Customer Reviews

Jack Maggs

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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.

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.

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.

Peter Carey uses his command on the language and knowledge of England near the turn of the century to create a realistic atmosphere. It seemed I was reaching for a towel to dry off everytime someone wandered into a damp rain or fog. I wish the same was true for the characters. I never felt close enough to any of them where I really cared emotionally about them. The story in the grand scheme is well worth reading but I never got caught, specifically, in anyone's plight.

This is the third Peter Carey novel I have read in 2004. (The others were "The True History of the Kelly Gang" and "My Life as a Fake".) And while these books have very different settings, characters, and narrative styles, I find myself with the same broad reaction to each.

First, I feel that "Jack Maggs", like "Gang" and "Fake", features brilliant writing and a fully involving narrative. For these reasons, I find Carey's novels hard to put down, and I zip through them fascinated, in just a few days.

Second, each of these books contains a book within the book. In "Gang", there are Ned Kelly's letters. In "Fake", there is the work of Bob McCorkle, the working class poet and naturalist of genius. In "Jack Maggs", there is the Dickens novel "Great Expectations", with Carey offering modern interpretations of Pip's relationship with Herbert Pocket and Magwitch's obsession with Pip. And certainly, "Maggs" offers some insight into Dickens, who is captured in the character Tobias Oates. Those who love books and writing certainly appreciate this component of a Carey novel.

Third, I would say that Carey's books, while great literary pleasures, are also slightly limited. This is because, at least for me, the experiences of his characters never reach beyond the dynamic of the book. Indeed, I have never recognized in these three novels a dynamic or conflict in my own life, which Carey has scrutinized. The books, in other words, seem masterfully self-contained. They are a bit like Joseph Cornell boxes-brilliant, beautiful, and in odd balance. And, they face inward.

Carey's "Jack Maggs" is a narrative gem, crisply written with a dark relentless momentum as it unfolds in early 19th century London. Its tone is steeped in the miasma of fog rising on the Thames, obscuring the pasts - and the present motives - of all the players.

Title character Jack Maggs is that ante-postmodern ideal of a villain wherein a genuinely huge and good heart triumphantly barges through the foul abuses of a childhood spent learning, then practicing the art of housebreaking. Witness Jack's first day on the job as an eight-year-old "Climbing Boy" who thought he was being taken to a new school: "Silas carefully lifted off the chimney pot and placed it on the roof. Said he -- All right, young whipper-snapper, down you go. (I hesitated) So he picked me up, and slid me in, as simple as dropping shot into a cannon." This child, later apprehended, tried, and deported to Australia, eventually becomes the man who often "stooped for his ankle knife. He felt the rough sure grip of the handle he himself had made with twine and tar. A convict's knife, it dated from before the time when he could have afforded the finest steel and ivory for the handle. He crouched now, a powerful shadow in the doorway of his own living room, drawing the blade in wide circle through the night." Yet, he is just as certainly "the prodigal father," undertaking a journey of lethal risk to rejoin and know his long-lost ward in this finely drawn story.

"Jack Maggs" satisfies on many levels. It paints vivid portraits of a host of eccentrics, among them a young novelist who dabbles dangerously in hypnosis and magnet therapy, his dumpy wife and saucy sister-in-law, a nouveau-riche grocer with household help he neither wants or needs, and a maid in his employ who's also his "Good Companion" on cold English nights. What a fun bunch, and each packed with the genuine baggage of the era: its fears, wisdoms, idioms, and oddities. All elements collide at the entry of Jack Maggs into their lives. At the same time, the novel addresses some thoroughly contemporary issues, such as the psychiatric validity (or not) of "repressed memory" revelations and the consequences of a life where no "Roe v. Wade" exists.

A final note: Whether or not you've read (and recall) "Great Expectations" is irrelevant to your enjoyment of Mr. Carey's novel. Although such background might add context and color, this work stands on its own.

I often become annoyed at reading reviews where critics rave about how wonderful a novel is and how "Dickensian" it is. Peter Carey's novel may be the first example I have come across that deserves that label. "Jack Maggs" is a novel that is completely realized in its attempt to recreate Victorian (possibly circa-the Industrial Revolution, but dating it is a little difficult) England not only in setting, but in language and tone as well. I literally felt like I was becoming a 19th century reader as I read the text. What amazed me was the fact that if I hadn't known it was a Peter Carey novel, I would have attributed the novel to a contemporary of Dickens himself.

