[Daniel is an Australian critic. In the following excerpt, she provides an overview of Carey's works through Oscar and Lucinda.]

Herbert Badgery is not only negotiating with the reader to sell us Carey's Lie. He is also the narrator, the Spieler gobetween, the entrepreneur between the characters and the writer, and he is not an honourable intermediary: some of the history he is selling us has been stolen from Leah Goldstein. Outraged, Leah accuses Herbert of the theft:

A hundred things come to me, things that amused me at the time, touched me—and now I see they were only excuses to thieve things from me. And even then you have not done me the honour of thieving things whole but have taken a bit here, a bit there, snipped, altered and so on. You have stolen like a barbarian, slashing a bunch of grapes from the middle of a canvas.

But who is the barbarian? Leah blames Herbert but she does not suspect the existence of the Pig Tyrant Carey.

At the start of Illywhacker, Herbert is beached, 'like some old squid decaying on the beach'. In Carey's story, 'Concerning the Greek Tyrant' [from The Tabloid Story Pocket Book, edited by Michael Wilding, 1978], Homer's characters are beached too, waiting on the beach because Homer is tossing in a fever, afraid he cannot cope with the next episode, afraid Odysseus will accuse him of mismanagement, afraid of mutiny. Odysseus reminds him sharply that it is worse for the men waiting on the beach. Echion is a battle-scarred veteran, questioning the reason for his terrible sufferings, and so is a dangerous character who could start the mutiny Homer dreads. Suspicious of Odysseus, Echion reads his papers and finds they are not navigational but verse—and contain a plot to kill him. Angry, Echion resolves to escape but Homer, a man he did not know existed, intervenes and ties him up. Echion manages to free himself and escapes—only to die in exactly the way Homer had plotted. But Echion's death was for nothing. Homer scrubbed the episode. We are left with a strange pity for Echion—Echion who is only a possibility Carey sees in Homer's story, a possible character, not even a real character. Before he died, Echion scrawled in the dust, 'KILL THE PIG TYRANT HOMER WHO OPPRESSES US ALL'. What of Carey whose existence Echion never suspected? Echion dies ignorant of the existence of the real Pig Tyrant, Carey. Carey is Echion's killer—and gets off scot free, while Echion lies bleeding in the dust. Behind Homer is the Pig Tyrant Carey.

So who stole Leah Goldstein's story? Who is the barbarian who did the slashing? Herbert or Carey? Who killed Harry Joy and sent a Good Bloke to Hell? Who stole Herbert's daughter, broke up his marriage, sent him to prison, made him live for 139 years and left him beached like an old squid? The Pig Tyrant Carey. But then being written up is no novelty to Herbert, in fact it is one of his weaknesses. So he has some good business deal with the Liar, who is outside the showroom where Herbert is trying to sell us his used-history. So sit back, relax and buy. Lies for sale.

Bliss is a novel built on an Escher double vision of heaven and hell, life and death, bliss and despair. But it is not so simple as double vision: Carey writes of 'the infinite onion of the universe' and of peeling back layers and layers of reality. A Godelian layering runs throughout his work, up and down a Tangled Hierarchy. One of his best known stories is 'Peeling', where layer after layer is peeled away from the woman revealing first her marginal selves, and finally a white doll. Underneath the layers of reality, which Carey peels away one by one, is the white doll, an absurdist truth.

I like to write like a cartoonist—I look at things that exist and push them to their ludicrous or logical extension … When you push far enough, you can find yourself in some strange and original places. [Peter Carey in an interview with Janet Hawley, in The Age (26 September 1981)]

This is a Liar's push, 'ludicrous or logical' extensions of things, reminding us at every step of his own strategies and artifice. In 'The Fat Man in History', Carey comments on Alexander Finch.

He enjoys himself with these theories, he has a love of such constructions, building ideas like card houses, extending them until he gets dizzy and trembles at their heights.

Thus does Carey build his fictions, like card houses, which leave the reader dizzy and trembling at their heights. Often Carey begins with the seemingly familiar, then suddenly jolts us into the surrealistic or the absurd. Often he works through a shift in our temporal or spatial bearings, disorienting the reader. His characters are sliding identities, who suddenly slip into a new marginal self or into a different time scale. Carey has a wonderful sense of play, enjoys playing with those incongruous aspects of reality that blur and trick, events that are no longer innocent but deceptive and devious. The Liar flaunting his Lie.

Born in 1943, Peter Carey grew up in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, where his father ran the family car business. He attended Geelong Grammar for seven years, then studied science for one year at Monash University, drawn to chemistry as a magical world, 'transmuting one element into another' [Carey in an interview with Alison Summers, in The National Times (1-7 November 1985)]. In a way which recalls Foster, Carey found magic in

organic chemistry—which I never understood—but it was the alchemy of it that fascinated me, things changing into other things. So perhaps whatever it was I was looking for in organic chemistry I finally found in fiction. [Carey in an interview with Candida Baker, in Yacker: Australian Writers Talk about Their Work, 1986]

He then joined an advertising agency, where he worked with Barry Oakley, Morris Lurie and Bruce Petty. He lived in Melbourne until 1967, then he went to London and, in 1968, wrote a novel, 'this very maniacal and highly mandarin novel which out-Becketted Beckett and out-Robbe-Grilleted Robbe-Grillet' [Carey in an interview with Frank Moorhouse, in Australian Literary Studies (October 1977)]. Now he mocks the obscurity of it and, believing firmly in 'the possibility of popular art that's good art in anybody's terms' [Carey in an interview with John Maddocks, in Southerly (March 1981)], he prefers to write for as broad an audience as possible. He returned to Australia and advertising, which he wrote about in 'War Crimes'.

The story is actually just like real life, like working in an advertising agency. It pushes things to extremes a bit—people are shot rather than fired. But that's just the logic of business anyway … That's my business story.

His first collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History, was published in 1974 and in 1980 the second, War Crimes, which won the New South Wales Premier's Award. A combined collection of his stories was published as Exotic Pleasures and his stories have been translated and published in Japanese, German, Dutch and Swedish.

Written while Carey lived in a Queensland commune and commuted to a Sydney advertising agency, his first novel, Bliss, won the New South Wales Premier's Award and the Miles Franklin and national Book Council Awards. Critics at the Cannes Film Festival were not enthusiastic about the film Bliss, but in 1985, it won the Australian Film Institute Awards—Best Film, Best Director, best Script (written by Carey and Ray Lawrence). His second novel, Illywhacker (1985) won The Age Book of the Year Award, The National Book Council Award, the Barbara Ramsden Award of the Victorian Fellowship of Australian Writers and was short-listed for the 1985 Booker Prize. First published in 1988, Carey's third novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is a dazzling Lie set in the eighteen-sixties. Carey suggests,

A lot of it's to do—I think—with Christianity and Christian stories and their effect on our culture. I'm interested in that; I grew up with it around me, but the tales seem to have gone now, just the last echoes of them are around … [interview with Baker]

Shades of the storytelling in Bliss, which is itself a 'post-Christian' novel. In a shimmering play of light and dark, Oscar and Lucinda is also about the molten mysteries in the manufacture of glass—and the manufacture of the Lie.

Carey's literary kin include Borges, Barthelme, Brautigan, Vonnegut, and in some ways Marquez whom Carey much admires for 'his ability to blend elements of fantasy and reality on a big scale, with some complexity'. Other writers he enjoys include the French new wave writers (Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Butor), Kosinksi (especially The Painted Bird), Faulkner, Kerouac, Joyce and Nabokov 'who really loved setting little rabbit snares'. Carey's stories bring to mind Borges' idea of the 'secret plot', the arcane element in narrative. Borges' theme of a man caught in a trap he has himself unwittingly constructed is Carey's theme in the story 'Kristu Du' as well as Bliss, but it runs throughout his work. Like Borges' stories, Carey's are often built on precise, substantiating detail which brings a weird air of probability to the fantastic and the bizarre, a disturbing vision of the unknown and the nightmarish emerging from inside the known.

In 'Crabs', Carey moves from the apparently familiar into the sudden futuristic or surrealistic world where the Karboys prowl and plunder, while Crabs himself, a nervous daredevil trying to escape from his own fears, finds himself plunged into the drive-in nightmare. The drive-in theatre is in part a refugee-camp, where he is stranded, being stripped of hope as his car is stripped first of two wheels, then of generator, carburetors, distributor, battery. He plots against his loss, struggling to reconstruct his hopes with the car, but under the bonnet are gaps, holes, emptinesses. Trucks arrive bringing other crippled cars, further distorting his hopes of escape. He decides that 'to be free, you must be a motor car or vehicle in good health' (The Fat Man in History), and so becomes one. When he moves freely outside the fence, he finds only a deserted world, and is left looking through the fence at the lights, the movement, the people inside the theatre boundaries. Carey himself has commented,

he spends all his time escaping from something which he finds unsatisfactory only to realise finally that what he's trying to escape from is the world, and there he is outside the fence.

