Customer Reviews

My Life as a Fake

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Following from Carey's hugely successful True History of the Kelly Gang, the author plucks another charismatic figure from history to reform in his fiction. This time he has taken the Ern Malley hoax and rewritten it using a bounty of sumptuous detail. In the 1940s a couple of writers sought to play a joke on the surrealist movement of the time. Their hoax got out of hand. They composed poetry using a mixture of their own original work, Shakespeare, a rhyming dictionary and a US army report. However, it was taken seriously, published and then caused a scandal because the content of the work was considered indecent. In many ways the editor who first received the work considered that the fake poet really did come to life. Stemming from this thought, Carey creates the story of Christopher Chubb who similarly sets up a literary hoax. This time, the fictional poet really does come to life.

The narrator of My Life is a Fake is the English poetry editor Sarah Wode-Douglass. She travels to Kuala Lumpur on the invitation of her acquaintance, the poet John Slater, with whom she has a long and complicated past. By accident she meets Chubb who is working in a bicycle repair shop. He gives her a glimpse of a poem by the poet he created named McCorkle. Sarah is desperate to retrieve this poet's work to make her own claim to fame. However, first she must hear the whole gruesome story behind it. It is a complicated affair leading Sarah and the reader to wonder what is real and what is fake. McCorkle comes to life and discredits Chubb's own life. Not only is Chubb's past revealed, but through conversations Slater Sarah's own past is examined. Another fake is revealed.

Carey does a magnificent job at evoking the environment of Kuala Lumpur in this time period. He creates a thrilling story despite its complicated plot. As the story progresses it becomes confusing who exactly is narrating the story. This fight to be heard seems to be the point because the spotlight is the object of desire for which the characters' manic ambition is set. Lies are the fuel used to gain entry into it. Each character struggles to make their lies sound the most convincing. It is the reader's delightful job to sift through for the truth.

Sarah Elizabeth Jane is an editor with "The Modern Review". When her friend the novelist John Slater suggests that she joins him on a trip to Kuala Lumpur, Sarah does not know the maze she is about to enter, "from which, thirteen years later, I haven't yet escaped" as she puts it. Shortly after their arrival in Kuala Lumpur, Sarah makes the acquaintance of an Australian in a shabby bicycle repair shop in Jalan Campbell, a man called Christopher Chubb. She soon finds out that he is the villain in the McCorkle Hoax dating back to 1946. Chubb gave birth to a phantom poet called "Bob McCorkle" who never existed but whom the Australian gave a life, a death and a biography. He then delivered a collection of poems called "Personae" to editor David Weiss, a man profoundly detested by Chubb since their common schooldays at Forest Street. Sarah is speechless as Chubb mockingly recites a passage from a poem called "Swamps": "Areas of stagnant water serve / As breeding grounds...", a passage Chubb had copied from an army manual of mosquito eradication! When Weiss published "Personae", he was arrested and prosecuted for "obscenity". As Sarah listens to the beginning of Chubb's account of his life, she is drawn into his harrowing narration. Chubb has a kind of magnetic effect on her and she can't resist wanting to learn more about Chubb's past, a maze of events on the verge of credibility. A beautifully crafted piece of storytelling, a powerful work of fiction, Mr Carey's narrative is fast, furious and haunting.

Mr. Carey spins quite a yarn here. Sarah Wode-Douglas, the editor of a poetry magazine in London, travels to Malaysia with one John Slater a writer a little like Truman Capote without the mincing-- that is, he is more famous for being a famous writer than for writing--a man she thinks had an affair with her mother and is responsible for her death. There they meet a Christopher Chubb, an aging Australian. Chubb tells a story that has shades of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Joseph's HEART OF DARKNESS, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and is as convoluted as The DA VINCI CODE.

Central to the story is a literary hoax based on an incident that actually took place in Australia, according to the Author's Note at the end of this fairly short novel. (266 pages)You may not care a whit about poetry, pretentious intellectuals or literary hoaxes; on the other hand, you will race through this novel with the speed you read any first rate mystery. I had no abiding love for any of these characters but was fascinated by this great tale.

Mr. Carey is nothing is not a master of the language, should I say Australian. There are nice Australian touches: "he said he would give me a hiding if I did not get off his irises straight away" and "I therefore was forced to take shank's pony to the city but I am used to walking. . ."

Surely Carey is saying something about literary criticism, which can be one of the world's most pretentious endeavors. There is the question of what is real and what isn't and how significant is poetry after all? Sarah, the first person narrator, opines that there is no value that can be put on fine poetry: ". . . but what price would I put on a Shakespeare sonnet? How much for Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Yeats?" W. H. Auden, whom Slater knew, is quoted in the novel. I remember, however, that Auden said that "poetry makes nothing happen."

Hey, I don't believe you have to be an English major to like this novel. Query: since Mr. Carey now lives in New York City, do we get to claim him as an American writer? I recall that he wrote a very beautiful and moving piece after September 11, 2001 about "feeling" like an American.

