Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tracks of the cat, March 20, 2001
This review is from: Jack Maggs: A Novel (Paperback)
Jack Maggs arrives in London carrying a dark secret in his baggage. He's escaped the ferocity of Captain Logan's Moreton Bay penal colony. Maggs also carries evidence that Logan inflicted more whippings than any other camp commandant in the colony. His back betokens applications of the "double cat". Invented in Australia, the multi-stranded lash was used to discipline the lags. If caught, Maggs'll immediately be hanged, but his quest overcomes his fear of the noose. He's seeking someone important in his life. But fate throws impediments in his way. Among them is Peter Carey's appropriation of Charles Dickens as an investigative journalist. Carey's engrossing story is his finest effort. He's created a character that only an author imbued with accounts of transportee [convicts, lags] travails could achieve. The Australian penal colony system was the antithesis of our concept of Victorian morality. Escaped prisoners were rare in Australia - there was nowhere to go. A lag returning to England was unheard of. In any case, the character of every lag underwent a change. They became two people; one the Englishman of a previous life and the other the result of the dehumanizing conditions suffered in that remote continent. Carey captures that duality with finesse and ardor. Driven by his quest, Maggs must adopt a servant's mien, even as his past experiences and cunning born of survival places him above the devious people he encounters daily. He has, after all, been sent to Australia, not for his crimes, but through an unparalleled act of self sacrifice. Maggs must mentally dodge and weave, moving between the worlds of Percy Buckle, Tobias Oates and the street urchin he was before being sent across the seas. Carey's fashioned a tormented figure set in the chaotic venue of 19th Century England. Equating Carey with Charles Dickens is misleading. Dickens was an investigative journalist turned novelist. In a later age, Theodore Roosevelt would brand such people "muckrakers". Carey's isn't reporting what he's observed, driven by championing the poor Dickens divulged to his Victorian readers. Carey's account is pure fiction, no matter how many real characters and true life conditions he imparts. His creative qualities quite set him apart from Dickens. Simply setting this story in mid-19th Century London doesn't limit it to a Dickensian framework. Dickens, his outlook confined to the British Isles, couldn't have written this book. Carey's Australian background brings subtle nuances to Jack in his characterization. It's unlikely that any Anglo-American author could impart the moods Carey achieves in his portrayal of Maggs. This book is a true prize.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good read., February 7, 2001
I always expect the same things from Peter Carey novels: great characters, poetic language, and an imaginative premise. Jack Maggs delivers on each of these. His protagonist is a criminal with a painful past, but a good heart -- not exactly original, but Carey brings such life to his creation the reader can feel Maggs' presence on every page. His pain is a real thing, and drives the novel. It's also interesting to watch him enter the lives of a few ordinary Londoners, and change their paths, and even their personalities, simply by virtue of his presence. Tobias Oates (intended as a fictional Charles Dickens) is also very well developed, and very human. Carey has a talent for making his characters capable of both good and evil, and by the novel's end, it's difficult to pin any of his cast as either heroes or villains. While this novel is based on a character in Charles Dicken's Great Expectations, I think its unfair to compare the two books. Jack Maggs is not a Dickens rip-off: the characters, the voice, the language, the humour, are Carey's own. There has been an attempt by Carey to sketch a London similar, in spirit, to Dickens', but this is a book with its own emotional centre, and it stands on its own. After reading some of the reviews here, I was surprised to find that the novel did not drag, and that it quickly became a page-turner. The plot steadily builds, with several well-placed and effective twists to keep things interesting (and unpredictable). Carey has managed, again, to lead me into a climax I could not predict, and while the scene had incredible potential, I think it lacks. He seems to rush through it. This is not Carey's best novel (see Bliss) but it is very good indeed, and worth reading if only for Carey's incredible use of the language, which is economical, poetic, and poignant, and also for the characters, which in many cases rise above the subject matter.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The father of Dickens, January 3, 2001
This review is from: Jack Maggs: A Novel (Paperback)
Peter Carey thinks that, because Charles Dickens developed so many of his memorable characters from real life sketches, the convict Jack Maggs from Great Expectations must have had a non-fiction antecedent. He turns this conceit on end by making Jack Maggs the center of this novel and fictionalizing a Dickens-like character, Tobias Oats, to write about him. Likewise, Pipp becomes Henry Phipps--here transformed to a dissolute and ungrateful young man. Other Dickensian figures abound. It had soon had me scratching my head and trying to remember more of Great Expectations. But you really don't need this to appreciate this deft and caring portrait. You do need to recognize that the peculiar mis-match between England and Australia is at the heart of Carey's fiction. And because the original Australians were the rejected children of Georgian England, the theme of failed parenthood recurs with particular bitterness. This gets expressed in the novel by the ironic inability of Oats and other Englishmen to understand, let alone appreciate Maggs and his working class--or criminal class brethren. Like the rather more substantial Oscar and Lucinda, the novel Jack Maggs develops memorable characters and presents them with great emotional challenges. The pace is quicker this time, but overall less powerful. The landscape of London in the 1830's is drawn economically, but very believably. Where the ending of Oscar and Lucinda was almost too heartbreaking, here we get a more hopeful close that turns on the real demand of fatherhood. Reading this novel is a fine way to spend a chilly evening by the fire this winter.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
