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CRITIQUE:

Gerald Murnane Meets Mad Max

I fell in love with Peter Carey's short fiction in his first collection, "The Fat Man in History".

This love affair continued to a slightly lesser extent with my first reading of "War Crimes".

Having just re-read the second collection, I wonder why I wasn't as impressed with it at the time. There is certainly much to love.

Struggling to define its appeal, my first reaction was to describe it as a cross between Gerald Murnane's "The Plains" and the first two "Mad Max" films. The latter analogy had occurred to me once before in relation to the story, "Crabs" (the source of the film, "Dead End Drive-In").

Status and Standing

The first story in this collection ("The Journey of a Lifetime") sparked the thought of relationships as a source of hierarchy, status, power and privilege.

The narrator is taking a train trip he's dreamed about and studied in detail for most of his adult life:

"It has been my ambition, my obsession, a hope too far-fetched for one of my standing."

Until this journey, he had to content himself with compiling scrapbooks of tickets, reservations, menus and other memorabilia of other people's train trips. Because of his standing, he was always at least once removed from a trip of his own. His standing distanced him from the pleasures (some of them exotic) of others.

The Nether Regions

The second story is narrated by the son of an official cartographer (cartographers are highly regarded as an elite in the story, like the Plainsmen in Murnane's novel). His father's job is to map parts of Australia, during the course of which he and other cartographers discover that parts of the country are disappearing. Soon, people as well as property start to dematerialise:

"It appears that for some time certain regions of the country had become less and less real and these regions were regarded fearfully even by the Cartographers, who prided themselves on their courage. The regions in question were invariably uninhabited, unused for agriculture and industry...

"There were long pieces of coastline which had begun to slowly disappear like the image on an improperly fixed photograph...

"As you know, the nether regions were amongst the first to disappear and this in itself is significant. These regions, I'm sure you know, are seldom visited by men and only then by people like me whose sole job is to make sure that they're still there.

"We had no use for these areas, these deserts, swamps, and coastlines which is why, of course, they disappeared. They were merely possessions of ours and if they had any use at all it was as symbols for our poets, writers and film makers. They were used as symbols of alienation, lovelessness, loneliness, uselessness and so on..."

Blue bird of paradise

The Genetic Lottery

One of two sci-fi stories, "The Chance", involves a genetic lottery set up on Earth by an alien race called the Fastalogians:

"So now for two thousand inter-galactic dollars we could go into the Lottery and come out with a different age, a different body, a different voice and still carry our memories (allowing for a little leakage) more or less intact."

The possibility of such a change starts to interfere with the relationship between the narrator and his partner, Carla:

"Even as I held her, even as I stroked her hair, I began to plot to keep her in the body she was born in. It became my obsession."

Still, Carla turns into a fat woman, and the narrator goes through his own changes (he becomes a homeless person):

"Pock-marked and ugly I have wandered the streets and slept in the parks. I have been bankrupt and handsome and a splendid con-man..."

Fabulist Twists and Turns and Conclusions

In the story, "Exotic Pleasures", the vehicle for the change is a beautiful exotic bird. The narrator and his partner experience such pleasure from stroking the bird that they start to question whether the two of them can experience mutual pleasure any more:

"You can't stand the sight of me having pleasure. You can't give me pleasure, so you're damned if anything else is going to."

From something as simple as a bird, Carey conjures a symbol of love, distance and lovelessness.

This story, like the others, demonstrates Carey's ability to take something normal, ordinary or straightforward, and subtly tweak or twist it into something abnormal, extraordinary or exotic that enhances our understanding of our own normality, and the normality or difference of others who might not be quite like us. Ironically, Carey's ability gives us enormous pleasure as well.


SOUNDTRACK:
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The Birthday Party - "Junkyard" [From the DVD "Pleasure Heads Must Burn"]



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