And Carey's own voice his driven, nervy, excitable dialogue, his appetite for names and things and physical presences comes through forcefully.

In Jack Maggs, Carey reads Dickens in order to produce a late twentieth-century story of equally pitiable isolation, of trauma, wounds, secrets and confessions. As with Carey's use of Gosse's Father and Son in Oscar and Lucinda (1988), or his bow to Sterne in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), this is creative, subversive pastiche. Like all the best parody, this is written out of a mixture of love and antagonism.īut we'd get tired of Jack Maggs, if it was just an exercise in spoofing. So the modern Australian novelist writes back against the great English novelist, and has his revenge on him. And in this version Maggs gets the better of his author and goes back to Australia to look after his own children and to lead a happy, successful and wealthy life. What Dickens will make of Magwitch is set against the alternative story of Maggs. But when he returns to find him, he meets instead the man who will become his author. Carey's convict, instead, deported for burglary in 1813, has made a lucrative career for himself as a brick-maker in New South Wales, enough to buy a house for the 'orphing' who befriended him. Carey upends Dickens's story of the convict who makes a gentleman out of the orphan boy who once helped him, comes back to take pride in him to the young gentleman's horror and dies a tragic death, all hearts at last softened towards him. Things that were suppressed or unspoken in Dickens homosexuality, illicit sexual passion, flogging of prisoners, the rape of child-prostitutes, the abortion trade are unsentimentally exposed in this rewriting, as are Dickens's colonial assumptions.

Eccentric minor characters rapidly appear and disappear.īut this is Victorian England with a difference. He gets exactly Dickens's effect of being in a phantasmagoric dream and yet in an overpoweringly real physical world. Carey's 1837 London, where most of the novel is set, is a brilliant Dickens pastiche, all 'sulphurous Corruption', glare and crowd and filth and dark corners, its buildings bursting with a violent life of their own.

Jack maggs by peter carey