He is left trapped in the wasteland outside the fence.

In 'Peeling', the narrator is contemplating the prospect of unhurried exploration of the woman, Nile, preferring 'to know these things, the outside layers, before we come to the centre of things'. Their relationship, he insists, is 'beyond analysis', his sense of time is stilled—'Normally it seems to be late afternoon'. He is content to contemplate change as a slow process, in slow motion, disappointed when she hastens it, and finds her behaviour promiscuous. His slowness is very deliberate, a practised discipline of eking out pleasures, for fear of emptiness, of nothing to do. In a world of white and her white dolls stripped of feature, where he would prefer more colour, 'more character about it', he contemplates 'moving layer after layer, until I discover her true colours'. He finds first the other marginal selves she contains, the young male, the woman beneath the male, but then as a stocking is unrolled, a limb disappears, until she is exposed as nothing, only the fragments of a small white doll without features. The more he tries to discover her true self, the more tightly he is embroiled in a surreal nightmare: the threads unravel and reveal nothing. 'Peeling' is a brilliant, surrealistic fiction of the fear that, if we peel back the layers of the infinite onion of the universe, there will be nothing, or only an image, without features.

Two stories hinge on absurd contradiction, an existential paradox. In 'Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion', Carey creates a Kafkaesque predicament, in which the narrator, Shepherd 3rd Class, is engaged in an absurd activity, employed by The Company to prevent the horses falling into the swimming pool and drowning. He feels bound to remain in his job until they all drown, which it is his job to prevent. When he deliberately allows them all to drown, so that he will be free and able to leave the Pavilion with Marie, replacement horses are delivered by The Company the next day. 'A Windmill in the West' has a similar absurdity but is more elaborate. The American soldier stands at his post on the line of electrified fence, which shimmers away into the distance, dividing east and west, one side designated the United States, the other Australia. His duty, to prevent unauthorized people from crossing, is to be carried out in ignorance of the length, shape, status and function of the line. In isolation, ignorant of what the line divides, encircles or contains, he loses all orientation, confusing east and west, inside and outside. In the absence of categories, he tries to devise his own measurements and definitions, killing scorpions in order to calculate the area of desert now free of scorpions. The spatial dislocation extends to a dislocation of his sense of self, a loss of connection with his own reflected image.

He can see his face in the shaving mirror, like the surface of a planet, a photograph of the surface of the moon in 'Life' magazine. It is strange and unknown to him. He rubs his hands over it, more to cover the reflected image than to feel its texture.

Unable to determine the significance of the aeroplane, he finally shoots it down. He acts distantly, as if observing his own actions and he has no categories by which to assess the significance of his action. Within a surrealistic structure, this is a marvelous Kafkaesque fiction of disorientation and loss of the categories by which we define and determine our actions.

'American Dreams' turns on the notion of the real and the artifice co-existing, the scale model the means of both realizing and destroying the dreams of the real country town. The idea of building, which runs through 'Kristu Du' and later Illywhacker, is part of Carey's transmutation of things as well as people. The story builds up the mystery of Gleason's actions, and speculates on his motives. The townspeople's dreams of the big city, wealth, modern houses and big motor cars, their American dreams, are realized through the model town. But the town is stilled too, stopped on the knife-edge of its self-consciousness, transfixed in the past. The narrator is left feeling guilty and, like the townspeople generally, bereft of his dreams. Unlike the slow, suspenseful building in 'American Dreams', 'Report on the Shadow Industry' immediately proclaims its central fiction of an industry, with factories, all the encumbrances of industrial technology and commercial marketing—of which the product is shadows. Shadows have different value, good and bad, beautiful and despairing, but, without shadows, there is 'the feeling of emptiness, that awful despair that comes when one has failed to grasp the shadow'. At the end, the narrator admits

My own feelings about the shadows are ambivalent, to say the least. For here I have manufactured one more: elusive, unsatisfactory, hinting at greater beauties and more profound mysteries that exist somewhere before the beginning and somewhere after the end.

Carey turns the fiction round to comment on itself and the manufacture of shadows, without which there is only emptiness.

In 'The Fat Man in History', the revolution spawns a new notion of fat men as greedy oppressors and, somehow American, grotesque enemies of the people. Alexander Finch is the secretary of the clandestine 'Fat Men Against the Revolution', living communally with its leader Fantoni and four others in a slum ghetto, their only trusted link to the outside world, Nancy Bowlby. The story builds to the fantastic notion of eating her as a political protest, which in Finch's formal rationale becomes an act of consummation by which the Fat Men will purify the revolution. But it is Fantoni himself whom they devour, when the man-who-won't-give-his-name kills Fantoni and assumes his role. The unexpectedly chilling end is the discovery that the whole sequence is part of a continuing experiment, a study of revolution in a closed society in which Nancy always precipitates change and the heir-apparent, the-man-who-won't-give-his-name, always supplants the Fantoni.

These are unforgettable fictions, the kind which lodge in your mind ineradicably and open up new strange territories of the real. Reality smudges across into the fabulous and the fantastic, as these fictions construct their own points of reference and then suddenly offer us new bearings on an old reality. Out of this exploration of the dark myths comes a new perspective on the real. All the stories in The Fat Man in History have what Carey has called a 'cool, hard surface', pared down, precise, with a finely tuned logic by which he elaborates the central absurdity or fabulous notion.

As a collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History I think is unsurpassed in Australian literature, even by War Crimes which is another brilliant collection. Carey has commented that, although his characters tend to be defeated, in War Crimes 'the characters are starting to win' because it is 'a more complex battle and a more complex defeat'. In War Crimes, Carey explores collective fears and imaginings of the future. Vast and awful possibilities loom up out of the present, which the mind finds intolerable and shuns. Carey takes us into these possibilities, makes us examine them, recognize and work out our choices.

In the title story ["War Crimes"], the narrator insists he is one of us.

And I am not mad, but rather I have opened the door you all keep locked with frightened bolts and little prayers. I am more like you than you know. You have not inspected the halls and attics. You haven't got yourself grubby in the cellars. Instead you sit in the front room in worn blue jeans, reading about atrocities in the Sunday papers.

He knows he will, in the end, be judged, by people who 'have supported wars they have not fought in, and damned companies they have not had the courage to destroy'. He will be judged a tyrant, a psychopath, an aberrant accountant, but, in this war, he insists his conduct is no aberration, but a more deliberate version of the normal and accepted conduct of business in our world. This is the norm of commercial war, their methods of motivating salesmen 'historically necessary'. He and Bart have become 'the Andy Warhols of business', and the story has, at moments, a macabre humour, with Bart strutting in his cowboy boots and waving his gun menacingly at top executives. The story has truly a black absurdist humour, full of menace and horror, which owes much to the cool, elaborating detail by which Carey relentlessly convinces us of its truth. It is set in the bitter disenchantment of the future, in a world in which there are roving gangs of vagabond unemployed and apocalyptic sects preach millennial doom, a future which is railing at its own disarray and 'surely, the Last Days'. The multitudinous unemployed camp around the boundaries of the food factories, executing the executive who appears outside its gates until they are themselves the victims of atrocities carried out by an army of workers under the orders of the accountant who watches from his window.

As I watched men run through the heat burning other men alive, I knew that thousands of men had stood on hills or roofs and watched such scenes of terrible destruction, the result of nothing more than their fears and their intelligence.

In the interests of business, Bart's hatred is diverted to the unemployed, by day obscure grey figures in a drab landscape, by night a menace licking at the face of darkness.

Some stories in War Crimes hinge on a central paradox, such as 'The Journey of a Lifetime', in which all the mystique and wonder of the train journey, so long anticipated, is sullied and corrupted by its purpose, a journey of execution and death. In 'The Uses of Williamson Wood', the grim, cruel reality of sexual assault smears across the girl's fantasy world, which becomes also the domain of her rebellion and revenge. Carey sustains the two worlds finely, as they blur into each other. Some longer stories are constructed out of a central absurdist notion, which Carey elaborates into an image of a futuristic society. In 'Do You Love Me?', he begins with the wondrous notion that parts of the country are becoming less real. Then he traces the beginnings of dematerialization, first of the neglected nether regions of the land, then of buildings and finally of people.

In 'The Chance', one of the best of Carey's stories, he sets up a futuristic world in a post-American era, where people undergo grotesque change in the Genetic Lottery. Social institutions are breaking down, abandoned ferries rust away, gangs of unemployed rove through the streets, people plunder and devastate isolated by fear and self-interest, religious sects are spawned—all through 'the total embrace of a cancerous philosophy of change'. The narrator begins to rediscover some of the moral values and categories of the remembered past but cannot avert the girl's grotesque change into an old hag so she can be part of the Hup revolutionary vanguard. In the Genetic Lottery, 'a new shrill current of desperate selfishness' is carelessly fostered by the exploiting Fastalogians and the people are the blind accomplices to their own ruin. With each change, the self gains a new outer cladding and loses a little of the remembered past. The story grows from absurd notions of change and beauty, which twist around into ugly people in an ugly society. Underneath the blindness of the people is Carey's sense of an aesthetics of the real.

