Peter Carey

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Review of Oscar and Lucinda

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SOURCE: Richey, Norma Jean. Review of Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey. World Literature Today 63, no. 3 (summer 1989): 534-35.

[In the following review, Richey examines the symbolic elements in Oscar and Lucinda, praising Carey's characterizations of the dual protagonists.]

Peter Carey has established himself as one of the best contemporary writers of fiction. His last two novels, Bliss and Illywhacker, were finalists for the Booker Prize, and Oscar & Lucinda was an early contender. Carey has both imagination and intelligence, and his writing gets better with every venture, though I am not sure anyone can write a better picaresque novel than Illywhacker.

Oscar & Lucinda tells the story of two misfits, unsuited both by nature and by parents who raised them according to personal rather than traditional communal values. Oscar's father is a religious fanatic and an erudite collector of strange sea life whose son is indeed an odd fish; Oscar is totally ill suited for being anything but an oddity in his combined ignorance and innocence, using gambling skills to support a theological vocation. Lucinda is an Australian heiress who meets Oscar between two worlds—on a boat en route from England to Australia. Their entire relationship continues as a metaphorical journey between two worlds: between England (past) and Australia (present), between religion and reality, between moral order (as in Kant's categorical imperative of “ought”) and the exigencies of poverty and greed.

These two mismatched individuals find each other in an odyssey that mocks English rigidity and Australian mores. The strong-willed couple are outcasts and gamblers who find themselves like each other. They bind their destinies in a glass church that they construct for transport to a near-wilderness settlement in Australia. The church, a fragile symbol of beauty and meaning, is a measure of their own values in a mediocre world in which they find themselves so strangely adrift.

Carey used the device of a figure seen passing in a boat in Bliss, when a glimpsed female was viewed as a romantic object, echoing Byron's words, “I did but see her passing by / Yet I shall love her 'til I die.” Oscar is far too weak and human to be seen as a Byronic figure as he passes in a boat (sitting inside the glass church thus transported). Oscar's destination is toward his own heart of darkness, and the savagery Conrad showed in Kurtz envelops Oscar as he sees the mindless and ambitious head of his caravan victimize both whites and Aborigines. Carey has a knack for making vignettes tell a historical chapter, as he does here in showing the mistreatment of Aborigines in a morality-play-like sketch, or as he did in showing the communist movement in one section of Illywhacker. For Carey, the small boat in which Oscar rides is a ship of the state of Oscar's sensibility, carrying Oscar's vision and his reality, his aspiration and his destruction.

Oscar dies in the church in the boat, drowned hours after having been seduced by this strange woman. He then consummates a will, leaving everything he owns to this strange woman—within hours after his first and only sexual experience. The will results in the loss of Lucinda's fortune, gambled by Lucinda to Oscar as a gesture of faith in his journey and his love for her. Lucinda is left poverty-stricken and eventually becomes a laborer and a labor activist. This does not mean, however, that all's well that ends well, but rather that the world is such a chaos that everything is a gamble, however matters turn out.

Carey's writing often balances elements which create a wonder of words that somehow keep emotions at a distance. Carey is not distant on the subject of death, and his account of Oscar's dying is a powerful example of his greatness as a writer.

A great bubble of air broke the surface of the Bellinger and the flying foxes came down close upon the river. When they were close enough for his bad eye to see, he thought they were like angels with bat wings. He saw it as a sign from God. He shook his head, panicking in the face of eternity. He held the doorknob as it came to be the ceiling of his world. The water rose. Through the bursting gloom he saw a vision of his father's wise and smiling face, peering in at him. He could see, dimly, the outside world, the chair and benches of his father's study. Shining fragments of aquarium glass fell like snow around him. And when the long-awaited white fingers of water tapped and lapped on Oscar's lips, he welcomed them in as he always had, with a scream, like a small boy caught in the sheet-folds of a nightmare.

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