Review: Many writers become established professional authors. They write for a living, they publish all the time. A few, such as Joyce Carol Oates, currently keeping at least four publishers busy, are driven by surreal urgency. She publishes several books a year. Themes emerge and establish themselves as fixed and dominant, resulting in a body of work locked within a familiar territory. Dedication and a relentless need to tell shape such writing, which in itself becomes a labour, hardened and real.
Australian storyteller Peter Carey defies all of this, and remains, after more than 20 years and the tour de force that is Illywhacker, that most rare being: a natural writer whose work retains its elusive freshness and conviction.
Theft: A Love Story is his ninth novel and true to each of those books, as well as his non-fiction, it is graced by his effortless, free flowing often conversational, at times - as with True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) - colloquial prose, lightness of touch and his genius for evoking a narrative tone. Carey simply writes so well, balancing humour and profoundity, he makes reading easy - not that either his prose or his narratives are facile, he is as deliberate as Banville and stylistically less self-conscious.
Darkness has always been central to his urbane and witty yet curiously disciplined magpie vision. The Tax Inspector (1991), his finest novel in what is an outstanding body of contemporary fiction, is a sinister exploration of life lived on several levels. Jack Maggs (1998) is an inspired yarn as well as an atmospheric homage to Dickens.
Carey has always been fascinated by objects and the act of process, the ways in which things are made, whether it is glass, as in his first Booker winner, Edwardian melodrama Oscar and Lucinda (1988), or as with this new book, a painting. Theft is a comic picaresque, shifting between Australia, Tokyo and Manhattan that confronts serious issues such as compromise, truth, responsibility and moral choices.
In ways it builds on the themes explored in his previous novel, My Life As A Fake (2003), which looked at the nature of creativity through a narrative based upon a real-life literary hoax. Carey is alert to the prevailing deception that co-exists within the creative process.
Theft follows the adventures of an Australian artist, Michael Boone, nicknamed "Butcher Bones". "I don't know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been about as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard."
"Bones" is a character who has accepted life on the edge. Carey gives him a credible voice seething with good-naturedly barbed exasperation. Having been released from prison, a stay resulting from efforts to retrieve his paintings now unfortunately classified as "marital assets", Bones has been given a chance, not much of a chance, but still a chance, as caretaker of a country property for one of his wealthy collectors.
Although he has lost his small son in the divorce court, Bones does have a charge - "Hugh, my damaged 220-pound brother."
If it is another variation on the theme of art and artists; truth and deception, Carey makes this novel completely different from its predecessor. He is an imaginative original who always writes a different book.
Adding to the texture of what is a vivid narrative as delivered by a man who has been despatched as both husband and artist, is the unexpected use of a second narrator in the form of the aforementioned "damaged" Hugh "Slow Bones" who offers his version of events.
Old Hugh, a holy idiot with a difference, who early in the book becomes the grieving owner of a drowned puppy provides a mythic, near Shakespearean dimension that contrasts brilliantly with the somewhat more factual yet no less colourful reports issuing from Bones.
"We are Bones, God help us," intones Hugh. "We were born and bred in Bacchus Marsh, 33 miles west of Melbourne, down Anthony's Cutting. If you are expecting a bog or a marsh, there is none, it is just a way of speaking, making no more sense than if the town were named Mount Bacchus."
It is Hugh who outlines the family history: "The Bones were butchers." There are echoes of Ned Kelly's intentions to set the record straight. Hugh fills in the gaps left by his artist brother who tends to concentrate on the present dominated as it is by his succession of bad luck and his complex private life. "What then," he asks, "are we to do with my emotions? Should they be burnt or nailed up on the wall?. "
The spilt narrative is finely balanced, both brothers emerge as developed characters with distinct voices; when there is more than one narrator, the same events acquire layers of meaning.
Boone's career as a painter has entered something of a twilight zone, as his existing work is dragged into the divorce settlement and his future work no longer appears to belong to him. Enter what he refers to as "The Art Police".
Into all this suspicion wanders Marlene, the daughter-in-law of a long-dead famous painter and his now dead consort. Soon, Boone is in love and she, having abandoned her husband, appears devoted to him. Carey exploits the ambiguity of love as a human condition for all its worth and it adds to the chaos.
For all the energy and contradictions Carey never loses control.
Boone may be down but he has not surrendered. Nor is he a caricature of a failed artist, his thoughts may be dominated by notions of new love and its ambivalence, but he retains his grasp of exactly where his talent had led him.
His observations reveal a great deal about the reality of being an artist. "If you are an American you will never understand what it is to be an artist on the edge of the world, to be 36 years old and get an ad in Studio International . . ."
Elsewhere he muses: "artists are used to humiliation. We start with it and we are always ready to return to real failure . . . the destruction of our talent by alcohol or misery . . . Shame, doubt, self-loathing, all this we eat for breakfast every day."
In a further sequence Boone says: "We had lived not knowing that Van Gogh was born, or Vermeer or Holbein, or dear sad Max Beckmann, but once we knew, then we staked our lives on theirs."
It is Boone who when visiting a gallery experiences real jealousy on observing a teenage boy discovering art that he himself did not know about until he was much older.
The scam that the plot revolves upon is cleverly devised, yet there is far more to the narrative than the
yarn - itself a deception. A collection of plates are sent spinning and Carey succeeds in managing them all. The Boone brothers are united and separate. They both take action and make their choices. Nothing is easy.
Serious novels are seldom as funny and as realistic as this vibrant performance from a writer who makes words sing and equally importantly, always tells a good story within sophisticated, crafted fictions.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Theft: A Love Story By Peter Carey Faber, 269pp, £16.99