Throughout War Crimes, the notion of aesthetics recurs in fantastic ways. The narrator in the title story ["War Crimes"] is horrified by factories which are for him monstrous yawning caverns in which terrible mutilations are carried out, but he is horrified too at the idea that factories might be less ugly, less brutal. In 'Exotic Pleasures', the superficial beauty of the silken blue Pleasure Bird blinds Lilly to its menace so that she becomes an accomplice to its ultimate 'complicated and elegant victory' over Earth. In 'Kristu-Du', the aesthetics of an ideal blinds the architect to the ugliness and horror of the tyrant for whom he constructs his beautiful gleaming dome. Employed by a mass murderer but anaesthetized by his dream of Kristu-Du, the architect has an almost mystical faith in its saving power, 'an immense benevolent force capable of overthrowing tyrannies and welding tribes into nations'. He abrogates all moral values and categories in pursuit of his dream, but is left only with the twisting irony of an architectural error. Through all of these, as in 'The Chance', Carey suggests that an aesthetic which owes no allegiance to the real and the moral is a destructive force which threatens the future of our world.

In 'War Crimes', Carey says of Bart:

His mind was relentless in its logic, yet fanciful in style, so the most circuitous and fanciful plans would always, on examination, be found to have cold hard bones within their diaphanous folds.

Carey's stories too have cold hard bones within their diaphanous folds. Carey has suggested,

The stories themselves ask questions. They say 'What if?' You look at the way people live their lives, and ask if they have to live like that; what happens if they organise themselves another way?

Pushing the hypothetical through to horrifyingly logical limits, he speculates on what happens if the new shrill self-interest is unchecked, if unemployment is a matter of indifference, if the Americans stay, if the Americans go, if we pursue beauty according only to glossy phantoms of it and without regard for the beauty of the real world. He speculates on self-interest as the basis of ethical and politic I systems, watches the world begin to dematerialize, watches it taken over by exotic birds and plants which destroy it, watches it submit to an alien power in pursuit of an absurd notion of change and beauty. His fictions shock and jolt the reader, startling him out of conventional attitudes and perhaps out of an apathy which is complicity and assent to a grotesque future.

The caretaker who was the last to leave the I.C.I. building, just as it was dematerializing in 'Do You Love Me?', looked almost translucent and claimed he had been able to see 'other worlds, layer upon layer, through the fabric of the here and now'. In all Carey's stories, there is a translucency, through which we glimpse the infinite onion of the universe, with all its layers of reality. Carey sets up extravagant worlds which reflect a fantastic mirror image of reality and peels back layers in the Godelian hierarchy of existence. In Bliss, Harry Joy also discovers 'that there were many different worlds, layer upon layer, as thin as filo pastry'. His first death lasts for nine minutes, during which time ecstasy touches him and he finds he can slide between the spaces in the air. He recognizes 'the worlds of pleasure and worlds of pain, bliss and punishment, Heaven and Hell'. At the very start of the novel, Carey sets up the double notions that are our landmarks, the points from which we take our bearings as we move through strange new territory. Life and death, pleasure and pain, Heaven and Hell, bliss and punishment, embodiment and disembodiment—these are the poles the novel offers at the start, as Harry Joy slides between the spaces in the air above the earth peering down at the body lying below. These familiar landmarks are complicated and blurred through the novel. Like Harry, Carey is a cartographer, beginning with the known before exploring and mapping out a strange new territory, the double vision of the Lie.

Harry himself is a familiar figure at the outset: a Good Bloke, a conventional family man, living in a conventional house and style, in a conventional job. He is blind to the faults in others and to the injustices of the world which is surely conventional too. He is 'not particularly intelligent, not particularly successful, not particularly handsome and not particularly rich'. His vision will be complicated, he will stumble into strange new territories of his own life. He, who inhabits the middle ground of existence, will be thrust into the extraordinary and the extreme.

He was like someone who has lain in bed too long eating rich food: within his soul there was suddenly a yearning for tougher, stronger things, for ecstasies, for the thrill of goodness perfectly achieved, to see butterflies in doorways in Belize, to be part of the lightning dance, to quiver in terror before the cyclone.

Instead of being 'not particularly' anything, Harry Joy wants to feel the sharp edges of experience; he yearns for the bliss and the terror. In a Borgesian way, he finds both inside his own existence, when he peels back the surface layer with which he has been content and discovers new layers of his own existence, new perceptions of 'a universe made like an infinite onion'.

Harry has been 'suckled on stories' in the innocent world of childhood, imbibing a world which was fresh and green:

Dew drops full of visions hung from morning grass and old Clydesdales stood silently in the paddock above the creek. Crickets sang songs and everything had meanings. The sky was full of Gods and Indians and people smiled at him, touched him, stroked him, and brought him extraordinary gifts from the world outside where there were, he knew, exotic bazaars filled with people in gowns, strange fruits piled high, the air redolent with spices, and Jesus Christ, and the Good Samaritan, always dressed in his dusty grey robe with its one red patch on the left sleeve, and the soldier offering the dripping red sponge of wine to Jesus, and there were small boiled sweets and white sheets and the smell of bread, and floor polish and, far away, New York, its glass towers trembling in an ecstasy of magic which was to become, his father said, one day, after the next flood, a splendid book read by all mankind with wonder.

Bliss opens with a gathering of myths, myths of innocence and purity, myths that no longer hold. These myths, religious, moral, political and national, social and existential, are the myths of Harry Joy's time, which is our time. The opening of the novel is closely tied to narrative and storytelling, the inherited stories, the myths of Good and Evil and Clydesdales, of crickets and the smell of bread and floor polish, of moral landmarks lighting up the map of existence. In Harry's childhood, lit by the glow of the Vision Splendid, he received the myths. When Harry himself becomes the storyteller, passing on his heritage to his family, he transmits the stories imperfectly, without understanding them, and they take on different meanings. Vance Joy's stories have

drifted like groundsel seeds and taken root in the most unlikely places. They had rarely grown in the way he would have imagined, in that perfect green landscape of his imagination, intersected with streams and redolent of orange blossom.

In certain climates they became like weeds, uncontrollable, not always beautiful, a blaze of rage or desire from horizon to horizon.

At the outset of the novel, Carey establishes the notion of a heritage received, transmitted without understanding and thereby changed, become weedlike, choking growth. It is a heritage of meaning, which in Harry Joy's time has been lost.

Vance's stories of New York contain apocalyptic visions and conflicts between Good and Evil, but like his other stories they have changed in Harry's telling. Amid the stories of Harry's childhood, always New York, New York, 'the most beautiful and terrible city on earth. All good, all evil exists there'. Now, dreaming of New York, Bettina is marooned in one of the outposts of the American Empire. Subscribing to the articles of the American Faith, she believes in,

the benevolence of their companies, the triumph of the astronauts, the law of the market-place and the twin threats of Communism and the second-rate, although not necessarily in that order.

The townspeople are more ambivalent than Bettina, envying American power but 'wishing to reject it and embrace it all at once', at once attracted and repelled. Set, according to the Liar, on the edge of the American Empire, Bliss plays with the talismanic myth of New York, the dream of its gleaming towers.

In a novel which is a post-Christian fable of our times, Harry tries to conceive a new eschatology, a new god, new myths for our time. He makes a list of all religions and, to the Reverend Desmond Pearce, announces his decision that they are all wrong. He ponders on the notion of a new god.

Maybe it's a god like none you've ever thought of. Maybe it's a 'they' and not a he. Maybe it's a great empty part of space charged with electricity. Maybe it's a whole lot of things in a space ship and flying saucers are really angels … I will tell you two things: the first is that there is an undiscovered religion, and the second is that there definitely is a Hell.

Harry begins an ontological quest for meaning, a post-Christian quest for salvation, in a post-Christian novel where salvation and damnation are not clear, untrammelled opposites but conjoined, twin modes like the concave and the convex of an Escher vision.

As Harry begins to move beyond the Christian landmarks, to map out the new territory he discovers in the universe, the god-like narrator becomes our guide and commentator. Like the disembodied Harry registering with sharp clarity the body lying down below, Carey's narrator watches from above, from outside, observing all that is played out in the narrative and commenting on it. He plays with time and sequence, anticipating future developments, retracing earlier events, disrupting the lines of his narrative and fracturing our sense of time. He watches Aldo in the restaurant, murmuring 'It would be another minute before he would know…'. He comments in collusive asides to the reader, nudging at us: 'It was not a question that would have occurred to Harry, who had never seen his family as you, dear reader, have now been privileged to.' Like some literary deity, he knows all, sees and hears all, knows the past of all the characters, their dreams and delusions, can tell their stories in fragments, setting them in motion inside the story of Harry. He stands back, detached, grave, sometimes gently tolerant, sometimes wryly amused. Then he steps forward to comment, elaborate, dislocate and remind us of his artifice. He already knows where Harry is going, is already familiar with the territory, has already heard the story.

