30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account
[In the following review, Maliszewski praises the “detail and insight” of Carey's travel writing in 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account.]
In the summer of 2000, while the world focused its attention on the pockets of Sydney given over to hosting the Olympic games, novelist Peter Carey returned to the city he had left for New York some ten years before. Carey wrote about his month-long experience for Bloomsbury's The Writer and the City series. While this is Carey's first book-length work of nonfiction, he doesn't seem at all out of his element, as 30 Days in Sydney gives him ample opportunity to exercise his interests in rich historical detail and a lively, never dry analysis of the way the past shapes the present, interests always apparent in his novels. Carey subtitles his book “A Wildly Distorted Account,” and perhaps it is, since he does talk almost exclusively to his old friends, all of whom he hunts down, has dinner and drinks with, and then tape-records, tapping them for their stories. When Carey comes across a copy of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman at a friend's house, he thereafter adopts O'Brien's use of an internal interrogator, who questions Carey on his perceptions, testing him on the value of his mission and the trustworthiness of his memory. But whatever Carey trades in objectivity and selflessness, qualities which are, anyway, probably vastly overrated when it comes to travel writing, he more than makes up for with detail and insight. Readers are thus treated to stories about the improbability of Sydney (Captain Cook recommended settling five miles to the south, at Botany Bay), how architecture adapted to the environment, the importance of sandstone, the baroque development of the city's central business district, and the lingering effects of having a master-class and a servant-class coexist in close quarters. Carey's book is, finally, a collection of just the sort of stories one always wishes to hear from travelers.
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