Customer Reviews

My Life as a Fake

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I am generally very suspicious of novels whose plotlines revolve around writers and the world of letters, doubly so in this case, as it involves poetry, which I tend to dislike. However... this is Peter Carey at work, and by the end of this book I'm convinced he could rework an appliance manual into a penetrating and thoughtful story. What he's done here is take a real-life Australian literary hoax from the 1940s, fictionalized it, grafted the gothic Frankenstein story to it, and then superimposed a running theme on the construction of identity by the self. It's the kind of fictional razzle-dazzle that might have seemed arch or pretentious or self-congratulatory in the wrong hands, but Carey pulls it off with style.

The story is narrated on its outer layer (there are numerous stories within stories and narrators within these) by Sarah, the editor of a prestigious, if perpetually bankrupt, English poetry magazine. She writes in the early 1980s, some ten years after the main events of the story, which take place in Kuala Lumpur in 1972. She was taken there by a friend of her deceased parents (and, she suspects, her mother's lover), and seeks to use the trip as a way to talk to him about the suicide of her mother when she was a child. However, one day while strolling the streets of KL, she sees a decrepit white man sitting in a hovel of a bike-repair shop reading Rilke. This piques her interest and she is soon drawn into the strange tale of Christopher Chubb, a man who thirty years previously perpetuated a hoax on a modernist literary review.

Chubb found trendy modernist poetry to be vapid stuff and so submitted some nonsense material from a fictitious blue-collar mechanic poet to an editor he used to go to school with. The editor bought it hook, line and sinker, but eventually was prosecuted on obscenity charges. This is based on the "Ern Malley" case, and follows the real-life case in all its bizarre twists and turns. However, as Chubb relates to Sarah, his fictional poet actually showed up and started harassing him. Chubb had created a fake picture of the poet by grafting three photos of different people together, Frankenstein-like, and the embodiment of this picture appears at his house! Eventually "the monster" kidnaps Chubb's adopted daughter Tina (she is the result of a subplot involving a charismatic and sexy artiste in the '50s) and Chubb embarks on a long quest across Indonesia and Malaysia to try and recover the girl. As Chubb relates his story in Malay-peppered Australian English, one gets a strong whiff of Conrad about the whole affair (Heart of Darkness meets Lord Jim).

Sarah is kept enthralled by this tale because Chubb has shown her a page from another "McCorkle" work that she recognizes as genius. Desperate to finally publish something groundbreaking, she sticks around for the whole convoluted story, even though she's not sure whether or not Chubb is lying to her or possibly even mad. Along the way, there are all manner of stories in miniature -- secrets from Sarah's past and present are revealed, we get a part bit on the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, a Sri Lankan master poisoner is introduced, and as a side bonus there is some great descriptive writing about Kuala Lumpur. Sometimes the framework gets a bit complicated and the reader has to work hard to keep track of which layer of narration or time frame one is in. Readers who like clear resolutions are forewarned that Carey isn't interested in that -- the ultimate point of the book is that we all construct our own identities, to the point that sometimes we lose track of who we are.

For a nation with so many fine writers, Australia has an unusual number of "fakes" of one kind or another. Not many years ago, a young British immigrant woman almost passed herself off as a Ukrainian refugee. A white male writer masqueraded as an Aborigine woman. Literary posturing isn't new nor unique to Australia, but writers there seem to be trying to launch a new genre through it. Peter Carey's book isn't an attempt to become a cornerstone of this potential realm. Through a narrative that binds the reader to every page, he re-constructs a fictional account of one of Australia's better known early attempts at literary chicanery.

In Australia, the "Ern Malley" affair remains notorious - poems supposedly penned by an unknown genius of the 1940s. Carey bases his tale on this scandal, bringing a fresh sense of life and place to his characters. He introduces Sarah Wode-Douglass, London literary magazine editor, and the man she's long considered her family's nemesis, John Slater. Sarah - known to Slater as "Micks" is lured to Kuala Lumpur, leading her to a disheveled old Australian, Christopher Chubb. Chubb has a secret, which he dangles enticingly before the editor. It's a collection of poetry by a Bob McCorkle, who Chubb invented. The invention was to have highlighted the failure of the Australian literary elite to understand real poetry. In doing so, it would provide a comeuppance to Chubb's former classmate and editor of "Personae", David Weiss.

The situation gets out of hand when Weiss issues the work and is charged with "publishing obscenity" by an over-zealous Melbourne policeman. Worse for Chubb, Bob McCorkle emerges as a "real" figure pursuing Chubb and demanding recognition as the "poetic genius" he's been depicted. Chubb both chases and flees McCorkle, ending up in Malaysia on a bizarre quest. Chubb/Carey creates a monster in McCorkle - a massive man with violent tendencies, bent on retrieving a reputation he's never earned. Lacking the violence, Chubb seeks his own recognition through Micks, and this story is dictated to her during her time in "KL". She must endure a world entirely alien to her while negotiating for the manuscript with a man who is forthcoming in one way, but highly elusive in others.