Harry Joy is trapped in a Hell which he has himself constructed. After his second death, Harry knows he is in Hell. He conducts periodic tests of his own sanity, making notes and observations on his own behaviour, and he amasses formidable evidence that this is Hell. On his white map of this 'unknown continent', he begins pencilling in marks, which are crude and inexact at first, 'but surely even Livingstone must have become lost occasionally and needed some high ground to see the lay of the land'. He is not only an explorer in the unknown territory of his life but also a zoologist devising keys and codes for classifying the creatures he finds in this new territory. It is an Orwellian classification and similar to [Australian novelist David] Ireland's terms of freedom and captivity in A Woman of the Future. But in Bliss the captivity is another face of freedom, the double modes of sly actors. Harry learns how to identify the Actors employed by Those In Charge to persecute the Captives.

On his walks, he saw ugliness and despair where once he would have found an acceptable world: goitrous necks, phlegmy coughs, scabrous skin, lost legs, wall eyes, dropping hair, crooked spines, lost hope, and all of this he noted.

But this dark vision of ugliness and deformity, an existential horror, is shifted suddenly, with Carey's usual incongruity, into Harry's unexpected boredom. He shrugs it off with a quick new optimism, only to have both the optimism and his car crushed by an elephant. This wonderfully parodic sequence culminates in Harry's testing out storytelling, preliminary lies, to save himself from the police, a comic anticipation of his own salvation at Bog Onion Road—and a quick glimpse of Herbert Badgery waiting in the wings, eager to start whacking the illy.

Released by the police, Harry Joy crosses the river Styx.

Barges carried their carcinogens up river and neon lights advertised their final formulations against a blackening sky.

Harry Joy, his face ghastly with hives, his suit filthy, his chest bleeding, his back sore, lounged sideways in the back seat, drugged with sweet success. The buildings of Hell, glossy, black-windowed, gleaming with reflected lights, did not seem to him unconquerable. It seemed that a person of imagination and resources might well begin to succeed here, to remain dry, warm, and free from punishment.

He resolves to be Good, trying out self-abasement and humility, but that too shifts suddenly when, with residual doubt, he determines on One Last Test because the evidence so far he finds 'insufficient to justify this terrible, risky strategy of Goodness'. In the tree scene which is a fine parody of the Tree of Knowledge, Harry conducts the Final Test and at the windows of Hell, he discovers the full family horror—Bettina's infidelity with Joel, his children's incestuous commerce. Having discovering the infernal truth of his family, his friends and the products marketed by his agency, he recoils from it to the relative safety of the Hilton Hotel. As a diversion from 'the razor-blade tortures of Hell', he fires his clients, Krappe Chemicals, and standing in the epicentre of Hell, he studies the cancer map. The whole sequence in the Hilton Hotel and the beginnings of Harry's education by his new mentor, Honey Barbara, 'pantheist, healer, whore', all culminate in David's financing his father's committal to the hospital. When, by the intervention of chance and contingency, Alex Duval is taken to the hospital in Harry's place, Harry enters the depths of his Hell and experiences a new horror, loss of identity, which is the climax of the novel and its double vision.

The hospital scenes have a splendid mixture of absurdity and horror as well as tightening the intellectual tensions of the novel. Until the outside intervention of the formidable wife of Alex Duval, Harry is steadily dispossessed of his own identity, stripped down to a residual self which is somehow not his own. The centre of his private gravity shifts and his determinations are no longer his own, but taken over by Alex. Harry contends not only with the institution but also with the constant presence of a rival claimant to the disputed commodity of Harry Joy's identity. The rival is actively resentful and reproachful at Harry's attempts to retrieve his own identity. It becomes wonderfully absurd, a kind of titanic struggle between them, each one tugging at the name and the identity of Harry Joy—the right to dress, walk, talk, behave, the right to be Harry Joy. It becomes a nightmare of dispossession, with Carey outside the frame delighting in the paradoxes, as the two Escher hands struggle for possession of Harry Joy's identity. This is classic Carey, with the companion figure of Nurse burying his memories in the garden for safe-keeping and periodically digging them up to see which ones have been stolen from him by shock treatment. Harry accompanies Nurse round the garden to check his store of memories, with the marvelous notion that one can lose one's whole identity by institutional theft or by the takeover bid of an old mate.

Through Alex, Carey exploits the notions of role-swapping and sliding identities, in which the self, whatever is left of it, is marginal, vestigial. Harry is upset in puzzling, contradictory ways by the changes in Alex as Alex grows into the role of Harry, and disconcerted by watching Alex/Harry's behaviour. It becomes a kind of split identity which they share, both marginal selves watching the shared self of Harry on which they both make claims. Harry begins to feel the pain of the people around him, developing a sympathy for the plights of others which is far removed from the figure at the start of the novel who was blind to other people and blind to the injustices of the world. But there is more to come: when Alex prevails upon Harry to accept that he should play Alex, not only does Harry quickly begin 'to embrace the pale, shuffling unhappiness of an Alex', but as Harry/Alex his whole status in the community changes radically. He ponders on the folly of seeking 'salvation by giving away the trappings of power', that is, the privilege of being Harry Joy, and realizes the consequences:

While he had still been the legitimate Harry Joy some power was attached to him … But once he was an Alex everyone knew he was a crumpled thing, a failure, defenceless. Three silk shirts were stolen from him and were worn, brazenly, in his presence …

They had authority over him. They made him sweep the concrete paths and he did it. They tried to feed him like an Alex. They did it for sport. For their amusement. They brought him big doughnuts and laughed at him when he pulled faces.

At Nurse's insistence, he writes everything he learned from Honey Barbara, particularly about food, in the book for burial in the garden, for fear of losing that too. While the new Harry Joy confers with Alice in her office and orders the old men about, the new Alex hears him and is jealous, envying the loud happy laugh of Alex/Harry, envying his peace of mind. The masterly touch here is that after all Harry's deliberations on Actors playing out roles, the novel reaches this climactic sequence of role-playing and role-swapping, in which Alex and Harry become actors playing each other. They impersonate each other, identities sliding to and fro between them, the way Heaven and Hell have been impersonating one another, sliding to and fro throughout the novel. It is the climactic pitch of the double vision on which the entire novel is built, but unfortunately the novel now begins to falter and grow frail as Carey relaxes the doubleness.

It is ironic that happiness is much more difficult to represent than misery and pain, that bliss is much more elusive than horror. In Bliss, this is a particularly pungent irony. Once the novel actually tackles bliss and salvation, it does not have the same impact or intensity as the earlier part. Honey Barbara and the idyllic existence in Bog Onion Road never manifest the same energy as the account of Harry's descent into Hell. The scenes of Honey Barbara as part of the household in Palm Avenue and the events leading to Bettina's death in the Mobil explosion, then the death of Joel, as well as the interpolated narrative of David's mock-heroic death, are all narrated briskly. But Harry himself is elusive at this stage, his motives enigmatic. Drawn to the feel of silk and money, his commercial energies are quickened again by Bettina's ability and her renewed vision of herself as a hot-shot on the way to New York. The notion of Hell recedes and Harry is content to regard himself as 'a prisoner with special privileges'.

The theme of cancer which has been sustained through the novel in moral, economic, health and political terms, develops into a futuristic vision of anarchy, against which Carey tries to set the Bog Onion Road version of salvation. It is an unequal battle and the supposedly idyllic existence of the community at Bog Onion Road does not stand up against the earlier black absurdity. In part Harry's salvation is story-telling, telling Vance's stories with new understanding.

And when he told stories about the trees and the spirits of the forest he was only dramatizing things that people already knew, shaping them just as you pick up rocks scattered on the ground to make a cairn. He was merely sewing together the bright patchworks of lives, legends, myths, beliefs, hearsay into a splendid cloak that gave a richer glow to all their lives … He insisted that the story was not his, and not theirs either. You must give something, he told the children, a sapphire or blue bread made from cedar ash. And what began as a game ended as a ritual.

Through the ritual retelling of the myths, Harry Joy regains his lost heritage and retrieves the sustaining myths which he shares with the whole community of refugees hungry for ceremony and story. When he addresses the ritual words to the circle of trees where he will build his house, they are Vance's words, with Vance's pantheism. After his third death, he is a sigh in the trees and his heritage handed down to the children of Honey Barbara and Harry Joy.

Bliss examines the myths by which we live, the myths which have failed, the myths we have lost. With a splendid absurdity, it explores the existential horror lying just below the surface of the ordinary life of a Good Bloke. Yet just as it is built on double vision, flipping from heaven to hell, from freedom to captivity, from one Escher hand to the other, so it is a work of contrary energy and paradoxical affirmation, which insists that Harry Joy is not finally trapped in Hell but can discover and explore new territories of his own existence within the layers of the 'infinite onion' of the universe. Bliss is Carey's storytelling, with Carey's narrator actually playing out the themes of the novel. It is also about storytelling with the storyteller quietly reminding us of the artifice and strategies of his own telling. It is a gentle strumming on the notion of lies and truth. In Illywhacker, no more quiet strumming, lies are the show, Herbert Badgery's subject, his specialty, his skill.

