'The two-time Booker Prize-winning author now gives us a wildly exuberant, wily new novel that circumnavigates 1954 Australia, revealing as much about the country-continent as it does about three audacious individuals who take part in the infamous 10,000 mile race, the Redex Trial.
'Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in south eastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed school teacher who calls the turns and creeks crossings on a map that will remove them, without warning, from the white Australia they all know so well. This is a thrilling high speed story that starts in one way, and then takes you some place else. It is often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves.' (Publication summary)
For Frances Coady
A brief review of this work appeared in The New York Times March 3, 2019 and 25 March 2018
'This article argues that, since 2004 or so, a new kind of Australian historical novel has emerged among practitioners of literary fiction, one concerned with the mid-twentieth century. This new historical fiction has been characterized by an aesthetic stringency and self-consciousness. Though Steven Carroll and Ashley Hay will be the principal twenty-first-century writers examined, reference will also be made to several other writers including Carrie Tiffany, Charlotte Wood, Sofie Laguna, and to the later work of Peter Carey. In all these contemporary books, technology plays a major role in defining the twentieth century as seen historically.' (Publication abstract)
'Peter Carey is Australia’s most decorated international novelist. His first book, The Fat Man in History, was published in 1974, and his work has often touched on themes of fact and fiction, history, and the arts. Two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, three-time awardee of the Miles Franklin Award, and an Order of Australia, Carey is routinely cited as a potential Nobel Prize for Literature Winner. He currently lives in New York City and has recently released A Long Way from Home.'
Source: Magazine blurb.
'On learning that the premise of Peter Carey’s new novel involved a test of automobile reliability on a round trip across Australia, my first response was to dismiss it as a thin conceit for encompassing the country’s remoter landscape within a work of the imagination. The internet, however, quickly delivered old Pathé newsreels revealing not only that this Redex Trial was a demonstrable historical event, but also that no less than 50,000 people showed up at Sydney Showground to see the cars off on their cross-country journey. Truth, indeed, can sometimes seem stranger than fiction. Didn’t they have anything better to do, even in 1954?' (Introduction)
'In his author’s note for A Long Way From Home (2017), Peter Carey explains, ‘I have spent my life writing about my Australian inheritance, interrogating our colonial past, or possible futures’. Indeed, Carey’s fiction has always been concerned with iconic events and characters that have shaped Australia’s identity: Dickens’ representation of Australia in Great Expectations in Jack Maggs (1997), the Ern Malley affair in My Life as a Fake (2003), Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and, most recently, the overthrow of the Whitlam government and the leaking of classified information by Julian Assange in Amnesia (2014). Yet Carey admits that despite his ambition to ‘acknowledge the peculiar circumstances of invasion, colonisation and immigration that have made us who we are’ he has always ‘avoided direct confrontation with race, and the question of what it might mean to be a white Australian’. A Long Way From Home changes this position. In 1985, Carey focused on Aboriginal dispossession and terra nullius in Illywhacker; he does this in A Long Way From Home too – but here he also confronts another type of dispossession, that of Aboriginal Australia’s cultural identity.' (Introduction)
Cars, sex outback pubs and facing up to a harrowing history. There's a lot on the road in Peter Carey's new novel, as he explains to Stephen Romei.
'In the European imagination, Australia was on the map long before it was a geographic reality. Terra Australis Incognita was the imagined counterweight to the northern hemisphere landmasses, a grey plate plonked at the bottom of cartographers’ efforts centuries before Dirk Hartog nailed his up at Shark Bay. Even when Europeans arrived in Australia, they acceded to this prefabricated idea: superimposing imported place names and laying down arbitrary internal borders, ruler-straight for thousands of kilometres, over an immemorial atlas created by 500 clan groups or “nations”, whose traditional lands were delineated by boundaries that had nothing to do with bureaucratic fiat.' (Introduction)
'Booker prize-winning novelist explains why he’s finally confronting Australia’s colonial past – and how it should be done.'
''A joyous car race across 1950s Australia becomes an examination of the nation’s crimes against its Indigenous people .'
'This year's longlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award features three previous winners — Michelle de Kretser, Peter Carey, and Kim Scott — alongside eight other established writers.'
