A Long Way From Home

By Peter Carey

Faber: £17.99

Review by Alan Taylor

WERE Peter Carey ever to retire from the business of writing fiction and take to the stage he can count on making a decent living as a ventriloquist. Among modern novelists, he has an uncanny ability authentically to adopt the voices of a multitude of characters and make them his own. This has been apparent from the start of his career, in novels like Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar And Lucinda and, most pungently, True History Of The Kelly Gang, which made him a double-Booker winner. Though he left his native Australia for the United States decades ago, it has remained the source of his inspiration and ideas, a nation of immigrants and outcasts, misfits and miscreants, teeming, multicultural metropolises and a vast and more or less empty outback where kangaroos easily outnumber the human population.

A Long Way From Home, however, breaks new ground for Carey. Here he is at least in part concerned with Australia’s dispossessed and maltreated indigenous people, the “blackfellahs” as one of his loquacious narrators describes them. That it has taken him until his eighth decade to get round to considering them in his work is indicative of the degree to which they have been marginalised. Until relatively recently Aborigines were simply not considered part of Australia’s narrative. That belonged to the colonisers, who were too busy taming the wilderness and recreating what they’d left behind to bother about those they had displaced and transformed into pariahs.

It would be misleading, though, to suggest that Carey’s latest novel is a manifesto in disguise. He well knows that the novelist’s primary job is to entertain and in this regard he fulfils his brief to the letter. The era is the 1950s, the decade of his boyhood. The setting, in the beginning, is the backwater town of Bacchus Marsh, situated about 40 miles north-west of Melbourne, which Carey fans will know as the author’s birthplace. Like many such towns, it owes its existence to the usurpation of the Aboriginals. Carey’s father had a garage and held a dealership for General Motors, all of which experience the writer mines in A Long Way From Home.

Titch and Irene Bobs, the parents of two children, have aspirations to become Ford dealers. Like Updike’s Toyota-obsessed Rabbit, Titch is ambitious and entrepreneurial but not one of the brightest sparks on the planet. However, while he may lack business savvy he knows his way around cars and petrolheads will revel in the passages in which Carey salivates over a Citroën Light 15 – “a lovely piece of engineering” – or a Jaguar XK120 which, this non-driver must accept, was “a thing to die for”. Alas, his hopes of the Ford dealership are dashed and he must make do with down-market Holdens, which are manufactured by General Motors.

But not for nothing is Titch regarded as “the best car salesman in rural Victoria” and to advertise his new venture he enters himself and his wife in a road race, the annual Redex Reliability trial, which involves an 18-day, 10,000 mile long trip round the entire continent. It is a gamble, in which the ever cautious but compliant Irene tells us she becomes involved with reluctance. It is her bottom, apparently, which she says makes her such an essential addition to the team, something doubtless to do with how she sits at the steering wheel. But while she and Titch will share the driving, they are deficient in one major respect; neither can read a map.

Thus is conscripted Carey’s second narrator, Willie Bachhuber, a fact-guzzling geek who reads Burckhardt’s Civilization Of The Renaissance In Italy for fun. When first we meet him he is the resident egghead on a dodgy radio quiz show. In due course he will be elbowed aside by his girlfriend, the lubricious Clover – she of the “tennis player legs” – and, having lost his job as a teacher, he has little option but to join the “Bobbseys” as their navigator. The son of a Lutheran pastor with a Nazi brother, his German past is ever present, as is that of his adopted country. More than anyone, he knows Australia’s egregious history. “Bachhuber,” relates Irene, “said families had been forced off cliff tops, gunned down, babies brained with clubs. At Goulbolba, more than 300 people had been shot or drowned, which was called a ‘dispersal’.”

This is grim stuff but it is contrasted with comic exuberance, biting Aussie humour and Carey’s elastic way with language. The Redex is the means by which Carey, like the explorers Lewis and Clark in the 19th century, unveils hidden and forgotten Australia. It is an exhilarating and bumpy ride though not without its longueurs. We learn perhaps more than we need to know about the Redex’s stringent rules and the innards of cars, fascinating as they doubtless are to those who are interested in such things. But what does not pall is Carey’s ability to put the reader into the passenger seat with the Bobs and Bachhuber. There is a sense of venturing into virgin territory, of a country opening up, of a reckoning, of long overdue discovery.