Let's relax and enjoy the show. We are in the hands of a Liar, and a showman, offering the best in entertainment, but a salesman too, working for a Liar and selling us Peter Carey's Lie, a conman.

'An illywhacker,' Leah Goldstein said loudly like someone fearful of burglars who descends the stairs, flashlight in hand, in the middle of the night.

'What's an illywhacker?' said Charles.

'Spieler,' explained Leah, who was not used to children. 'Eelerspee. It's like pig Latin. Spieler is ielerspe and then iely-whacker. Illywhacker. See?'

'I think so,' Charles said.

'A spieler … A trickster. A quandong. A ripperty man. A con-man.'

Herbert is 139 years old, born in 1886, and so the novel opens in the year 2025 A.D., unless he is lying—which he is. He is like some ancient prophet, an androgynous seer, turning into a woman, growing tits and giving suck. Now beached by time 'like some old squid decaying on the beach', he is also master of ceremonies, promising 'plenty of hanky-panky by and by relating to love of one sort or another'. His advice is 'to not waste your time with your red pen, to try to pull apart the strands of lies and truth, but to relax and enjoy the show'. From the opening proposition of the Liar's Paradox, Illywhacker is a play on truth, fiction, lies, spun by Herbert inside Carey's own web. The lies cling, adhere and trail behind us as Herbert spins his tales and whacks the illy, luring us deep inside his fictions, stopping only to remind us suddenly that he is a liar. And this he does with a true 'salesman's sense of history', exquisitely playing with time and fiction and the passage of the reader's credibility, and selling us not only lies which are his own and therefore his to sell, but also lies of our own, lies we already own. Spinner of tales and webs, illywhacker and deceiver, spieler, conman, distorter of truth and fabricator of fiction—this is the showman and narrator on whose word we, the readers, the believers and self-deceivers, the dupes, will always depend. Forget the finer points of truth, forget its boundaries and its lines of demarcation. Don't worry about who owns the Lies. The Lies are for sale. Just relax and enjoy the show.

Illywhacker is a constant delight, spinning splendid new fictions at every turn, lies which are beautiful and noble, some subsistence lies, some mean and ignoble, snivelling things, noisome, some simply bullshit. There are lies too which are political, some public and national, some historical. And there are Lies which are personal, guises and disguises of the self. And some Lies which are literary, artifices of fiction. [In "Weaving a Tangled Web of Lovely Lies," The Weekend Australian (6 July 1985)] Adrian Mitchell calls it 'an aesthetics of the lie', and certainly some are more beautiful than others, some ugly, some glossy, some tawdry, some makeshift put-up jobs, some made of sturdier stuff. But perhaps rather than aesthetics, Illywhacker is about the calibrations of the Lie and so about the calibrations of truth. What calibre suits our needs? How much truth do we really want? In the opening quotation from Mark Twain, Carey raises not only the notion of beauty and truth, but of novelty. Rich pickings for the Liar in the 'novelty' of history.

Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.

How much novel truth do we want about our history? Behind the lies is not only Herbert's specialty, 'The role of lies in popular perceptions of the Australian political fabric', but also a truth full of splendid incongruities and incredibilities, which we can buy if we want to from our own history. Herbert is selling us used-Australian history, second-hand history. It's a novelty but it's all true. Caveat emptor.

What is a 'salesman's sense of history'? It is timing, a quick sale before events run on or your buyers run off.

I do not mean about the course of it, or the import of it, but rather its scale of time, its pulse, its intervals, its peaks, troughs, crests, waves. I was not born in some Marxist planet out near Saturn where the days last a year and the inevitabilities of history take a century to show. I am from Venus, from Mars, and my days are short and busy and the intervals on my whirling clock are dictated by the time it takes to make a deal, and that is the basic unit of my time. And even if I have boasted about how I was a patient man when I sold Fords to cockies, shuffled cards, told a yarn, taught a spinster aunt to drive, I was not talking about anything more than a day or two of my life, and then off down the road with the order in my pocket.

Carey's salesman's sense of Australian history is like that of the other great Australian salesman, Peter Mathers—it has the pulses and intervals and crests of history, a history which is chaotic and yet continuous, full of bizarre twists and turns, tenuous connections and absurd lines of continuance. The fantastic and the bizarre are embedded in the stubbornly substantial and convincing. Characters come and go apparently at random, slipping off the edge of the narrative, like Phoebe and the schemer Nathan Schick, only to re-appear later. The narrative slithers in complex traces across the page, inside skins likely to be sloughed off at any moment. Like the snakes slithering through Illywhacker, the narrative itself is serpentine and sinuous, uncoiling its snake lines as if never-ending, until it tapers and finally reveals the sub-caudal scales of the tail. The tip of the Liar's tale.

In contemporary Australian fiction, Illywhacker is closest to Mathers' novels and like them, it is a form of picaresque novel, a narrative that proliferates through time and space, in which the protagonist takes on a series of roles and guises, partly because reality palls and partly because it is the only way to deal with reality—then off down the road. Like Percy Wort, whose guises sprawl through the parody family saga, Herbert plays a series of roles, changing with his chaotic passage through history. Bow-legged, blue-eyed, head shaved bald for twenty-one years, Herbert is variously Aviator with Morris Farman Shorthorn; an illiterate who learns to read in his fifties, correspondence student and later graduate; manipulator, using frailty and decency as a prisoner; used car salesman selling T-models to cockies; child assistant cannon vendor; trickster; nationalist; herpetologist; thespian; walker who favours the Gentleman's Stroll; bigamist; purloiner of church hall; architect and builder of flimsy structures with improbable materials. He is also one-time resident of Mallee hole in ground; wanderer of Western District, nomad across the face of Victoria; paternal conman with son with snake trick; hatcher of schemes; master of his own visibility; urger and enthusiast in general. But there is more: he is also a dealer and trafficker in lies, forger swapping notions of himself for accommodation, lies his currency; a thief and plagiarist, filcher of Leah's writings; and finally 139-year-old androgynous patriarch and concocter of family saga of the 'fatally flawed Badgerys'; writer, with the callused writing finger, 'the liar's lump'; and above all, spieler, the storyteller addressing a spellbound audience.

At the start of his tale, with the exquisite sense of timing of a dealer and an illywhacker, Herbert assures us there is little he looks forward to as much as the story of November 1919, when he was thirty-three (mythically speaking, just the right age). We are hooked, snared, thrust right into the middle of the show, as Herbert lands in Balliang East, in the middle of a lie about a snake, in the middle of the lives of the McGrath family, to whom he delivers value, swapping lies and fictions for free accommodation. As he counts the day of his revenge on his father on the Punt Road hill as the day of his birth, so he counts this day of landing in Balliang East as the start of his adult life. And with the true storyteller's timing, while he unfolds his tale, Herbert keeps interrupting his own narrative, to anticipate, darting head to hint at the exciting developments awaiting us there, or to retrace, darting back to an earlier episode to draw out the storyteller's connections, so that the narrative proliferates sideways and backwards as well as running ahead. Out of it grows a sense that behind every yarn, every vignette, every thread, lies another story and another and another. The forward movement of the narrative is constantly disrupted as though the narrative is conical or cuneiform and only the tip is showing: the further one delves, the more the story enlarges, deepening and complicating in a tangled hierarchy.

One of the extraordinary features of Illywhacker is the range of its settings and times. The snake narrative uncoils through the Western District, across Balliang, Geelong, Anakie, Terang, Bendigo, the Ballarat area, moving to Melbourne and the Maribyrnong house, Woodend, Jeparit and the Mallee, Bacchus Marsh and the Underhill family, then wends its way through Victoria, a few passages to Queensland, before coiling itself into Sydney—only to uncoil again for some overseas scenes in Rome and Japan. It slithers across the face of Australian history, from the Lambing Flat riots, the shearers' strike of the 1890s, the colonial era where Imaginary Englishmen strut across society, through the period of the Wobblies, the rise of aviation, the 1930s, the Depression, the Second World War and the influx of Americans, the 1950s and on into the 1970s, from there to the putative future. Herbert's 139 year life encompasses all this, either in truth or in the artifice of lie. His childhood was nomadic, his father a wandering cannon salesman, with rounds of ammunition for sale to squatters to ward off marauding shearers. He sloughs off that life with revenge on the Punt Road hill and enters the life with Goon Tse Ying, which offers him the gift of invisibility—a lie which underlies Sonia's disappearance and is later contested in the struggle over Goon's Book of Dragons. He wanders then, marries, nearly marries in Nambucca Heads until foiled by a corgi, sells cars, becomes an aviator, until his debut, when he drops down from the skies to Vogelnest's paddock.

