FictionHere's my favourite anecdote about fakery. Around 12 years ago, while on a trans-Atlantic flight from London to New York, I found myself seated next to an exceedingly wiry, super-fit German gentleman who was wearing a large gold medallion around his neck.
When I inquired about this badge of honour, he explained that he had just won the London Marathon the day before. Being the gregarious sort that I am, I mentioned this fact to the air hostess the next time she passed by us. Not only did she bring this guy up to meet the pilots, but she also got him upgraded to business class.
Much later that night in Manhattan, my brain tingling with jet-lag, I found myself perusing the New York Times. And turning to the sports section, I noticed that yesterday's London Marathon had been won by a Kenyan. No German came second or third . . . though, as I later found out, all participants in the marathon did receive a medal.
There's a wonderful Yiddish word for such extravagant chicanery: chutzpah.
But though we all might publicly denounce such chutzpah-like self- fabrication, the fact is that we all have a secret propensity for fraudulence - especially as it is an essential part of the human condition to fantasise about the life not lived.
Of course, writers get paid to indulge in such extended reveries, which means they know more than a thing or two about the blurred frontier between the fictive and the real. Or, to put it another way, all writers trade in illusion and fraudulence because, after all, storytelling is an ongoing improvisation on the so-called truth.
Peter Carey's remarkable corpus of fiction is, on one level, endlessly obsessed with personal and communal reinvention. His native Australia might be his great subject. In novels like Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, he might have deconstructed national myths, not to mention the terrifying tabula rasa that is the external and internal Australian landscape. But dig just below the virtuosic surface of his work, and you see that he's also grappling with the way we are all the architects of our own fabrications, and how we must constantly tell ourselves lies to get through the day.
Which brings me to My Life as a Fake, Carey's newest novel, and an extended rumination on the way a lie is a truth that is a lie . . . especially when it comes to the business of writing.
At first, however, this cunning book appears to be a tale of literary London and of Sarah, a rather posh editor at a small magazine who follows an old family friend, "the poet John Slater", to Kuala Lumpur. Slater is something of an ageing rake ("such a Famous Crumpeteer"), and Sarah is in no way interested in a fling - but she has recently suffered a bereavement and he is offering an all-expenses-paid freebie, so . . .
But while wandering through the convoluted streets of Kuala Lumpur, she and Slater find themselves passing a bicycle repair shop, in which sits " a white man with ulcers on his legs . . . reading by the light of a naked bulb, 'Sonnet to Orpheus'". The fellow seems to recognise Slater. Slater all but blanches. But when Sarah asks Slater if he knows this curious man, the poet indignantly denies having ever seen him before.
"And that is really where the story begins, for it was clear to me that he was lying," Sarah tells us.
The chap in the window turns out to be a long-exiled Australian named Christopher Chubb - and he has a long and fantastic story to tell about his invention, back in the l940s, of a modernist poet named Bob McCorkle. And this is where things get wonderfully complicated - because Chubb's tale isn't just about pulling off a massive literary scam; it also blossoms into a courtroom battle in which the fabricated Bob McCorkle suddenly finds himself tangling with a very real Bob McCorkle, who soon turns out to be a true avenging Frankenstein.
But besides being the tale of Chubb's decline and fall, Carey's elegant and wily tall story (based on a famous Australian literary hoax of the 1940s) works as a sort of hall of mirrors, in which reality is constantly distorted, nothing is ever what it seems, and (most tellingly) just about everyone involved in the proceedings has also lived the life of a fake.
As always, Carey's prose is beautifully precise and perfectly judged. He also has this damnably enviable ability to build a heady milieu out of the sparest of details, and to reel you into his narrative web with crafty ease.
Which means you can read My Life as a Fake both as a brilliantly crafted and gripping excursion into the realm of counterfeit lives, or as a more probing reflection on the illusory nature of all told tales. Either way, it's a reminder that great fiction is a falsehood which somehow enchants and persuades.
Douglas Kennedy's most recent novel, A Special Relationship, has just been published by Hutchinson
My Life as a Fake By Peter Carey Faber, 266pp, £10.99