SOURCE: "Parallel Universes," in The New Republic, Vol. 212, No. 15, April 10, 1995, pp. 38-41.

Peter Carey knows that the novelist's greatest freedom is the freedom to invent. He is an artificer, a fabulist whose work, with its gestures toward fantasy and science fiction, has always had the spectacular credibility and the irrevocable logic of dreams. When his short stories, with their hapless characters trapped in eerie, claustrophobic landscapes, began to appear in Australia in the 1970s, one thing was obvious: anything could happen in them. A man could become a truck. Aliens might invade and introduce a genetic lottery. People found their hands turning blue. Carey's imagery was vivid, surreal, scary. Australian fiction was never like this.

As Carey grew more confident, the short story became insufficient for his purposes. In the longer stories and in the novels that followed—Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), The Tax Inspector (1991)—he learned how to stitch one incident into another to create the sensation of an unstoppable plot. He never abandoned the clean, lean prose of the early work. It was if he suspected that the trappings of art would interfere with the drive to communicate his fictional universe. This clarity and raciness, combined with the obvious ambition in Carey's work, also made him stand out in an antipodean context in which the longing for work that can be taken seriously has often produced the effect of brocade: writing that is ornate, heavy, self-consciously literary. By the end of the 1980s, once readers had access to Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda, it was clear that one of the obvious points of reference for Carey's work was the Victorian novel, with its supposition of an enthralled, page-turning reader. Both Illywhacker and Oscar and Lucinda had intricate, gargantuan plots that gave readers a continent enlarged under the glass of Carey's imagination. They were received in Australia with the kind of excitement that Patrick White's novels generated in the 1950s.

From the outset, Carey's work introduced readers to a gallery of freaks, losers and fast-talking rogues. The idea of the misfit who wins our confidence and makes us believe in his humanity runs through much of his writing. Illywhacker begins with this dazzling confession:

My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die. I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar. I say that early to set things straight.

Carey prefaced Illywhacker with Mark Twain's wonderful observation, made in 1897 after his tour of the colonies, that Australian history "is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer" and "does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, incongruities, contradictions and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened." You could not find a better gloss for the way Carey set about constructing an imaginary Australia that is indisputably strange and strangely plausible. If Carey is a magical realist, it is in part because he has been obsessed by questions of nation and history, by the need for the writer to believe that his work can define how these issues are imagined and discussed. "I think the writer has a responsibility to the truth," Carey once said, "not to shy away from the world as it is."

Carey always knew his nationality was an advantage, precisely because it gave him the opportunity to make indelible images in a country still coming to grips with the antiquity of its indigenous culture, and the novelty of its transplanted European culture. Perhaps the appropriate point of comparison for the development of Australian writing in the past fifty years is with mid-nineteenth-century America, with Melville, Whitman and later Twain himself as they collectively helped to build a national literature. "With sheer will and determination and enthusiasm you can make something that's going to affect the whole history of your country," Carey once said. "We're really so privileged to be able to be working with Australian literature at this time." He fulfilled these ambitions with Oscar and Lucinda, a love story that concludes with the indelible image of a glass cathedral—"a prism, a cube, a steeple of light sliding into the green shadows"—floating down the Bellinger River in an 1860s Australia. This was indeed a beautiful lie.

Carey's new book is also obsessed by the idea of national and cultural identity. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith quite explicitly devotes itself to the construction of an imaginary world that hauntingly resembles the actual world. The contours of this fascinating allegory are more reminiscent of Carey's early short fables than any of the intervening work. Here again we enter an intimidating high-tech world, this one defined by vids and zines and simis and voice patches. (The latter allow their wearers to talk underwater.) Once more we find ourselves in the heart of a menacing, labyrinthine environment, in which the lives of the characters are governed by shadowy powers stronger than they are, and which seems to operate according to systems to which only a few have the key. In this book Carey locates these powers directly in the sphere of international espionage. The novel is a picaresque fable that ultimately assumes the shape of a political thriller, though its overriding preoccupation is with cultural power. This is a world in which arguments about culture can break up relationships and incite murder.

Carey has pushed his imaginative prowess to the limit. He has not simply intuited the possibilities of national history or character, he has invented an entire geography, and two new species of English patois. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is a tale of two nations: the Republic of Efica, a small provincial country, a cluster of eighteen islands "between the tropic of Capricorn and the thirtieth parallel"; and Voorstand, a powerful hub of cultural and economic activity that throws its long shadow over almost everything that happens in Efica, even though it's thousands of miles away, with part of its territory lying within the Arctic Circle.