From the moment he lands in Balliang East, Herbert is trapped inside his own snake-lie, driven to ingenious concoctions to substantiate it until the snake strikes and, killing Jack, kills off the future Herbert had devised. To Jack McGrath who is dreamer and visionary, Herbert delivers value by offering the 'gift' of the richly packaged lie of his aviator self.

I was an Aviator. That was my value to them. I set to work to reinforce this value. I propped it up and embellished it a little. God damn, I danced around it like a bloody bower-bird putting on a display. I added silver to it. I put small blue stones around it.

When others contribute 'creamy coats of credibility' to his lie, then it becomes beautiful, the nasty speck of grit transformed into the lustrous pearl and the dream of an aircraft factory. Jack McGrath becomes Herbert's straight man, the willing dupe on the other side of Herbert's lie: 'There was nothing to protect us from each other. We were elements like phosphorus and air which should always be kept apart'. The liar and the self-deceiver, the salesman and his willing customer, in idyllic union until the snake strikes. There is a snake biding its time, waiting to strike the other dupe too, the one duped by the other Liar, Carey—the reader of Illywhacker.

But a lie, though a tenuous thing in constant need of support and embellishment, is also a version of the self, a cloak.

It was the trouble with the world that it would never permit me to be what I was. Everyone loved me when I appeared in a cloak, and swirled and laughed and told them lies. They applauded. They wanted my friendship. But when I took off my cloak they did not like me. They clucked their tongues and turned away. My friend Jack was my friend in all things but was repulsed by what I really was … could only like the bullshit version of me.

Impatient with the confines of reality, Phoebe loves the liar: 'You have invented yourself, Mr Badgery, and that is why I like you. You are what they call a confidence man. You can be anything you want'. Her vision of their lives together is simple: 'We will invent ourselves'. In Maribyrnong, Herbert's inventions are more architectural and domestic, a matter of scavenging for things timber. Phoebe takes a poetic turning, writing poems Herbert cannot read. Now he looks back:

But now I know a poem can take any form, can be a sleight of hand, a magician's trick, be built from string and paper, fish or animals, bricks and wire.

I never knew I was a hired hand in the construction of my wife's one true poem. I knew only, in the midst of its construction, that Horace would puzzle me with his sympathetic eyes which would not hold mine when I confronted him.

On the edge of the novel, Horace is another marvelous Carey character: mid-wife, devotee of Phoebe, poet, housekeeper, epileptic, frequenter of strange literary rooming houses, faithful companion and itinerant Rawleigh's man, a man of many faces and roles, an incipient Herbert without the lies. Phoebe, self-indulgent and preening like a caged budgie, is in the mainstream of the first book of the narrative, until she slips over to the wings to wait for the third book, there to re-appear as a free spirit, combining her literary aspirations with her powers of sexual persuasion, playing the role of one of the great characters and hostesses of Sydney.

When Phoebe flies out of the cage she perceives as Herbert's life, he is comforted by Molly McGrath for a year, until he enters the itinerant phase again, this time complete with Charles, Sonia and the Dodge, roving Victoria in quest of survival, until he meets Leah Goldstein. Thespian now, for six or seven years, Herbert becomes part of Badgery and Goldstein (Theatricals) and Pet Suppliers, with detours into political acts which culminate in the glorious battle (and Pyrrhic victory) with John Oliver O'Dowd and his bully boys. Nathan Schick, schemer, entrepreneur, vanguard of the Americans, enters the narrative with his flashy show in Ballarat, until the departure of Leah to tend the injured Izzie and begin spinning her inventions, then the disappearance of Sonia. Herbert's encounter with Goon Tse Ying in Grafton and the bizarre severing of Goon's finger bring him to Rankin Downs Prison and, with his new literacy, to a B.A. by correspondence and new inklings of political lies.

By the third book, the centre of gravity has shifted to Charles, first amid the plague in the Mallee staring in comic bafflement and consternation at his dismantled bike, then, oblivious of all omens, launching into his marriage to Emma and the opening of his pet shop. From here the development of the pet shop itself holds the centre of the stage. As Carey weaves a vast pattern of time and place, with interpolations, crosscurrents of narrative, silvery trails of related tales that could have been told, its main forward thrust through the Badgery family and through a hundred years of history is to the Pet Emporium, into which the fortunes of all the main characters are finally subsumed. Herbert's role shifts with it, from itinerant and thespian, to prisoner living on the 'perfumed razor blades' of Leah's inventions, to patriarch and finally writer. As he writes and records, still spinning lies and fabrications, the narrative shifts forward again into the next generation, with Hissao taking charge of the family fortunes.

Herbert's role is apparently more passive in Book 3, perhaps the reason that some reviewers of Illywhacker found that part less successful than Books 1 and 2, feeling the narrative palls and the interest wanes. I find, on the contrary, that the narrative begins to tighten and intensify here, because it is at this point that Carey's conception of his illywhacker is expanding: Herbert moves steadily out of the lies of his own existence into the political and national lies of Australia, without diminishing the artifice of his own role. His role changes throughout the novel, but the major change is revealed in the sudden disclosure of the lies of his version of events. In her 'book-keeping', which, amid the dullness of her life with Izzie, has become her sacred time, Leah's letters have offered Herbert the salvation of invention. He decides 'There was nothing left for me but to teach myself to be an author. It was the only scheme available'. In a succinct and skilful sequence, Carey shifts our perspective on Leah and Herbert and the whole status of the narrative, when Leah complains that Herbert has stolen her material and stolen it like a barbarian. What follows is a contestant version of Herbert's narrative, not only alleging that his version is a concoction of stolen fragments of her writings but with specific disclaimers of details and challenges to his interpretation and representation of specific incidents. They share the same publisher, Doodles Casey, and, according to Leah, have already collaborated on other books, notably 'Gaol Bird', but Herbert regards the real subject of Leah's writings as 'not the people but the landscape and its roads … the raw optimistic tracks that cut the arteries of an ancient culture before a new one had been born'. Placed at a critical point in the novel, this whole sequence is crucial to our perception of Herbert's role in exposing the lies of Australia.

The lies of Illywhacker have such convincing substance that the issue of their truth fades and retreats, but the man with 'the liar's lump', the callused writing finger, keeps reminding us of the Lie. This is the content and the movement of the novel, and this final reminder through Leah is the culmination of the Lie of the novel. After Herbert's luminous discovery (through M. V. Anderson) that a liar might be a patriot, his last scheme is Carey's scheme, the big Lie, the all-encasing one of Illywhacker. Carey weaves the web of historical lies into his narrative, the lies of settlement and Aborigines, the lies of English colonization, the lies of whole eras, as in the 1930s.

Lies, dreams, visions—they were everywhere. We brushed them aside as carelessly as spider webs across a garden path. They clung to us, of course, adhered to our clothes and trailed behind us …

As well as the lies that cling and entrap, Herbert knows all too well the allure of lies, their soft, warm comfort:

It is why we believed the British when they told us we were British too, and why we believed the Americans when they said they would protect us. In all these cases, of course, there is a part of us that knows the thing is not true, and we hold it closer to ourselves because of it, refusing to hold it out at arm's length or examine it against the light.

The lies of Australia, its history, its society, its independence, its economy, its architecture, are finally exposed amid Sydney, the city of trickery and illusions. The lies include the lie of 'Australia's Own Car' which is 'one more element in an old-pattern of self-deception', the lie of the Holden which is at the centre of [Australian novelist Murray] Bail's Holden's Performance. All these are inside the vast Lie of Carey.

The Pet Emporium, which to Herbert and Hissao always is like stepping into a vision, every edge sharp, every colour intense, steadily becomes ever more bizarre and absurd: Mr Lo conducting ferocious arguments with an imaginary umpire, Emma practising courtesan arts in her cage with its pink venetian blinds, Herbert architecturally engaged in demolition work, then, after Charles' death, at his window amid the neon sign, enthroned high above Pitt Street while angels or parrots trill attendance. Through the schemes of Major Nathan Schick, the juggler with a myriad schemes arcing through the air. The Best Pet Shop in the World thrives in war-time and the 1940s, fed by Americans. In time it becomes dependent on smuggling of Australian animals, and bribery of customs officials, then a financial disaster, then a rusting slum until, following the absurdist death of the last recorded golden-shouldered parrot, it is reborn with Japanese investment. Like his grandfather and mentor, Hissao is an architect, building 'like a liar, like a spider—steel ladders and walkways, cat-walks, cages in mid-air, in racks on walls, tumbling like waterfalls.' His features inexplicably Japanese, Hissao is the putative future, given suck by Herbert as he waits for revolution.

