Customer Reviews

Oscar and Lucinda

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having read Carey's first novel, 'Bliss', I really didn't think he could write something as good. Luckily for him, and me, and anyone else who reads 'Oscar and Lucinda', he's come very close.

Nothing really happens in the book, but it doesn't matter; there's a beauty in the language used that is extremely rare. This book is pure characterization. Carey's characters are dense and human and live before the book begins and after it ends. It's a love story, but not a conventional one. The love between Oscar and Lucinda builds and builds with every written word, up to an ending which even the most astute and well-read reader will never expect. The ending is what makes the book. It is powerful. I haven't cried since I was a boy, but I came damn close reading the last few pages. It's really incredible stuff.

I found I was thinking about the last scene for weeks after I finished the book; I've even gone back and read sections. How often does a book do that to you? Not very often, I bet. 'Oscar and Lucinda' is a bit slow, but always interesting, surprising, and touching, like 'Bliss', but in completely different ways. The imagery is brilliant -- you will not see the scenes, you will stand there, with the characters, feeling the sun on your face, breathing the same air they breath. That's how good this is. Go and read it.

Oscar and Lucinda is the best book by my favourite living author. I am a failed writer, and it is thanks to authors as talented as Peter Carey (and there are only a handful) that I chose to give up: I couldn't possibly hope to capture human life on the page, with all its infinite possibilities, as beautifully, gracefully, amusingly and touchingly as Peter Carey. As Angela Carter writes on the dust jacket of my copy, "It fills me with a wild, savage envy, and no novelist could say fairer than that". I am currently half way through my second reading of Oscar and Lucinda, and I know what is in store for me. I am prepared to sob like a child, and I am relishing it.

Set in England and Australia in the nineteenth century, the novel is essentially about the precariousness of existence and how people's lives are constructed by chance. Its essence is perhaps best captured in Oscar's speech to Lucinda on the ship Leviathan: "Our whole faith is a wager...We bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it...We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence". And so they sit down to a game of cards.

Objectivity is perhaps an unattainable goal. When I recommend Oscar and Lucinda to my friends, they generally enjoy it. But this is not enough for me. I want them to feel it as keenly as I do - that Carey is an astonishing writer, possessed of an imagination, intelligence, wit and compassion, and the ability to imbue his writing with these qualities, unrivalled by any living author. And that Oscar and Lucinda is a strange, evocative, beautiful, tender novel which will make them laugh and make them cry and make them wish it would never end. I hope this is recommendation enough.

For a week, all I wanted to do was read this book. I read it afew months ago, and I still think of the characters. A truly good bookoffers beginnings, struggles, strides and redemption, and this is such a novel. Lucinda is a hero like none other -- she transcends any conventionality. Her life and actions are so unexpected, so real. She is completely her own person, and I marvel at Carey's ability to know her so well. Carey does it all. He masterfully tells a story of theology, human weakness, passion, geography, politics and history. All this is implicit in the text -- you don't get the impression he's sticking stuff in for authenticity -- it's all relevant. Oscar and Lucinda is not a simplistic book, but it's such a quick read. Sometimes when an author is brilliant, they put you off by showing off. Carey is the kind of person you know is an excellent writer, but only because you love the story. And the characters will inhabit your life. I'm not being hyperbolic. I was fascinated with each life -- I cared what happened. I've never gambled, and yet I felt as excited as Lucinda when she entered the parlors and back rooms. Voyages and sweeping landscape made this the best book I've read in a long time -- maybe ever.

I am hard-pressed to remember two more strange protagonists in all of literature than Oscar and Lucinda. That they meet, fall in love and make a bet on whether a glass church can be transported and constructed "by Easter Sunday" for the benefit of an out-of-the-way congregation and its minister is even more absurd. Yet, page after page, I read, absorbing the wonderful and vibrant detail of mid-nineteenth century England and Australia. Only in the world of this novel could these two characters be "perfect" for each other. And in being written, this book issues a challenge to this world to accept that which is odd and unconventional, that which is outside societal and religious standards.

Somehow I am reminded of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; the interplay between Oscar and Lucinda amongst "strict society" strikes the same chord as that struck in the love story of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, a man and a woman outside the "norm." This book is wonderful reading to get lost in.

The simple legends of a family's past are brought into microscopic focus to become a moving saga. Two unique people, each misfits in their society, gradually come together to create an amazing white elephant - a glass church. This beautiful but impractical artifact, like its creators, is a misfit, and ultimately flawed.

But the object of the book is not the final results, but the journey. The stories of the protagonists lives are filled with moving human detail. Each episode strikes a poignant chord. Through their trials and small triumphs, Oscar and Lucinda come of age to plan their great achievement.

The story illustrates the ability of human beings to imagine and aspire to divine goals, even if reality intrudes in the effort to achieve them The book is filled with wonder, high ideals... and shortsightedness and miscommunications. Ironic opposites abound. Strengths and weaknesses, the abstract and the actual, churches and gaming hells. And it is nearly impossible to put down until the last page leaves you gasping!

On the back of my copy of the book was a quote by someone saying they felt a "savage envy" of Carey's writing ability, and I had a similar sentiment up until about three quarters through the book.

But I felt the ending was rushed. The empathy with the characters that had been built up during the novel was carelessly thrown away. The whole ending left me with a dull sensation. Also, I didn't feel it was a romantic novel, as it is often described. Lucinda becoming involved in the labour movement, and the portrayal of the killing of the Aborigines in particular, which I understood to be one of the key reasons for the end of the novel, didn't have enough background to evoke emotion.