Carey's handling of this tale is masterful. Even had it not been based on true events, his relation of it is flawless. The characters may seem outlandish in many respects, but the author conveys them with precision and finesse. Sarah is obsessed with her lust for the collection - one is almost reminded of the editors of the post-modernist journal "Social Text" blindly gobbling Alan Sokal's wonderful hoax. Post-modernism has launched many bizarre tales. Carey's knowledge of place is equally compelling as he takes us from KL, through Melbourne, Sydney and back to the Malay jungles. There are warlords, asides in time and place - none of which interrupt the narrative, since each provides enhancement - and a bruising finale. This is one of Carey's supreme works, standing with "Illywhacker" and his fabricated history of Ned Kelly's career. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

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

Carey takes the reader on a twisting and turning journey into a Malaysian Frankenstein-like struggle between creator and created. The conflicting motives and shortcomings of each character leave one wondering who the real "fake" might be, or if the whole point is that we're all fakes in our own eyes.

If you like tidy, wrapped-up plot lines with obviously good and evil characters, don't bother with Carey. On the other hand, if you're interested in exploring the intricacies of the human psyche and the challenges associated with cross-cultural relationships, this is an excellent read.

At his best, Carey is direct and compelling as he weaves a number of intricate stories and subplots. The story is a bit difficult to follow at times as it becomes almost too clever in its nesting of tales. Overall, however, a forgiveable detail, that only marginally detracts from the overall quality of this novel.

Carey's story is not unlike Dan Simmons' "Song of Kali", and you may find that an interesting parallel read as the main character searches for an abducted child in the underbelly of Calcutta.

Carey's tale of literary high jinx and hoaxes owes as much to Golem mythology as it does to Frankenstein or the actual incident the novel is based on. What happens when creative energy is loosed into the world, in whatever form? It takes on an unpredictable life of its own, imbued with its creator's spirit but independent of the creator's will and intentions, and this independence can cause chilling and undesirable results.
The framing story is claustrophobic and vertiginous, a duel of wits between decrepit failed poet Christopher Chubb and literary magazine editor Sarah Wode-Douglass, but the main narrative is a cracking adventure through the jungles of Southeast Asia. The issues that both the framing story and the adventure narrative raise--questions of the meaning, intent and consequences of artistic creation; of the value of the truth; of the role of the spirit in defining character--are developed alongside the personal epiphanies of the narrator Sarah Wode-Douglass, whose internal struggles are as moving as the tale of woe she hears from Christopher Chubb.
This is a novel that gets more complex and interesting with reflection. It lives on in the imagination.

Peter Carey's book My Life as a Fake is quite a fascinating piece of work. At one level, the book details the confessions of literary hoaxer Christopher Chubb. This is relayed to us via Sarah, an ambitious poetry journal editor who listens to his long tale in the hope of getting her hands on his brilliant but yet undiscovered poetry. The story of his fall from grace starts off ordinarily enough but as each chapter passes you find yourself being drawn deeper and deeper into it as more and more bizarre truths are revealed. A literary hoax that leads to the victims suicide, the appearance of a giant who claims to be the fictitious author in the flesh, kidnap and a chase through Malaysia to find Chubb's child all follow. What starts out as a quarrel between egotistical poets slowly begins to sound more and more like a Victorian horror story as layers of truth are uncovered. On top of this are the present events that are taking place in Malaysia at the time of this story being told (set in 1972). Here Sarah tries desperately to secure the poetry while Chubb confronts the evils of his past. Hard to classify and hard to put down this book sucks you in like a whirlpool. For a story that starts off unremarkably it ends up taking one on quite an interesting journey.

This is an enchanting story. Peter Carey has borrowed the plot from a series of events that took place in Australia. He has changed the names, the times and the places but the core of the story is true. Carey writes exceptionally well. I found myself dog-earing pages to mark sentences and phrases that resonated with me so that I could return to them. The plot device he invokes is a bit of surrealism. If you like John Irving's stories you will like Carey's. He leads the reader into a bit of surrealism - if you accept it, all is well and on you go. If you can't accept it, best put the book down. I prefer not to divulge the nature of the surrealism - it spoils the story if you don't discover it for yourself

Carey is superb at charactier development. They develop out of their actions and their words, not from narrative. Carey is a great story-teller as well.

I have read two of his novels and this book will make me read another.

