Monday, November 10, 2014

Amnesia by Peter Carey – Hamish Hamilton - $40.00- Reviewed on Radio NZ National 10 November, 2014

Peter Carey  is of course one of Australia’s greatest novelists, being one of only three writers to have won the Man Booker Prize twice, JM Coetzee and Hilary Mantell being the other two. He won it in 1988 for Oscar & Lucinda and again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang and was also shortlisted in 2010 for Parrot & Olivier in America. He has also won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s top literary prize three times. And the Commonwealth Writers Prize twice, all significant achievements indeed.

It will not surprise me if Amnesia, his 13th novel, is short-listed for the Man Booker & other awards in the coming year. It is powerful stuff, funny and dark, fast-moving, terrific characterisation, Peter Carey at his very best I reckon.

It is his first novel set in Australia since True History of the Kelly Gang and it is set largely in the years since November 1975 when Gabrielle Baillieux is born in a Melbourne hospital on the day that the Governor General announces on the radio that he has dissolved Australia’s legally elected government led by Gough Whitlam. This event proves to play a major part in the book.

Gaby as she is called becomes one of several principal characters. Her story is being told by another principal figure, Felix Moore, “Australia’s last serving left-wing journalist” who has just been sued for defamation and ordered to pulp his latest book. He is a flawed and unreliable character but still with heaps of energy and an ability to write at a furious pace.
Gaby is raised by her actor mum, Celine, and her Labour party politician dad, Sandy. When she gets into major trouble with the authorities over computer hacking as a young adult, her mother, Celine, approaches Felix Moore, they were friends back in the 1970’s, to get him to tell to tell her back story and thus prove her innocence. The first half the book is written in the first person voice of Felix.

Woody Townes a wealthy property developer comes on the scene and he bails Gaby from jail and arranges for Felix to get exclusive access to her story and thus clear her name. Woody it transpires is also an old friend of Celine, thus his generosity. As Felix gets into his research we learn about Gaby’s grandmother and mother and about other significant episodes in Australia’s political history.

In the second half of the book Felix is replaced as narrator by a variety of voices that appear on interview tapes that Felix has been given to form the basis of the book he is writing about Gaby’s life.

I can’t say too much more about the book without spoiling it but I should explain that Gaby has a hatred of corruption and her misdemeanour is the releasing of a virus into the computers of Australia’s prison system which results in hundreds of prisoners, particularly asylum seekers walking free. And because an American corporation runs the Australian prison software security system American prisons are also affected by the virus and thus the CIA are seeking Gaby’s extradition to the US. It is a case of the cyber underworld colliding with international power politics.
The story is set largely in Melbourne and north of Sydney.

The book will delight Peter Carey’s numerous fans and I am picking it to be a worldwide best-seller over the next couple of months.


Although Australian he has lived in New York for the past 25 years and was home in Australia promoting his new book just last week. His wife is the British publisher Frances Coady to whom I notice he has dedicated this latest book. Coady was the founding publisher of Vintage paperbacks and Random House’s literary division in the UK. She also relaunched Granta Books and established Picador USA as a major literary trade paperback house.

Amnesia - Hamish Hamilton, NZ$40.00

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