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.

Not going to lie, it took me a while to read this but it was worth it. It's a story of a man's life, plain and simple, mistakes and joy, life and death. It's beautiful but I had to slow down to really appreciate it, it's not a binge read book.

I really had mixed feelings about this book, hence the rating.
I THOROUGHLY enjoyed the first half, and during this time I laughed out loud during several occasions, and 'whooped' a few times at the fluidity of the prose...some sentences really got me. They were so well-placed, albeit melodramatic at times, that I had the dogear the page, as is my habit.
I enjoyed the exploits of the main character, and his relationships with Phoebe and Leah Goldstein, and the way their stories became fused with his own, at least for the first half.
The second half was devoted to the story of his son and then even later his grandson, and it ends with a very bleak future for the family; everything that was golden for this family is vanquished. My compassion for the characters changed to neglect, but I was more hurt by Carey's treatment of the Badgery's, and especially Leah's relationship with Herbert.
It didn't have to be this way! It was such a ride, for it to fall off like that hurt.

Okay, I enjoyed this book, I liked the characters but as read further into the novel, I found myself wanting more of Herbert Badgery's story. About three quarters of the way, I get bogged into a whole heap of characters that I neither cared about or want to know. I was intrigued by Herbert and I found this massive slab of his story just disappeared as I was taken along to the story about his son and then grandson.
Parts of the book moved into the surreal with people living in cages and just decaying away before our eyes in their own madness.
The opening part of this book gripped me and I really thought I was going to be taken along on the greatest ride by a great Australian con-man but I only half got that story.
It will not stop me reading more Carey because I do enjoy the topics he tackles.

SUMMARY - I recommend making the cake, but despite Carey's beautiful writing, this early novel makes a bit of a meal of it.

Like 139 year old self-confessed liar Herbert Badgery whose journals form the tale, 'Illywhacker' itself felt like it went on twice as long as it might. This is a big and baggy story that continually segues into other lives. The histories interlock and loop, with some precision lathe-turned phrases, but words mount on words like the jerry-built 4+ storey emporium of Book 3.

Like a tall tale told in an outback bar, the yarns multiply. We are told up-front by Herbert Badgery that little is true, yet are forced to rely on him as our only witness. It is Badgery's journals that we are purportedly reading, and I did like the scene late-on where Leah angrily adds her drunken counter-testimony to the pages. Elsewhere we see vanishing men, dismembered fingers turning into dragons/foetuses, and a closing scene that is both incredible, and potentially a truer damning indictment on how western families treat the old.

Was this magical realism? It felt similar in some to Rushdie's work, and to Keri Hulme's Kiwi 'The Bone People' (which won the 1985 Booker Prize on the same shortlist as Illywhacker). Or was it a tale of self-deception by an old man claiming some omniscience to the thoughts of his fractured and dysfunctional family?

I would normally prefer a tighter compass for action, and a stronger sense of moral- and psychological-relatability than I found in Illywhacker. For this reason, anyone who likes more metaphorical narratives with blurier edges is quite likely to disagree with me, and wish the book were longer. There is depth to Carey's writing, with an extended play on themes of animal-human freedom, with Australia's fauna made emblematic of a fierce and unpredictable independence of spirit. The Americans are speered by Badgery as money-rentiers, and the Brits as slimey two-faced exploitative snobs. Because the book was so long, these themes could simmer in the stew and develop a fuller flavour, even if in my case my belly started to ache for an ending.

Another theme throughout - linked to that of the wild independence of the Australian nation - were the multiple sketches of entrapment in the world of eccentric (human) others. Rarely does anyone get their own way, and most end up ensnared in the prison of their own relationships. Phoebe is perhaps an exception, but it's not a book that offers warm views on most family relationships. In Carey's world, home often stiffles but escape is rarely possible.

One last word: about butter cake. I saw it mentioned, tried a receipe, and it is *delicious*. Basically it's sponge, but lighter than most cakes I tend to make. It's also wonderfully quick, so if you haven't got time for Illywhacker, then I can certainly recommend butter cake.

He writes some weird stuff. If you like Moorcock, you'll like Carey.

Boy, it's been kind of gloomy around here recently, hasn't it? What with unanticipated abridgments, disorganized Englishmen, and lukewarm responses to historical fiction, things have looked rosier. But here, my friends, is the antidote: Peter Carey's rollicking Australian epic Illywhacker is robust and uproarious - a chewy, stew-like story you can really sink your teeth into, and which also offers a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of lying and the truth.

I've written before about how I would cheerfully devour a phone book if Peter Carey took it into his head to write one, and Illywhacker is no exception - although it is different than the other Carey novels I've read. It doesn't have quite the focused incandescence of Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, or the obsessive surreality of My Life as a Fake. Instead, it follows a John Irving-like model of sprawling, character-driven, oddball family saga: a portrait of three generations in the quick-tempered and bandy-legged Badgery clan. Narrating the tales of his progeny and their hangers-on is the 139-year old patriarch Herbert Badgery, an exuberant liar who has yarned, belched, strutted and cajoled his way through the Australian countryside over more than a century. Badgery is the archetype of the charismatic con-man, and Carey depicts him masterfully: we observe, at once, his flatulence and grime, and also his grand dreams of love and aviation, of starting an Australian airplane factory, of building a rambling mansion for the woman he loves. He's simultaneously crass, cynical, and grandly ambitious, and, somewhat predictably, gets his heart broken at least as often often as he breaks the hearts of others. Possibly most important, he's a freewheeling unreliable narrator, telling the reader on the first page, "[M:]y 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."