Loosely based on a real incident that happened in Australia many years ago, the author took the concept and ran with it to create his own literary work, one that plays with the reader's credibility.

This novel is about a hoax. It's starts when Susan Wode-Douglas, an editor of a London poetry magazine, travels to Kuala Lampur with an old family friend, John Slater, who she suspects of being her mother's ex-lover and the cause of her suicide. It's an unpleasant holiday in many ways, but then she comes in contact with Christopher Chubb, a middle-aged Australian man, working as a bike mechanic and having an incredible story to tell.

John Slater warns her about Chubb but she's fascinated because he shows her a piece of poetry that wins her heart immediately Of course she must then listen to his outrageous story, which might or might not be true. It's a story of double-crossings and suicide and horror that goes on and on. She hears of a beautiful woman and a baby girl and a kidnapping. She hears of physical discomfort and fear and loneliness and suffering of the soul. Chubb tells her how he created a literary icon in order to play a practical joke on a colleague. Then this supposedly imagined literary figure came to life. Is Christopher Chubb insane? She can't really tell and neither could I.

The best part of the book is the descriptions of the people. The author has a knack for making me feel every bit of sweat that comes off of a forehead, and gives meaning to every crinkle of an eyebrow. The search for the perfect piece of poetry seemed silly to me. But the obsession of our heroine did not. She becomes a fanatic herself as she goes after her prize, which would be the one copy of a hand-written book of poetry from the now mythical figure.

The problem with the book is that there was no clear resolution. I did get involved and wanted to keep reading. But then I was disappointed at the end. So in spite good writing, I cannot recommend this to anyone but the most dedicated literary mavens.

*My Life as a Fake* is, in the main, the story of unsuccessful poet Christopher Chubb, an Australian whose life is forever marred by a literary hoax he perpetrated in his youth. Chubb invented a deceased poet by the name of Bob McCorkle and passed off McCorkle's poetry--his own work, of course--on an unsuspecting editor whose ignorance Chubb wished to expose. (The story is based on a real-life literary hoax, the similar invention of a certain Ern Malley in the 1940s.) When he first appears in the story, Chubb's stint as literary hoaxer is long behind him. He is filthy and destitute and quite possibly mad, employed as a bicycle mechanic on a cramped street in Kuala Lumpur. He is discovered there by Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry magazine, to whom Chubb spins out the unlikely story of his post-hoax life. Wode-Douglass in turn relates Chubb's story to us:

The creature of Chubb's imagination, the fictional Bob McCorkle, was--or so Chubb was led to believe by the creature itself--given flesh by Chubb's pen. That is to say, someone who fit the description of Chubb's manufactured poet entered Chubb's life claiming to be the flesh-and-blood product of the hoaxer's fiction. Who or what this man is in fact is never fully explained. Whatever he is, the McCorkle creature endeavors, successfully, to destroy his alleged creator's life. The story of Chubb's ruin involves all manner of cruelties, but chief among them is McCorkle's kidnapping of Chubb's infant daughter, a crime which determines Chubb's unhappy future.

The better part of *My Life as a Fake* is narrated by Chubb to Sarah Wode-Douglass. Within Chubb's narrative, moreover, are remembered conversations, sometimes lengthy stories, which Chubb now recounts. But while much of the book might justly have been encased in quotation marks, there is not a single such punctuation mark to be found in the text. The result is not as confusing as one might expect, though direct and indirect discourse blend together into an inseparable mass of speech. Chubb's language, meanwhile, is often difficult to understand, an Australian English tinged with the expressions and verbal tics of his adopted country.

One reads the book increasingly curious to discover how Chubb came to be in his current situation, repairing bikes in Kuala Lumpur, but the read is not a wholly pleasant one. Chubb's' convoluted story is interesting, but its narration leaves one with numerous questions, not least of which involves the true nature and motivation of McCorkle. The story of Wode-Douglass, too, which frames Chubb's' tale--her reasons for being in Kuala Lumpur, her interest in a collection of poetry by the monster McCorkle, her relationship with Englishman John Slater, her companion on the trip--seems in the end to have been largely unnecessary. Too little, in particular, is made of the character of Slater, a likeable rogue who is put to little use in the story. Carey's novel is indeed bold and imaginative, but the truth in it is uncomfortably elusive.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Using a real literary fraud from Australia as the basis for his main plot, Carey introduces the reader to Lady Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a small English poetry magazine, always on the verge of financial collapse. Persuaded by John Slater, a poet and friend of her deceased parents, to accompany him from England to Kuala Lumpur in 1972, she is recollecting her encounter there with Christopher Chubb, a refugee from Australia where he had, in the 1940s, perpetrated a major literary hoax, designed to protest the trends in modern poetry. Chubb had written and succeeded in getting published a series of "poems," supposedly by a man named McCorkle.