I felt nothing towards any of the Christian denominations from reading the book, as apparently was one of the aims (but perhaps this is not what Carey intended, only what others say). Quite liked both Oscar and Lucinda as characters though. At no stage did I consider it to be a story trying to be realistic. The prose was lovely to begin with, but I tired of it, as though it was a sweet I had too much of.

There is an error in the book that I found to be quite misleading. At one stage, it was written that Lucinda would be destitute within two years, and that the current year was 1859. However, Oscar does not reach Australia until a fair bit later (1865), well past the time Lucinda was supposed to be destitute. With that in mind, I expected the ending to be much different, as it is Oscar that brings about Lucinda's destitution. I have checked this out on my older edition of the book, and the most recent edition, and both have this error.

I think the first thing to say about O & L, which I must admit is one of my favourite novels, is that it is story telling of the highest order. Read it, and then ask yourself: how on earth did the author think up all the characters and events? Examples. The bishop doing the table-cloth trick. The events and characters of Lucinda's gambling evenings. The phosphorescence on the boat. The hopscotch. The novel is an extraordinary kalaedoscope of shifting colours, all held together with a ruthless, if merciless, logic. Carey moves effortlessly from rural Devon through Oxford to the nineteenth century Australian outback, throwing in references to glass manufacture, the Oxford Movement, marine biology and an infinity of other topics. Resonances connect all the disparity together: the tragic misunderstandings of love, the brittleness and beauty of glass; the ambiguous and moving relationship between Oscar and his father; the inscrutability of Lucinda (what does she really think?). And of course, the rich and inventive humour that enlivens every page. This is a book about love: its perversion into obsession, its destructiveness, its strength, and its ultimate futility; and the place of love in religion, seen in negative and positive. And despite Carey's distance from his subject (he writes in an ironic detached tone), does any reader really doubt where his sympathies really lie? (for an example of a book where the author *really* doesn't care, try The Magus by John Fowles). For example, is Oscar's father the villain of the piece, or Hugh Stratton? Or is it the mass of characters - from Mr Fig to Jeffries through to the dogooders of Sydney - who display the sluggish and lazy attitudes of the damned.

The christmas pudding incident is based on the life of Edmund Gosse (Father and Son, E. Gosse), and readers may be interested in chasing up the real Philip Gosse - the model for Oscar's father - in Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse by Ann Thwaite.

This is a wonderful book, meaning it is full of wonder. A page turner, but not in the style of "Jurassic Park" or the latest Stephen King, where you are kept going because you want to know what is going to happen. Here, you are compelled to keep reading in order to experience one more beautiful passage, one more lovely image. I saw the movie first, and it ruined the beginning of the book for me a bit. The book seems distant and cold at first. Nothing like the movie. But when Oscar and Lucinda begin their journey aboard the Leviathan, the book takes off, and where the movie didn't really make sense, the book is crystal clear. The characters become so real, until, finally, you love them as if you knew them yourself. One of the best books I have read in years.

I have paraphrased the famous verse to reflect the almost ethereal, twilight beauty this story holds for me. It is the most reached-for book on my shelf - there are so many favourite passages. The short chapter style of Carey lends itself to one dipping in and out of the novel, and this is no sin, as the chapters stand alone as examples of such beautiful writing. I have often snapped the volume shut, startling anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot, calling out "what a book!".

The delicate weaving of this love story achieves a form of perfection rarely seen in modern novels. This was one case where I saw the movie first, and I think you must watch the movie as a companion piece.I don't exaggerate when I add at this point that the re-telling of this story by Fiennes, Blanchett and Armstrong in the movie achieves the closest standard to perfection I can imagine.

This story seems to float by as if the reader has joined the characters and been snared in a timeless dream. The particular relationship issues brought forward in this study are examined in such an unusual way. The actual process of falling in love - the feeling on the magical day when you KNOW it has happened - is so well described that I am moved to tears every time I read the relevant passages by the my own recollections of the same experience, such is the truthfullness of the telling. This story will elate and torment you - I hope you will find it unforgettable.

At first, I was reluctant to give myself over to this book. From what I knew of plot and characters (glass churches! gambling priests! Australia!) I dreaded another work that confused quirky for interesting, as so many tend to. But after the first page, all of those worries were left behind and I found myself completely engrossed in this novel. What I had assumed would be an airy, light read turned out to be a book that has stuck with me since I read it.

More than that, it was one of the few books that I've read recently that I really could not stop reading; whenever I had a spare moment, I would try to read a few pages. It was as if instead of reading a novel, was being introduced to breathing, living people, an effect accomplished by having the vast majority of the book acting as a build-up for the advertised events with the church; the reader spends less time reading a story of an event and more time being introduced to two people, with all their traumas and fears and joys lain bare for one to see. While in the hands of a lesser artist this inordinate attention to the back-story could misfire badly, Peter Carey time and again proves himself to be a storyteller more than able to carry it off. And more than an excellent story-teller, Carey is an amazing writer, with a prose both crystalline and gorgeous.

But, this is not a perfect book by any means. One of its most noticeable flaws is the treatment of the last episodes of the narrative, which don't so much wind up the story as suddenly cauterize it to a close. This is even more glaring when one compares it with the style and content in the book's early sections (especially when one considers the amount of detail and care evident in the chapters dealing with Oscar's childhood vs. the whirlwind events after his arrival at Boat Harbor).

However, as the title of this review suggests, the real impact of the book is how it stays with the reader. This little book that I thought would help pass the time before going to sleep has instead stuck stubbornly in my mind, and doesn't seem to be willing to go anywhere else soon.