Australia

Abstract

Following the success of his Booker Prize winning True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey has turned his pen to another Australian myth. This time, and from a distant home in New York, Carey turns to the socalled ‘Ern Malley Affair’. One of the most talked about literary scandals in Australia, Malley has become central to an understanding of literary modernism in the country. His poetry was hailed as a literary sensation by the avant-garde art group of the time, the ‘Angry Penguins’. Yet in 1944 their author was exposed as a fake; the Angry Penguins had been subject to a hoax. James McAuley and Harold Stewart wanted to expose the pretensions of modernist writing. Yet even after such an embarrassing controversy, editor Max Harris continued to claim that Malley was one of the greatest poets of the day, real or not. The poetry even went to trial, as Harris was charged with publishing obscenity and was forced to defend the material designed to embarrass him! The issue had great impact in a young country still insecure about the place of its art in the modern world. By defending the imitation, Harris symbolically defended the right of the periphery to make true objects of art in styles that were determined by the centre. Carey’s new novel, My Life as a Fake, condenses the hoaxers McAuley and Stewart into the one person of Christopher Chubb. What follows is a complex narrative set in the jungles and alleys of Malaysia, in which the editor Sarah attempts to track down the real author of the verse that Chubb has given her. This author then comes to life in a stroke of Carey-style magical realism. The blustering Bob McCorkle rampages on stage and the novel is never quite the same again. Carey quotes Mary Shelley in the novel, and evokes the creator and monster of Frankenstein in the duo of Chubb and McCorkle. Australia