Apart from his masterful control of sentences and paragraphs, one of the most interesting things about Peter Carey is the complex morality in his novels; all of the four that I've read so far have interrogated the relationship between lying, storytelling, and the truth, and come to complicated conclusions that can't readily be summarized. Mid-way through Illywhacker, Badgery (sort of) wins and then (kind of) loses a puritanically honest woman named Leah Goldstein, of whom he eventually and unexpectedly makes a lying addict. After they are separated, she spends years upon years faithfully writing to him, creating letters which are almost complete balderdash:

Later she would think of these months, when she helped her friend die, as one of the most important times in her life.



But she wrote not a word about it to me. Instead she described long walks with Rosa along the clifftops to Tamarama. She did not date these walks, but the impression given was that they had happened an hour or a minute before, that Rosa sat across from her at the kitchen table, drinking fragrant tea. They were beautiful letters, bulging with powerful skies and rimmed with intense yellow light. Every blade of grass seemed sharply painted, every word of conversation exact and true. Perhaps these things had once taken place. Perhaps she invented them. In any case they gave me that electric, unnatural mixture of emotions that every prisoner knows, where even the best things in the world outside become slashed with our own bitterness or jealousy. This confusion of love and hurt is very powerful. I came to crave it even while I dreaded it. It is a more potent drug than simple happiness.

...

There was a time, when I finally learned the truth, that I could have killed her for her deception, to have made me feel so much about what revealed itself as nothing. I will tell you, later, how I got on the train with my bottle and my blade. But when I think about her now I cannot even imagine my own anger.

Another word for "lying addict"? "Accomplished fiction writer." When he learns that the lovely world Leah created for him is a lie, Badgery is faced, on a more dramatic scale, with the feelings we all have upon finishing a fantastic book: loss and grief for a world he believed in. Leah has written herself through a gauntlet of lies and somehow become a novelist - and also, argues Badgery, a fully fledged Australian citizen. For, as Carey has his famous fictional historian MV Anderson relate,

Our forefathers were all great liars. They lied about the lands they selected and the cattle they owned. They lied about their backgrounds and the parentage of their wives. However it is their first lie that is the most impressive for being so monumental, i.e., that the continent, at the time of first settlement, was said to be occupied but not cultivated and by that simple device they were able to give the legal owners short shrift and, when they objected, to use the musket or poison flour, and to do so with a clear conscience. It is in the context of this great foundation stone that we must begin our study of Australian history.

Together, these two passages paint an impressively complex view of lying and storytelling. On the one hand, Badgery spends the entire novel fighting for Australian pride - for Australians to invest, for example, in Australian-made cars and airplanes, rather than importing British and American models thought to be self-evidently better than anything "we" could make. He rails against the colonial inferiority complex that motivates many Australians of his day to truckle to the British crown. And so, recognizing that lying and tall-tale-telling are an integral part of his Australian heritage, he embraces them with unmitigated exuberance. I couldn't help loving him for it; the charisma of his voice is intoxicating. On the other hand, though, a big reason that lying has become a national pastime for Australians (and, I might add, Americans) is both shameful and essentially BRITISH: the foundation stone of British colonization in both places was a huge, convenient deception about whether the land they took was already being used. So Badgery's mode of protest against the British turns out to originate with them, and his recommendation to his readers not to look too closely at the truthfulness of his own stories mirrors the cavalier disregard with which they invaded continents and invented the convenient fiction that they had "discovered" them.

But while the lies of Badgery and the British colonizers are largely selfish and convenient, however attractive they may seem, Leah's fictions are a more complicated matter. It doesn't directly benefit her to provide Badgery with false images of a beautiful life which she is not really living. It provides a bit of escapism for her, crafting these letters in which everything she wishes is made true, but it also accentuates the gulf between what she wants and what she has. Whatever results her actions have (and there are both positive and negative repurcussions), her primary motivation, arguably, is kindness. It's painful to Badgery to learn that (almost) everything he believed about Leah's life is a lie, but he's such an inveterate liar himself that it's hard to pity him too much. And if we condemn Leah, what to make of our own decision to pick up Peter Carey's Illywhacker? Of all people, isn't Herbert Badgery, con-man extraordinaire, ASKING to be conned himself, just as we readers of fiction are when we crack open his book? After all, it was Badgery who taught Leah to lie in the first place. Not to mention that through her lies, she manages to demonstrate truths: the truth that she loves Badgery, and that she wishes things were different.

Without giving too much away, I'll just say that toward the end of Illywhacker all these intersecting threads of lies and counter-lies, of the personal versus the national, take a disorienting and eerie turn. I don't pretend to have tracked them all; as Badgery says in the novel's opening, there comes a point when it's best to just sit back and enjoy the ride. And enjoy it I did, thoroughly and completely. Carey has yet to disappoint.

This is a big and strange book - a national epic, you might say. I’ve taken to describing it as being Australia’s ‘Midnight’s Children’, which is about as accurate as you can really get without actually saying anything about it. There probably isn’t, in reality, anything as tidy as the Great Australian Novel (and Illywhacker certainly is anything but tidy), but this should take a prominent place in any discussion about the theoretical G.A.N., since its massive enough and disgusting enough and honest enough and beautiful enough and surprising enough and weird enough to represent its country as well (or better, even) than any other.