Peter Carey uses a bizarre but true story of a hoax in the small world of Australian poetry as background to explore the forces of obsession and alienation in human nature. "Drip, drip, drip, poison in her ear. He must have stolen her from me a little every day...He made her hate me-lah". This is the process of Parental Alienation that is behind the agony and sadness of divorced fathers who never regain contact with their children after leaving the family home. Christopher Chubb has spent the last 20 years locating and trying to reconcile with his daughter. She was alienated from him as a little girl but even as he tries to be bread-winner (again?) to the girl and her adoptive (or is it her real) mother, the familiarity of his presence breeds contempt that culminates in the dramatic ending. Woven in with his pathetic family life is Christopher Chubbs obsession with his poetry. It is what he lost when he went back to Sydney and what the women jealously retain to thwart his chance of publication and fame. This is a powerful novel that on the surface, when you start it, doesn't seem interesting at all. But if you know Peter Carey as a writer, you won't let that fool you.

My Life As A Fake by Peter Carey is a strange, multi-layered journey through a man's past, his artistic inspiration and his products, both illusory and real. Christopher Chubb is Australian and a budding poet. He resents the privilege of a certain litterateur and so he decides to nail him. An apparently genuine but actually bogus set of poems is supplied and adjudged significantly more than competent. The agent publishes. The material is fake. Chubb is accused and stands trial for his sins against artistic identity and integrity.

Some years later John Slater and Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglas visit Kuala Lumpur. Slater is an accomplished poet who has hobnobbed with anyone worth hobnobbing with, Eliot, Pound, Auden, etc. He also something of a lady's man on the side. Sarah is an upper crust girl who developed a liking for other girls at school. Aspects of her origins are a matter of some conjecture, however. Slater seems to have played a role. Her present is clear. She is the editor in chief of a miniscule literary journal devoted mainly to new poetry. In Kuala Lumpur she discovers the story of Bob McCorkle's fabled poetry, the fake created by Christopher Chubb.

Chubb is resident in KL and has been so for several years. He has a bicycle repair shop, but still writes his own doggerel. Sarah meets him and dismisses his work as dire, derivative at best. McCorkle's poems, however, are blissful and she tries everything possible to get her hands on the material so that she can publish it. The problem for her is the fact that McCorkle is apparently an invention of Chubb, so the only way that she can get near to the material is through him. The Australian is now a poor artisan with ragged clothes and tropical ulcers. He speaks English strongly peppered with bits of Malay and plays hard to get. The only way that Sarah can access the McCorkle poems is to suffer Chubb's life story, its fantasies, inventions and questionable realities.

And it's a story that comes and goes to and from Australia. It progresses through Indonesia and peninsular Malaya. We visit Penang, sup tea in the E and O as Chubb pursues McCorkle, his own now demonic invention, across south east Asia. His alter ego becomes something real, something apart from himself.

The book is packed with literary references, but is in no way academic. There is a strong sense of place, with the sights, sounds and smells of Kuala Lumpur oozing from the page. The only aspect missing is the taste, and in Malaysia food is much more pervasive an influence in the culture than we encounter via Chubb's adoption of it. It's a minor point.

Eventual reconciliation of the Chubb-McCorkle conflict, Sarah's pursuit of the poems and Slater's apparent management of the process is truly surprising and it is for the reader to discover this empirically.

Overall the pace of the book is varied and, here and there, one feels that Peter Carey has over-complicated things and thus detracted from the directness that could have achieved increased impact. But then poetry is like that, isn't it? If it was linear, uncomplicated, What Katy Did, then it would not have the richness that makes it poetry. It would lack the diversion, the invention. My Life As A Fake has all these things and probably stands alone, eventually, as an examination of the nature of creativity and invention. When viewed in retrospect, Chubb's life, his haunting by the accomplished poet he has ostensibly created and his pursuit of the same to reclaim a daughter he believes is his own at times beggars belief. But just try predicting tomorrow's news, or even, especially, your own emotions or reactions. We all become inventors, with neither a past nor a future solid in our present. Eliot again.

This book, I was told, is based on a true story. Two Australian poets, anxious to show up a young editor as a fraud, concocted a fictional poet and then wrote some terrible verses under his name and submitted them. The editor thought they were brilliant and published them. Then, the fake was unveiled.
This is the starting point for Carey's novel. In this fictional version, the protagonist and narrator is a very proper Englishwoman with sapphic tendencies, editor of a high brow poetry journal in London who is lured to Kuala Lumpur by an author whom she despises but with whom she shares a tragic past.
Carey makes much, Somerset Maugham style, of the fetid, fervid Far East, stinking of sewage and smelling of scents, and the endless rain etc etc. They run into another mediocre poet, an Australian called Christopher Chubb, who, Ancient Mariner style, fixes our Englishwoman with his glittering eye and proceeds to tell his story.
It turns out he created a fake poet -- only in this version of the story, the poet comes to life and begins to torment his creator. We think Golem of Prague or Frankenstein. Like layers of an onion, different stories are stripped away and presented to our eyes -- one more fanciful and unrealistic as the next.
The premise is promising but the execution deeply unsatisfying. I think the author wants to discuss the question of fakedom -- what is real and what is not. Ultimately, if it is intended as a work of art, this book also ends up being fake.