The fraud, which took place in the 1940s, is told in flashbacks from the 1972 trip, mainly by Lady Sarah and Chubb. Its wry humor and social commentary are fun to read, with Chubb mocking the state of literary awareness in Australia at that time and providing information about the obscenity trial which resulted from his hoax. When Chubb cleverly shows her one page from another work by "McCorkle," Sarah sees it as a masterpiece akin to "The Wasteland," and tries to obtain the whole manuscript, the publication of which would save her magazine. Sarah's life in 1983, and shocking revelations by John Slater about Sarah's parents, their marriage, and her mother's death in the late 1930's widen the focus and time frame. The reader quickly recognizes, as all the characters play their parts and the story develops, that all are guilty of some sort of fakery.

The second half of the book, however, becomes a wild, often wacky adventure story as separate new plots develop, the time frame changes to World War II, and several new characters, unrelated to the main plot, tell their own stories. Sarah and Slater play no real role in the action as Chubb tries to rescue his daughter from a suddenly real, seven-foot-tall McCorkle, who has kidnapped her and run from island to island in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Japanese have invaded and have begun vividly described atrocities.

Separate, virtually unconnected plots in four time frames--1983, 1939, 1972, and World War II--revealed by four or five different narrators, in settings that include England, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia all contribute to a confusion of focus. The characters, events, and plot line from the beginning of the book have little if any overlap with the characters, events, and plots in the middle. Though the several sections are exciting and imaginative separately, they did not cohere for me, and I found myself thinking of the first half as a stand-alone novella, with the remaining episodes connected to it as a series of memorable, separately developed short stories. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple

In the beginning Peter writes beautifully, weaving a magical wonderland with his delightfully erudite sentences. He draws you in, setting a scene of interest and intrigue, but about halfway through just when you expect things to begin happening, it all slows down into a big pile of boring sludge where his stylistic concerns seem to be of greater interest than the story itself.

After my initial excitement I was most disappointed by this, and one fine Wednesday morning I hurled the book across my room vowing that I would never be tempted to read another word of it. A few days later I took it back to the shop and asked for a refund, but was refused even though I assured them that I hadn't read or even glanced at the second half. I then threatened the shop manager with violence but calmed down when he pulled a gun from under the counter. Unable to tell whether or not the gun was real I decided to say I was sorry, but he refused to accept my apology and called the police.

At first I denied any wrong doing and blamed it all upon the shopkeeper, but after being confronted with video evidence of my social transgression I was taken to the police station and charged with disturbing the peace, and now have to front up at court in 3 weeks time to face a judge.

I am afraid I cannot recommend this book unless there has been a nuclear war, or an attack by aliens, and there are no other books left on earth. In either of those scenarios I would give it more than 2 stars, maybe 3.

I would rather slit my wrists and drink battery acid than ever again read anything by this over rated whacker. All because Peter lost control of the plot and the pace.

Such is life.

The Ern Malley poetry is some of the funniest, most vibrant work ever produced in Australia - and the story itself really defines Australia's contradictory, anxious attitude towards its own literature. It's excellent stuff - it was a shame that Carey's novel did such a poor job of conveying that. He took a lively story (told far better by Michael Heyward in 'The Ern Malley Affair' if you're interested) and suffocated it in a convoluted, rather boring novel. It is weighed down by constant, laboured references to Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and by its thoroughly unlikable characters. There is very little to keep you reading to the end of the novel.

Although some of Carey's sentences are well constructed, and his reflections upon text, authorial responsibility, truth and Australia are mildly interesting, these postmodern concerns are tackled much more convincingly by other novelists, including, for example, by Richard Flanagan in 'Gould's Book of Fish'. As satire, it is not very funny; as a postmodern work, it lacks the irony and sense of play needed to make it interesting; as a piece of literature, it is not that well written and as a novel it is just kind of dull. Not the worst thing I've ever read, but disappointing.

I have been a fan of Peter Carey since reading Oscar and Lucinda ten years ago, and have enjoyed every story since (Jack Maggs was a gripper!), but this one was work to get through. The only reason I trudged through the book was because I had faith that Mr. Carey would deliver. At some points, I thought he was close...I was interested, and ready to be excited. But then, once again, something irritating happened (chubb was caught; he meets someone whose past MUST be explained in detail; the editor's own family drama;etc.) which made it such a chore. The ending was anti-climactic.

I, too, felt like I was reading a galley. Oh well, you can't win 'em all! I'm sure he'll do better next time.

I can't decide between a two or three star rating. For me, My Life as a Fake started off slow, showed promise, but didn't quite deliver. The book offered enough intrigue and quality bits of writing for me to finish it. However, I felt as if I were reading a draft rather than a finished product. That said, there is something in Peter Carey's writing that is alluring enough that I'd like to try another of his novels (preferably something award-winning).