Illywhacker abounds with pets, animals—snakes, parrots, goannas—generally caged and entrapped. From Herbert's first being entrapped in his own snake-lie, to the image of Phoebe as a trapped parrot, from Leah's snake-dance to Charles' instinctive skill with snakes and his peculiar impulse to tell the whole snake truth, down to the last sub-caudal scales, the pattern of snakes and snake images slithers through the narrative. When Herbert learns to read, he is transformed. 'I was an old python with his opaque skin now shed, his blindness gone, once again splendid and supple, seeing the world in all its terrifying colours.' Amid the images of cages and entrapment, amid the lies coiling and uncoiling through the novel, the narrative sheds a succession of opaque skins, until we glimpse an image of the future, splendid and supple, with the world in all its terrifying colours. Australia, The Best Pet Shop in the World, becomes a human museum, its caged exhibits an endangered species, Australians: shearers, manufacturers, lifesavers, inventors, masons, Aborigines, bushmen, artists and writers, Leah a Melbourne Jew and Herbert the 139-year-old exhibit, who cannot die 'because this is my scheme. I must stay alive to see it out.' In the vast human museum of Australia, 'the very success of the exhibit is their ability to move and talk naturally within the confines of space', as though real, as though not just exhibits of a historical lie, displaying their own capacity for self-deception. Herbert and Hissao are left amid 'this splendid four storey mirage', in the land of the lie.

Illywhacker is an extraordinary blend of comic vignettes, absurdist notions, zany fictions and convincing images of time and place rich in corroborative detail, which have an ineradicable, stubborn substance constantly challenged by the artifice of the novel. It is a vast and generous novel in which wondrous scenes abound, some of them fugitive, fleeting scenes, sharp with Carey's quick sense of a single, telling detail; some more sustained with collusive character and circumstance: Leah's emu dance when Herbert first meets her; the car selling sequence in Woodend; the battle with John Oliver O'Dowd and his bully boys; Father Moran's tale of seeing a fairy; the sergeant's thrusting the bottled finger at Herbert; the dismantling of Charles' bike by Les Chaffey, where it occurs to Charles that he has fallen among mad people; Emma's retreat to the goanna cage and the nurturing of the goanna foetus; Herbert's period of imprisonment; Sonia's fascination with the insubstantiality of things. Obsessed with truth in all its endless detail, Charles is 'a poor salesman … because the truth told thus, is of no interest to the average punter'. With his 'salesman's sense of history', Herbert's telling of it is in the true illywhacker style, playing on all its high points, teasing out its tangles where major strands knot together, interrupting the narrative to go back to some earlier episode or run ahead to anticipate some later development, telling yarns within yarns, running off at tangents and detours when they promise richer tales, but never losing the way back. Episodes spread tentacles which run on into the future or, at the most climactic moments, take a sudden dramatic turning, are left open, hanging. We are left baffled, bewildered, impatient to know, captive and waiting for explanations, which Carey withholds with a true storyteller's timing.

Herbert's story is an Australian family saga, with the family legacy of lies bequeathed to his children and to theirs. 'Spawned by lies, suckled on dreams, infested with dragons', their family history is the Australian history of lies, of self-deception, of dreams and visions preferred to truth—the calibrations of self-deception which leaves Australia a human museum, a pet shop. Throughout Illywhacker, Carey bares and flaunts his own artifice, with a rich canvas of fictions, within the marvelous strategies of the Liar and his character, liars together, partners spinning their webs of lies which cling and adhere and trail around the reader.

Like Illywhacker, Carey's third novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is a vast and teeming Lie which conjures up marvelous images at every flick of the Liar's hand. Set in the 1860s, it is an absurdist novel about the passage of Christian stories to Australia and about the stakes in the Christian bet on God. But Oscar and Lucinda is more than the myriad past behind the Gleniffer church in the present, more than the passage of dreams across the face of the 1860s. It is also a dazzling Lie about the manufacture of glass—and the manufacture of the Lie.

Behind the Prince Rupert Glassworks in Sydney, there is another factory, the 'fancy-factory' of the mind, where Lucinda and the Reverend Oscar Hopkins manufacture their dreams. And behind this is Carey's own 'fancy-factory', the Liar's workshop with its own molten mysteries, where the Lie is manufactured. As the narrator writes, he holds in his left hand a Prince Rupert's drop, 'not the fabled glass stone of the alchemists, but something almost as magical'. Formed by dropping molten glass into water, a Prince Rupert's drop seems unbreakable but, if the slender tail is nipped with pliers, it bursts into a myriad fragments, scattering grains of glass. A spectacular moment of 'fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence.' A Liar's moment. With his pliers, the Liar grips the tail of the past. In one dazzling movement, all the slivers of time and chance are spread out before us. An explosion of word and image. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence.

Oscar and Lucinda is a Liar's Prince Rupert's drop, one which shines and dances with a shimmering play of light and dark, the luminous, magical fireworks of the Lie.

Lucinda discovers the wonder of Prince Rupert's drops as a child and so learns

glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid … invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and contradictory thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.

Entranced by the molten mysteries of Prince Rupert's Glass-works and delighting in the construction of fancies, Lucinda dreams of building a structure of glass, a pyramid, a tower, an arcade of glass spun like a web, until she conceives the fabulous image of a glass church. When the lives of Oscar and Lucinda lock together, Oscar, like Lucinda, becomes entranced with the manufacture of glass. He too is captivated by the image of the glass church, dancing around it like a brolga, seeing 'light, ice, spectra'. He sees that glass is the gross material closest to the soul, free of imperfection, an avenue for glory. An actor, a contradiction, glass is a Liar's substance. Oscar and Lucinda is the Liar's brolga dance through the light and spectra of the Lie.

Oscar appears a praying mantis, a scarecrow, with wild red hair, a neat triangular face and a luminous innocence. He has a reedy, fluting voice and flapping hands, and knees which click when he runs, a nervous scuttling motion. He is a superb ungainly creature, angular, but also light, airy, 'made from the quills of a bird'. A man of 'holy profligacy', who lacerates himself with his paradoxes, Oscar is a very moving figure, from the start in Hennacombe, where he is trapped in his own bewilderment and grief. For Oscar the toss of the tor in the hopscotch game reveals the will of God, commanding him to emigrate to New South Wales, as the earlier toss commanded him to leave Theophilus and become Anglican. He receives Wardley-Fish into his life as a spiritual messenger, an agent of the Lord sent to reveal the wonders of the race-track and the proper religious activity of backing horses. In the spiritual conundrum on which the novel turns, Oscar sees his passion for gambling as vile, but his notebooks of betting data as diaries of his communion with God.

The delightful Wardley-Fish, with his awkward kindness and enduring love for Oscar, recognizes that Oscar is 'one of those trick drawings in Punch which have the contradiction built in so that what seems to be a spire one moment is a deep shaft the next.' This is the trompe l'oeil of Oscar's Escher self, the spire soaring up into dazzling light, and the shaft reaching down into the darkness of hell. The whole novel is lit by this Escher vision of spire and shaft, light and dark, the shimmering light and mysteries of glass, yet the nightmarish images of darkness and hell.

For Oscar and Lucinda, existence is gloriously random, life the play of chance, the roll of the dice—and the dividend, 'We are alive … We are alive on the very brink of eternity'. Spurning all the structures of safe passage through their lives, Oscar and Lucinda choose the exquisite knife-edge of risk. Both reject the vouchsafed life inside accepted boundaries of religious, social and moral codes, and, for Lucinda, 'The Glass Lady', the life inside the conventional roles of women in colonial society.

In colonial New South Wales, Lucinda Leplastrier is a contained creature, with,

a clean, starched stillness. But the stillness was coiled and held flat. Like a rod of ebony rubbed with cat's fur, she was charged with static electricity.

Two gamblers on an arc towards each other, Lucinda and Oscar are partners, two players across hemispheres, looking for a game. Lucinda is alienated from colonial society by her dress, her spinsterhood, her aloofness, her gambling—and her dreams. She pits herself passionately against male voodoo, determined to manufacture her dreams at her Prince Rupert's Glassworks. Yet her life is split between the glass dream and the circle of card players at D'Abbs' house, the circle which is for her an abstraction of human endeavour, the electric edge of life. Forever in search of a game, she prowls across Sydney to the Chinese fan-tan room, as she later prowls through the Leviathan, in search of the electric ecstasy of the game.

The novel abounds in images of safety, vouchsafed lives, with edges dulled. Against this, Oscar and Lucinda choose the risk and place their bets.

Like working out the odds, Carey scatters chance circumstances over the face of the novel: the Christmas pudding which turns Oscar away from Theophilus; the chance death of Lucinda's father on Palm Sunday; the chance that Wardley-Fish took Oscar to Epsom the first time; the chance of the sermon on Christmas Day, which disposed Oscar and Lucinda to accept Jeffris' proposal of leading the expedition; the chance that Wardley-Fish, who might have saved Oscar, was robbed and forced to return to Sydney; Oscar's chance encounter with Miriam Chadwick, who becomes the narrator's great-grandmother. A vast array of marginal figures press forward into the novel, from the Reverend Dennis Hasset, entranced by Lucinda's coiled stillness, to the preening d'Abbs in his habitat, from the stern fundamentalist Theophilus with the trembling hymnal soul, to the thin brittle soul of Melody Clutterbuck. As contingent character and chance event flow around them, Oscar and Lucinda play out the gamble and wager everything.

