Volume 51, Number 1 · January 15, 2004
Hall of Mirrors
By John Lanchester
My Life as a Fake
by Peter Carey
Knopf, 270 pp., $24.00
'The good ended happily and the bad unhappily,' Miss Prism informs her listeners. 'That is what fiction means.' Perhaps because that used to be so true, it nowadays isn't. The morality of most serious contemporary fiction is ambiguous, or elusive, or reliant on heavily discounting the views of an unreliable narrator. In literary fiction today you have to figure out who the good and the bad people are for yourself. One of the reasons for the wide appeal of Peter Carey's work is that it isn't like that: he always draws up a set of moral accounts for the reader. His last novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, has sold two million copies worldwide, making it one of the most successful literary novels in years, as well as one of the best. One of the reasons for its power is that it is so uncompromisingly on Kelly's side. The portrait of the outlaw has life and color and humor and tragedy and variety of tone, but it is not morally ambivalent: Carey sees Kelly as a good man and his enemies as bad, and the reader is not invited to disagree.
Review, 3484 words
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