Books
Frankenstein of Australia
by David Eggleton
Peter Carey’s new novel reconstructs another Australian myth.
MY LIFE AS A FAKE, by Peter Carey (Random House $49.95).
A voice hurls an accusation out of the darkness: “You never gave me a childhood … Can you imagine what it is to be born at twenty-four?” It sounds like pure melodrama, but Peter Carey’s new novel My Life as a Fake manages to conflate this fantastic premise with the realistic ordinary world and hold your attention all the way through to the startling denouement. My Life as a Fake is a cautionary fable about the magical ability of the imagination to conjure characters into being. It is the account of a poet who ends up imprisoned by his own creation – who becomes his Nemesis and ultimately his destroyer.
Carey, in the first instance, has obviously revamped Mary Shelley’s monster novel Frankenstein and shifted the locale to our part of the world, but he has also derived inspiration from a literary hoax that has become part of Australian folklore: the Ern Malley affair. Ern Malley is one of the giants of Australian literature. His portrait was painted by Sidney Nolan and his name is as legendary as that of Ned Kelly. But Ern Malley never existed. Ern was dreamed up by two anti-modernist Australian writers (Harold Stewart and James McAuley) during World War II to have some fun at the expense of a small but vocal homegrown literary scene that championed modernist poets such as T S Eliot and Dylan Thomas.
In the event the hoaxers targeted magazine editor Max Harris, who promptly trumpeted the rapidly composed “gibberish” they sent him under the name “Ern Malley” as “brilliant”. Then the pranksters exposed him as a dupe. The Australian tabloid press picked up the story and, misunderstanding it, gave it a media beat-up. In the resulting hoo-ha, Harris was prosecuted and sent to trial for publishing supposedly obscene verse.
It was an incident that had a profound effect on the course of Australian literary history and Carey retells the whole tragi-comic story in My Life as a Fake, only he reworks and revitalises it as a bardic battle of wills, blending fact with fiction, while also managing to take potshots at Australia’s “derivative … shallow … provincial … second-rate culture”. (“Australia is the country where a woman named Chamberlain was convicted of murdering her baby on the basis of no evidence other than her refusal to cry on television.”)
But Carey has larger and more subtle ambitions than mere sideswipes at bumpkin behaviour. As a string of novels has shown – most recently The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) – he is a reconstructor of myths: a retailer of Australian folk-legends distinguished by his own ingenious style of yarn-spinning. In his account, the Ern Malley affair is a springboard into an elaborate tale – stories within stories, secrets within secrets – of blood, vengeance and betrayal. There’s child abduction, Malay pirates and the last hurrah of British imperialism in South-east Asia.
In 1972 two Brits involved in the book industry, and holidaying in Malaysia, stumble across an elderly expatriate Australian poet holed up in a bicycle repair shop down a back alley in Kuala Lumpur. And, like the Ancient Mariner, he bails them up and proceeds to tell his life-story. Down on his uppers and clinging to the last shreds of his dignity, this is the marooned Christopher Chubb, perpetrator of the Bob McCorkle hoax (identical to the Ern Malley hoax) who, shunned by the local townspeople, has found that Bob McCorkle – the poet he invented – has become flesh and blood and taken his place and then become a heroic and admired character. Carey’s triumph is to make Chubb’s preposterous situation seem credible.
The tropical Gothic narrative expertly switches between 1940s Melbourne and 70s Kuala Lumpur, between 1950s Sydney and 80s England. We are convincingly immersed in the sticky heat of old Kuala Lumpur (with its simmering ethnic discontents) and in the steamy rain forests of Malaysia. Chubb tells of learning the deadly art of poisoning from a Tamil schoolteacher and of being tied up, then lashed to a makeshift raft and pushed out in the noonday sun into the middle of a fast-flowing river, with only a small lizard for company.
Eventually we discover that though he is indeed a man haunted by his past, so is everyone else in this novel – from the woman editor he narrates his story to (Sarah Wode-Douglass, a blue-blooded English aristo), to rival English poet John Slater, a leering predator (“One more old white man come to Asia buying sex”), to the foppish David Weiss (Carey’s version of Max Harris), to Mulaha (Tamil schoolteacher and self-taught poisoner). Then there’s Sydney socialite Nousette Markson, and of course Bob McCorkle, desperate to escape his destiny.
Carey gives voice to them all in order that they might emote, for perhaps his greatest strength is the self-confident evocation of the rainbow of emotions – anger, hatred, love, jealousy – displayed by his characters. Providing individual voices, Carey comes on like a one-man Circus Oz: the tightrope walker, the acrobat, the magician, and above all the ventriloquist.
Page 1 2 