The novel centers around Jack Maggs, an exiled thief who returns to London to find his pseudo-adopted son Henry and reclaim his house. By accident, he becomes the footman to one Percy Buckle and eventual "scientific study" and novel inspiration for a writer named Tobias who has the ability to hypnotize his subjects and obtain whatever information he wants from their brains. It's a wonderful cast of characters who become embroiled in Maggs' search for his son, someone who does not want to be associated in any way, shape, or form to his benefactor. As the story continues, you wait and wait for a terrible tragedy to occur, and you can literally feel a noose getting tighter and tighter in the final few pages.

I loved reading this book as I have enjoyed much of what Carey has written. For those who love Dickens and James, this book will be a wonderful addition to your bookshelf.

The best thing you can say about Jack Maggs is that Peter Carrey has fashioned a darker, more realistic, more interesting Dickensian London for the reader to inhabit. Although the plot takes a long, uneventful time to get set up, the periodic flashbacks are brilliantly executed. The story told within the flashbacks of Jack Magg's brutal childhood were by far the best part of the novel for me. Carrey's descriptions of poverty, burglary, and depravity were vividly recounted to great effect. The other outstanding element is the creative portrayals for the secondary characters. Tobias Oats in particular was well fleshed out and had a life of his own. The plot is well executed and relatively complex, but not as compelling or intricate as Dicken's best or Paliser's 'The Quincunx'. The story unfolds in a somewhat flat manner and lacks the urgency one would expect. Overall, worth the read, if for no other reason than to soak up the long ago London world Carrey has painstakingly re-created.

One of the most ambitious novels I have read recently, Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs" is a rewriting of quite possibly the most famous text in English Literature- Great Expectations-. For those familiar with Great Expectations, the narrative chronicles the development of Phillip Pirrip on a path of self-discovery, his rise to gentleman financed by the forbidding Australian convict Abel Magwitch. In writing "Jack Maggs" , Peter Carey has shifted the narrative focus from Pip to the convict, and in doing so deconstructs norms present in 19th century English literature. In this rewriting, the Australian writer Peter Carey provides the marginalized, convict character of Magwitch to rebel against his portrayal and define his true identity.
The plot is concerned with the return of Jack Maggs (Magwitch's fictional counterpart) to England, -under the threat of discovery and certain death- to meet the orphan 'son' whose rise to gentleman he has financed for the past twenty years. Once arriving in London, however, Henry Phipps has disappeared. The ensuing chapters detail Jack Maggs's continued attempts to seek out his 'son.' On another level, this develops into a series of confrontations that result in the resolution of Jack Maggs's crises of identity. After discovering that the orphan he has financed from birth into a gentleman has vanished, Jack Maggs poses as a footman in the employ of Percy Buckle, Henry Phipps's neighbor. In his quest to find his "son" not only must Jack Maggs reconcile himself with his identity as a transported convict, but he must also search the streets of London and the surrounding countryside under the threat of certain death. Adventure, suspense and fine characterization ensure that Peter Carey's ambitious rewriting of Great Expectations is both a rollicking sojourn into the seedy streets of 19th century London and an ultimately satisfying read.

I regret that I had heard this book compared so favorably and unfavorably to Great Expectations before I read it. This book is not a re-telling of Great Expectations or even, as one other reviewer noted, a "spin-off." This book might more accurately be termed a "jazz riff" on Great Expectations. Mr. Carey has taken some of the key elements of the story of Magwitch and Pip (a banished convict benefactor returning in search of his protege) and constructed a very different story. To compare it to Dickens's book is greatly unfair. Great Expectations is one of the most important pieces of capital-L Literature in the English Language; Jack Maggs is just a good book.

But as a good book, I found it to be a rather satisfying read. My only criticism that bears noting is that the characters do not build any emotional magnetism until half-way through the book. What has always drawn me to Peter Carey's work, more so even than his original and often witty storytelling, are his keen observations about the human heart and the ways it breaks, warms, and is drawn to others. These elements exist in the novel, but you must find your way through the first half of the book, which is an interesting enough story, but emotionally sparse. Those who have a closeted (or uncloseted) love for all things Victorian, or get off on mysterious Jack-the-Ripper-like characters, will find the story itself enough to carry them through.

All in all, I was pleased with the book, and it carries the distinction of being the first book I've read in a long time that was neither too long nor too short for its story.