeira, maize, the raw optimistic tracks that cut the arteries of an ancient culture before a new one had been born.

Illywhacker likewise takes us on a delirious journey through western Victoria, the placenames beating out a steady rhythm in a way that reminded me of the geographical romance of Kerouac's America: Ballarat, Bacchus Marsh, Jeparit, Geelong, not to mention wonderful sketches of Melbourne and Sydney. ‘It is not a country where you can rest,’ says one character. ‘It is a black man's country: sharp stones, rocks, sticks, bull ants, flies. We can only move around it like tourists.’

The book itself tries (like so many of its characters) to forge or identify some kind of authentic Australia. Its language is discretely shot through with regionalisms: wildlife like she-oaks and yabbies, people that work as cockies or bushies or rabbit-ohs, obscure references to mud-maps and kero and dunnymen, clichés like Akubras, fair-dinkum and dinky-di, surprising mundanities like ‘nature strips’ and ‘rear-vision mirrors’. Sentences like ‘the johns had sworn to massacre the swaggies if they jumped the rattler.’

In the early parts of the book, set in the 1910s and 1920s, this Australia is defined in opposition to England, and Herbert reserves his most withering scorn for fellow countrymen who still idolise the motherland.

It was what happened in this country. The minute they began to make a quid they started to turn into Englishmen. Cocky Abbot was probably descended from some old cockney lag, who had arrived here talking flash language, a pickpocket, a bread-stealer, and now, a hundred years later his descendents were dressing like his gaolers and torturers, disowning the language, softening their vowels, greasing their way into the plummy speech of the men who had ordered their ancestors lashed until the flesh had been dragged in bleeding strips from their naked backs.

But towards the end of the book, the enemy shifts to become multinational industry in general, and American investors (who ‘misunderstood our ironies and took them for firmly held beliefs’) in particular. Herbert and his family, struggling to turn their Sydney premises into a monument to Australian fauna, end up with something between a tourist attraction and a prison, funded by General Motors and owned by the Mitsubishi Company of Japan. Almost everyone involved ends up reduced to – in Carey's typically memorable phrase – ‘a skin-wrapped parcel of fucked-up dreams’.

‘I have not valued what I have loved,’ frets one character. To this extent Illywhacker is a cautionary tale. You can love your country to your heart's content, but giving it its proper value is an altogether trickier proposition. In a country founded on lies, maybe lying is the best solution after all. ( )

Because I didn’t like Bliss, I skipped ahead to Peter Carey’s first Booker Prize winner, Oscar and Lucinda, which I found to be excellent. So I was pleasantly surprised to go back to Illywhacker, Carey’s second novel (and the first nominated for a Booker) to find that it was also an excellent work – a funny, tragic, picaresque epic.

Herbert Badgery, Illywhacker’s protagonist and omniscient narrator, begins the novel by announcing that he is “a hundred and thirty-nine years old… and a terrible liar.” The story begins in Victoria in 1919 when he is thirty-two years old and engine trouble forces him to land his plane in a country field, where he meets the picnicking McGrath family. This chance encounter leads to his friendship with Jack McGrath, with whom he plans to open an aeroplane factory, his romance with Jack’s teenage daughter Phoebe, and the subsequent deaths, births, weddings, adventures and trials that follow – and this is just in the first third of the novel.

After reading Oscar and Lucinda I compared Carey, or at least an aspect of his writing, to Terry Pratchett – a sort of wry, witty sense of human nature and a dry way of dropping random information to sum up encounters between two different people. For example, when a self-important woman attempts to convince a policeman of her importance:

“My father was a Colonel McInlay,” she told the sergeant who had successfully conspired to shoot a major in Ypres.

There’s an element of Carey’s style which also reminds me of Michael Chabon’s, particularly in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, though I can’t quite articulate why. A sort of omniscient third person perspective that expounds upon the characters’ thoughts and feelings and futures, without ever seeming overdone.

For all the comparisons, Carey undoubtedly has a unique writing style. I particularly like his knack for imbuing Australian place names with a sense of fabulousness, admiring their innate lyrical beauty: Jeparit, Bendigo, Jindabyne, Geelong, Terang. (Perhaps this is part of why I didn’t care for Bliss, which takes place in city suspiciously like Brisbane which nonetheless goes unnamed.) Illywhacker covers more of Australia than any of Carey’s other books, rambling across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, and Herbert Badgery has an insight on everywhere:

I have heard people describe Bendigo as a country town. They mention it in the same breath as Shepparton or Ararat. These people have never been to Bendigo and don’t know what they’re talking about. The Town Hall is the equal of anything in Florence; the Law Courts would not look frumpish in Versailles. And if there are farmers in the streets, dark cafes with three courses for two and sixpence and, in Hayes Street, a Co-op dedicated to Norfield Wire Strainers and Cattle Drench, it does not alter the fact that Bendigo is a town of the Gold Age.

If Illywhacker has an underlying theme beneath its sprawling family saga, it’s the cultural cringe and the Australian sense of inferiority. At the beginning of the novel, a 32-year-old Badgery is determined to establish an Australian aviation industry; later, he becomes disillusioned with his job selling Ford cars, and rants against the Holden slogan, “Australia’s own car,” given Holden was owned by GM. When a guest at his wedding says “I could fancy I was sitting, at this very moment, in Paris,” Badgery says he was “so happy I could not find it in my heart to ask the old gentleman what was wrong with sitting in Melbourne.” He has nothing but contempt for the Australians who behave as Englishmen:

You would think Cocky Abbot a reasonable fellow until you met the son, and then you saw what was wrong with him. It was what happened in this country. The minute they began to make a quid they started to turn into Englishmen. Cocky Abbot was probably descended from some old cockney lag, who had arrived here talking flash language, a pickpocket, a bread-stealer, and now, a hundred years later his descendants were dressing like his gaolers and torturers, disowning the language, softening their vowels, greasing their way into the plummy speech of the men who had ordered their ancestors lashed until the flesh had been dragged in bleeding strips from their backs.

There are also elements of Carey’s light touch at magic realism – an adoptive Chinese father who teaches Badgery an invisibility trick, a priest who swears he once saw a fairy, a jar containing a severed finger which sometimes, to different people, contains completely different things. Badgery’s self-confessed liar status makes it difficult to tell what really happened and what’s just a shaggy dog story, but as Badgery warns on the first page: “My advice is to not waste your time with your red pen, to try to pull apart the strands of lies and truth, but to relax and enjoy the show.”

Illywhacker is a great, garrulous, tottering tower of a novel, which is much better than it has any right to be. Oscar and Lucinda is probably the better book, being quite a bit more tightly plotted, but both of them are brilliant: wonderfully written Australian adventures full of odd characters, magical landscapes and Peter Carey’s unique, beautiful prose. Illywhacker is a gem. ( )

This is my favourite book. It is like the mythology of Australia. The imagery and Carey's use of phrase stays with you. This was a long savoured read over my second pregnancy, taking me to magical places and a myriad of possibilities. ( )