Peter Carey’s latest view of our future is either ominous or optimistic. I’m inclined to the optimistic — good on ya, mate!
And how could I not read this novel, since the lead character is named “Felix”?
Felix Moore is an aging, cantankerous, left-leaning newspaperman, who is caught in the middle of an international computer hack, the “Angel Worm,” purportedly engineered by the daughter of an old friend.
He is “commandeered” into writing a biography of the young lady to try and help her escape both prison and expatriation to the United States.
First, Carey’s words are a colloquial and colorful evocation of Oz. Back in 1988, my wife and took a four-month sabbatical to Sydney, and, to prepare for it, I read an Australian history and some of its novelists. First on the list: Oscar and Lucinda, Carey’s 1988 winner of the Booker Prize, and that naturally led to reading, over the ensuing years, nine more of his works. I’m hooked.
In the 40 years covered by this story, Amnesia opens up a more complex Oz. I’ve been to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, walked their streets and beaches like Baudelaire’s loyal flaneur. I’ve strolled alongside the Yarra River, rowed and sailed on Sydney Harbor, chartered a powerboat on the Hawkesbury River, lived in Neutral Bay and Mosman.
The places in this novel recall many scenes. But it requires frequent checking of local state maps for Victoria and New South Wales: have you heard of Katoomba, Coburg, Rozelle, Wodonga, Pittwater, and Wiseman’s Ferry? I had to look them up …
And strange birds interrupt conversations: magpies (including a robotic one!), kookaburras, whipbirds, lorikats, king parrots, butcherbirds, pelicans and cockatoos. Sounds from trees, too. Australia is a noisy country.
Underlying this tale is computer hacking, “… a new type of warfare where the weapons of individuals could equal those of nation states.” Edward Snowden is the most obvious recent example, along with the Sony releases, following Julian Assange.
Carey seems to suggest that this may be the wave of the future. He shifts back and forth from the first to the third person, never uses quotation marks, and hits the reader with short, punchy chapters of two to four pages. And throughout is a latent skepticism of the United States and its continuing intercessions around the world. John LeCarre has also drifted in this direction.
He writes of the elusive and complex young woman hacker, “She was born into the Anthropocene age and easily saw that the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself.” The ominous implication — elusive, ubiquitous malware, worming its way into every nook and cranny of our lives.
On the other hand, can anyone or any state hide anything any more?
Oh yes, I did learn how to pronounce the name of Gough Whitlam, Australia’s prime minister in 1975. It sounds like “cough!”
The Economist thinks Amnesia may corral Carey a third Booker Prize this year, following Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. Read any or all of his books.
Editor’s Note: Amnesia by Peter Carey was published by Alfred A, Knopf, New York 2015
About the author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008). A 20-year resident of Lyme, he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction that explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there. For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farms Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His wife, Ann, is also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a bubbling village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visit every summer.