Peter Carey

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Toxic Waste

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SOURCE: Radin, Victoria. “Toxic Waste.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 168 (13 September 1991): 39.

[In the following review, Radin laments that Carey's dark tone in The Tax Inspector is overly gruesome, arguing that Carey is at his best in his lighter, earlier works.]

Peter Carey can normally be relied on for weather-resistant high spirits and brazen acts of generosity. Illywacker is narrated by a con man of 139 years who has grown a pair of magnificent breasts that suckle a babe. Oscar and Lucinda builds a glass cathedral in a river, in which the hero gratefully drowns. Bliss, being the tale of Harry Joy, triumphs over dark parable. Carey's novels are all fables or follies, but their design is so nicely demonstrated, so deeply embedded in unexpected largesse, that the reader feels stroked and loved.

By the end of The Tax Inspector, this reader felt abused. A Great Point is being made, and the finger is jabbing at us. Even the writing falters, loses Carey's typical relish and precision: there are slacknesses, surprises that slam doors rather than open them. It is an ugly story, and ugliness is not Carey's forte. We have other writers for that.

Abuse is the theme of The Tax Inspector. Ecological abuse has carved a hideous housing development and stinking motor business from fields where Frieda Catchprice, the octogenarian matriarch of the tale, had once dreamed of creating a flower farm. And now the local swimming hole is toxic, its shores littered with condoms left by old children with “lighter-fuel breath”. We never quite learn why blonde, pretty Frieda gave up her dream, but we do eventually see her as the hag she has become. Carey's sympathy wavers near the end of the book, before she detonates Catchprice Motors in a cinema-melodramatic, rather than inevitable, gesture of spite.

He is equally wasteful of Maria Takis, open-hearted, raven-haired, eight months pregnant and single—and the tax inspector of the title. Only Peter Carey could envisage a taxation department staffed by latter-day Robin Hoods, creaming the owners of Rollers to fund child-care and hospitals. But the Department has reverted to type, Dial-a-Death threatens, and Maria's attempt to save Catchprice Motors by breaking into the taxation computer by night proves a meticulously observed red herring. Likewise her rose-coloured, though plausible, romance with Jack Catchprice, whom she drops with a display of sullen hopelessness similar to that with which the author ends his book.

Although Carey has always been unusually able to draw either sex as easily as the other, The Tax Inspector reeks of dislike for men. Running through the Catchprice males is a generational curse of child abuse that culminates in the derangement of Benny, a scary adolescent who cold-bloodedly transforms himself (transformation of a more haphazard sort being a more typical, and endearing, Carey motif) into a white-haired, depilated, silk-suited Lucifer, an Angel of Death—in fact, his own.

It is unclear if the ghastly ending, combining mass destruction and possibly one of the most horrible births in fiction, is meant to be redemptive, but it leaves an awful lot of gore on the ground. Here in Franklin, Australia, are Sam Shepard's Badlands without his warmth, crossed, when the action goes urban and upwards, with a sort of Sydney After Hours. Carey used to write of freakishness and make it seem friendly and compelling. He is now writing, in unforgiving dissatisfaction with contemporary life, of freaks.

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