Giddy with fear of the water, Oscar's journey on board the Leviathan is a nightmare the hopscotch will of God has demanded of him. While up above, there is phosphorescence, the sea studded with sparkles of light, a luminescent sea of globes of fire, Oscar is below, a creature of dark, caught in the web of his own phobia, 'a sad and ugly creature in a fairy tale, one forever exiled from the light and compelled to skulk, pale, big-eyed, sweat-shiny in the dark steel nether regions.' Searching for a game, Lucinda journeys through the innards of the Gargantuan Leviathan to a nightmare of some monstrous creature pouring black effluent up from its stomach into the sky.

In a triumph of contingency, with the Liar waiting eagerly for the moment, the two lives come together, Oscar and Lucinda in a moment of joyous conjunction, discovering a partner. Oscar is in a cloud of electricity, Lucinda both enchanted and appalled by his innocence. When Lucinda confesses her gambling Oscar articulates the notion on which the novel turns, that gambling is noble, part of the divine design. Religious faith is a wager, a bet on the existence of God, in which we stake our lives on a structure of fancies.

'Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier, We bet … we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the Saints in paradise.'

'I cannot see,' he said, 'that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence … It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unproveable fact of His existence.'

In this splendidly Dostoyevksian proclamation, the Rever-end Oscar Hopkins insists gambling is a part of the divine scheme of things. Later Lucinda proudly asserts 'We are gamblers, in the noble sense. We believe all eternity awaits us.' We bet on the spiritual dividends.

At the Glassworks, Oscar becomes Lucinda's tangle-legged usurper, until she reveals her precious dream of the glass church. Now the moment of conjunction—glass and gamble become one. Now the splendid leap of the Lie—the glass church becomes their bet, in which Oscar and Lucinda are one, the glass church their progeny.

Born of Christian thinking, the glass church and its delivery to the Reverend Hasset is 'a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery curved, dancing with light'. Oscar bets on the benefits of sacrifice in hope of winning Lucinda's heart through the prism of the church. Both are betting their inheritance—Lucinda her fortune, Oscar his faith. The period they spend together in the cottage at Longnose Point is a coda period in the novel, a touching period of haven for them both, but quickened by the lure of the bet on the glass church. As the expedition leaves, Lucinda feels the absurdity of the whole venture, the packaged glass church not 'the crystal-pure, bat-winged structure of her dreams', but a heavy folly.

Like Lucinda's nightmarish drive through Sydney at night, on the way to the Chinese gambling den, Oscar's journey is a longer and more horrific nightmare, a hellish journey into the heart of darkness. The passage of the church across unmapped territory is a dark emblem of the cost of their fancy and the cost of the Christian fancy. Adrift and besmirched inside a laudanum nightmare, Oscar is trapped under the tyranny of Jeffris, and, during the massacre of the Aborigines, tied to a tree, he becomes a horrified, wailing witness. At Bellingen, under the crushing weight of evil, Oscar is gaunt and scraped out, haunted by his complicity in the massacre, until, in the evil heart of the land, he is driven to the murder of Jeffris. A black and absurdist Christ figure, still bearing the rope burns from the time of the massacre, Oscar becomes a man afire, burning and dancing in his own firelight, as he constructs the glass church for its final passage on the water.

Out of all the patterning of light and dark, it is the hellish darkness with which the novel ends, culminating in Oscar's death, inside his own nightmare. He wins the bet with Lucinda on the glass church, and loses the bet on God. As the glass church slides down its tilting ramp, the fractured panes of glass open to admit his ancient enemy. The flying foxes close on the river seem 'like angels with bat wings. He saw it as a sign from God. He shook his head, panicking in the face of eternity'. He dies screaming, caught in the sheetfolds of a nightmare, realizing, Like Lucinda, the glass church is 'a product of the Deuce's insinuations into the fancy-factory of his mind', a terrible folly.

If the novel is Conradian in its journey into the heart of darkness, it is also Dostoyevksian in its reach of dark and light, its religious themes of risk and gamble. In a wry literary joke, Carey even posits a link with George Eliot through Lucinda's mother which Lucinda herself disclaims when she finds Eliot out of sympathy. There are other nineteenth-century literary shadows. The style is sometimes Dickensian, wonderfully comic, with quick sketches like Mrs Stratton's walking at an angle for carrying books, thus revealing her donnish nature, or Mrs Williams' hairbrushing; or Bishop Dancer's vision of Sydney as 'an orphan's party with a dressing-up box', with maids donning tiaras, piemen dressed up as gentlemen. Or the image of the d'Abbs house, like a ball of string, a grand expensive tangle in which the pristine d'Abbs dances. In spite of all the literary play which conjures up nineteenth-century literary kin, the flickering shadows of Dickens and Eliot, the darker presence of Conrad and Dostoyevsky, yet here is unmistakably a contemporary Australian Lie.

Oscar and Lucinda is a post-Christian novel, an absurdist black comedy of the life of Reverend Oscar Hopkins, a man of burning faith, playing the hopscotch game of God's will. There is a dark absurdity in the scene of Oscar's standing among the lettuces at the Stratton house and declaring himself a theological refugee, 'called' to the Anglican faith; or the scene of Oscar, blindfolded, caught inside his own fear, being loaded in a cage by crane on to the Leviathan, a man of faith obedient to his God. This is the man who brought the Christian stories up the river with him, the stories which have vanished now as the Gleniffer church has vanished, replaced by thistles. No sign now of what the church has meant to the narrator's family: Palm Sundays, resurrections, water into wine, loaves and fishes, 'all those cruel and lofty ideas'. The narrator hears the echoes, feels the brush of ghostly presence and wonders. The great-grandson searches for an explanation of the vanished stories, meditating on the shadowy presences.

Oscar is a creature manufactured out of slivers of gospel stories: Jonah and the Whale and the parting of the waters are transmuted into the massive ship, the Leviathan where Oscar huddles below in the dark. Jesus' walking on the water becomes translated into Oscar's terror of water and death in water. No Lazarus here either, only the death of Stratton, the murder of Jeffris and the massacre of Aborigines. No miracles of driving out demons here, only the voracious gambling monster which must be fed. God spoke from the Burning Bush but here there is a fiery light and burning fire of Oscar assembling the glass church. The river that turned to blood, the story of Jesus rising from the dead and ascending to heaven—these become in the hands of the Liar, Oscar pulled down into the river waters surrounded by bat-winged figures, a sacrifice offered up to the limits of his own dream. New stories start here, handed down to Kumbaingiri Billy by his aunt, Oscar's Aboriginal Mary Magdalen, on the day Jesus came to Bellingen to construct the glass church and reach Boat Harbour by Good Friday.

In this post-Christian novel, Australia is not a Christian landscape.

You could feel it in the still shadows along watercourses. She felt ghosts here, but not Christian ghosts, not John the Baptist or Jesus of Galilee. There were other spirits, other stories, slippery as shadows.

Oscar finds his Randwick flock 'creatures of their landscape',

Sydney was a blinding place. It made him squint. The stories of the gospel lay across the harsh landscapes like sheets of newspaper on a polished floor. They slid, slipped, did not connect to anything beneath them. It was a place without moss or lichen, and the people scrabbling to make a place like troops caught under fire on the hard soil.'

The narrator marvels that, in this ancient landscape, as his great-grandfather drifted up the Bellinger River, inside the glass church, Oscar saw nothing.

The country was thick with sacred stories more ancient than the ones he carried in his sweat-slippery leather Bible. He did not even imagine their presence. Some of these stories were as small as the transparent anthropods which lived in puddles beneath the river casuarinas. These stories were like fleas, thrip, so tiny that they might inhabit a place (inside the ears of the seeds of grass) he would later walk across without even seeing. In this landscape every rock had a name, and most names had spirits, ghosts, meanings.

The glass church, with ice-walls of light, drifting down the river through the ancient landscape, with the black-suited figure inside, is a superb image of the incongruity of Christian faith in this landscape. The church cracks and crazes, into ice-knives hanging over Oscar's head, with jigsaw edges refracting a spectrum of colours over his hands. Up above, the sky is blemished, or curdled, and the glass so splintered it is almost opaque. Christianity cracks like glass, breaking up in the face of the ancient landscape.

But what of the Liar's fancy-factory, with its molten mysteries? No folly this, no insinuations of a literary Deuce here. This is a splendid unforgettable Lie, which dances with light and dark, an Escher vision of spire and shaft, light and dark, the shimmering light and mysteries of glass and nightmarish images of darkness and hell. The reader has only to break the tail of this magical Prince's Rupert's drop, open Oscar and Lucinda, and the spectacular vision begins, an explosion of magical words.