Customer Reviews

Illywhacker

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Peter Carey seems to be a great literary secret -- hugely imaginative, immensely readable, a touch surreal, full of startlingly accurate insight into the frailties of humanity, and just plain funny -- but until I came to Australia I hadn't heard of him and his stunningly absorbing novels. His books are TERRIFIC.

Illywhacker is, on one level, a highly absorbing story about a born liar and showman and his varied life across southeastern Australia during the twentieth century. But on a deeper level, Illywhacker is a complex allegory about Australia itself, with interwoven and tangled images of cages, the uses and abuses of lying, Australia's search for itself vs. the UK and US, Australian animals, and Australia's simultaneous entanglement with and rejection of the Asian cultures with which it coexists. The result is a complicated, thoughtful, and even disturbing portrait of a maturing Australia that has made me reassess my own view of the country. Read Illywhacker! for the amusing liar's tale, read Illywhacker for the thoughtful commentary on Australia's national self-consciousness and insecurity -- but either way, read it!

Perhaps this is not the best thing that Peter Carey wrote, but that's not really saying much. Ah, Peter Carey, writing at length about Australia without ever resorting to cliches. If you are not Australian, I don't think you can really understand what a relief it is to read something like this about Australia. First of all, there is a nationalistic hero (nationalism and pride in (white) Australia is something so rare that the novelty is enough to sustain the entire book); secondly, the characters (including the women) are interesting and convincing; thirdly, I am completely homesick and this is so Australian; fourthly, he creates a new kind of poetry (new to me anyway). I didn't like the part about snake dancing, and the characters change too quickly (for example, Charles and Phoebe) and you kind of lose the thread. I like the way he dances about with truth, and I like the deep sadness about us losing our identity (whether or not it's true). I recognize a lot of the characters and the patterns of events from my own relatives and ancestors. I've never seen these things outside Australia, and you forget them, so thank goodness someone's documenting it all. This is so impressive if it's his first book. Read it.

I recently reread Illywhacker, and found it every bit as gripping, entertaining, and hilarious as on my first trip through the novel, over ten years ago. Crammed full of daffy but believable characters, remarkable stories, and useful details (how to transport a snake in a hessian bag, how to build your own airplane), this remains among my top-ten novels ever written.

Had Illywhacker been my first encounter with Carey, I would likely have enjoyed it more. But I've read Bliss. And Bliss is brilliant.

Carey is a great writer, but his editor was too nice with this one. This book could be half as long, without losing any of the characters, descriptions, or plot twists that Carey is capable of.

It starts off well enough, but there are blocks in which nothing happens, and it gets boring. I hate it when books get boring.

Also, the ending is far too preachy and doesn't seem to jive with the rest of the book.

There's another Bliss in there, but it's bogged down by an extra 200 pages that keep this book from really flying.

An enjoyable read, nonetheless.

I love this book. (I love Peter Carey generally, and especially here.)
Many of the reviewers have confessed a certain bafflement when confronted with Carey, both in this novel and elsewhere. This is not, I think, because his prose is stylistically off-putting, or his themes too profound or personal.
Rather, Carey's novels are constructed in an unconventional manner, and that novelty, I think, confuses: each of his many chapters serves as a floating, almost separate episode. The cumulative effect is less that of linked stories than linked prose poems. The reader does not feel caught up in a forward moving narrative, but instead awash, for lack of a better word. Sort of like Bruno Schulz.
Beautiful, beautiful, haunting, haunting.

I very much enjoyed reading this novel. The robust prose, the thoughtful characterizations, the bursts of poetry, and the sustained pride in being a (white) Australian were all fantastic. However, this book of 600 pages never really lets you care about the narrator, which grew more and more problematic. After so long, you want to feel more for the story-teller. I was, however, entranced by the sense of righteousness about being a white Australian, and found the treatment of racism towards Asians constantly provocative. At the same time, for a book so preoccupied with Australia, it was strangely devoid of Aborigines and their plight at the hands of Europeans. I also found the ending tacked on and hardly worthy of the gusto of the rest of the book. Nonetheless, a pleasant, fascinating read.

This is the book that introduced me, many years ago, to Peter Carey. I picked it up because I was intrigued by the title, because I was interested in Australia, and because I like long books. But I *loved* it because Carey knows -- as simplistic as this sounds -- how to tell a story. His characters are well drawn (from scoundrels to nutters to fools). His pacing is spot-on. His ear for language is superb. This novel is well worth your time. So many of the books I read are forgotten within days or weeks. I read Illywhacker years and years ago, but it's stayed in my mind all this time. It's that good.

Carey is an excellent storyteller, with a gift for witty juxtaposition and dropping plot bombs on his readers. We've all known someone a little bit like Herbert Badgery: "I am a liar. I am one hundred and thirty-seven years old." So it's a shaggy-dog story about a pathological liar who has a lot of charm and can lead people to believe exactly what they'd like to believe in the first place.

However, this book has garnered many awards, and wide critical acclaim, and I don't see why. Many people say it is symbolic of Australian culture and history. Perhaps I, as an American who hasn't even been to Australia, don't know enough about Australian history to fully read Herbert Badgery as a stand-in for Australia itself, or to catch the many historical references that Carey has probably hidden in the book. Yet my position is likely similar to that of most of Carey's prospective readers; he cannot assume a deep knowledge of Australian history from someone who is just picking up the book as a pleasure read. Maybe I will give the book another try, this time explicitly trying to dissect it as an analogy and as "great literature." Right now, I can only see it as a pleasurable and fairly simple read.

In summary, this is a highly entertaining novel, even if its headier aspects are lost on many readers. Carey is a long-winded storyteller, but a very funny one, and the interweaving plot of Badgery, his mythical airplane factory, and the people who surround him is engaging and humorous.

Illywhacker is an almost surreal novel and therefore has both strong and weak points. This 600-page decription of the Badgery clan is peopled by extraordinary, larger-than-life characters and touches onto very real themes and ideas - from the opening ("my name is Herbert Badgery and I am a liar") to the bizarre but poignant conclusion, Carey explores dozens of fascinating themes.

The only disappointment is the writing itself. Sometimes painfully difficult to read, it is mundane and long-winded, full of unnecessary passages and incidents. None of the characters are highly sympathetic, and the reader never feels involved in their lives. And while the themes concerned are almost all interesting, he dwells relentlessly on many of them and they lose their novelty.

A book not for the easily frustrated, it is so weakly-written and mundane that it is easy to lose sight of the originality and insight that lies beneath the surface.

Stunning masterpiece, and the best book written in the last five years. Herbert Badgery's life draws you in and doesn't let go. It's a book you hate to finish, with a typically bittersweet Carey ending.