Efica is a former penal colony, settled several centuries previously by the French and the English. The Efican Calendar dates from the foundation of the country, and the action of the book begins in the year 371EC. Efican English is deeply influenced by its French roots, and it has a lively vernacular. A "bride" is a pint of beer. "Mollo mollo" tells its hearer to relax. The wet season is called the "Moosone." A "turnboy," we learn, was "originally a chauffeur, but later a mechanic." To understand Efica, we are told, you need to read books such as Efica: From Penal Colony to Welfare State, published by Nez Noir University Press in 343EC. One of Efica's writers, a certain Jacqueline Bardwell, grew famous by writing a book called A Long Way from Anywhere.

Carey's Eficans are self-deprecatory, ironic, open, practical people. They are "laconic, belligerent, self-doubting." "No one can even tell me what an Efican national identity might be," someone says in exasperated despair.

We're northern hemisphere people who have been abandoned in the south. All we know is what we're not. We're not like those snobbish French or those barbaric English. We don't think rats have souls like the Voorstanders. But what are we? We're just sort of "here." We're a flea circus.

Carey's Eficans are faced with the inherent provincial dilemma of how to reconcile themselves to the fact that the metropolis knows next to nothing about how they live, may not even know where their country is. The great wide world about which they dream is not wide enough to include them. "My name is Tristan Smith," the novel begins. "I was born in Chemin Rouge in Efica—which is to say as much to you, I bet, as if I declared I was from the moon." With its huge ultramarine skies and its semitropical air, Efica might be a Caribbean island, though for Australian readers it is more precisely the kind of place Australia might be if it were imagined as a Caribbean island. You will not find the word Australia mentioned once in the book, but for Australians that is all the evidence they need. Tristan Smith is an obsessive parable of national identity.

Voorstand—"2,000 miles from north to south, 865 lakes, 10,000 towns, ninety-three major cities"—is a more dangerous and more contradictory place by far. It is both effortlessly self-confident and driven by a nostalgia for a time when it was a better, simpler country. "You hold the red passport with the phases of the moon embossed in gold," Tristan tells the nameless Voorstandish reader to whom the book is addressed. "You stand with your hand over your heart when the Great Song is played, you daily watch new images of yourself in the vids and zines." Like Efica, Voorstand is a country of the new world but its colonizers, and the shapers of its English, were Dutch.

Thus a skyscraper is a "wolkegrabber," explained in Tristan Smith's glossary as "a cloud-grabber." A rollerblader is called a "wheel-squirrel." Voorstanders perfume themselves with "odeklonje." Carey's intuition of the dialectics of Efica and Voorstand is one the novel's prime imaginative feats. The words his characters use become a key indicator of cultural difference. In context their speech is never unintelligible, but provides the fictional equivalent to that sensation of strangeness we all have when we hear foreigners speaking our language but using words we never would. We know what they mean but would say it differently. At the back of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith you will find glossaries for Efican and Voorstand English, but as you read on you will find your-self flipping to these to confirm what you have already understood.

If Voorstand seems very like the United States, then Saarlim, the great metropolis that dominates Voorstandish life, is a version of New York, with its lavish private wealth and public decrepitude. "Saarlim City was littered with abandoned papers, cans, bottles, cars, mattresses, stuffed furniture." But Saarlim, as one of its inhabitants describes it, is also the "Arts and Leisure capital of the world." Its stories are told "in every corner" of Efica, and Eficans dream about it the way children do Narnia. Tristan remarks that

it is hard for some Ootlanders to accept that they are not attuned to the soul of Saarlim. They may never have visited Voorstand but they know the names of the steegs, the kanals, the parks, the bars, the Domes…. But they do not live in Saarlim and therefore there is much that they do not understand.

Voorstand's cultural dominance of Efica is the natural outcome of its political influence in the smaller country. The two nations are allies but Voorstand exploits Efica for defense purposes, interferes in its elections and murders its citizens when the status quo is threatened. "That is the paradox," Tristan grumbles when he meets a man in Saarlim who has never heard of his homeland. "We are important enough for you to bring down our government, but you have never heard of us. You could see this gjent had no damn idea where Efica was."

This highly suggestive relationship between the two nations is focused on the outlandish figure of Tristan Smith himself. He was born in 371EC; by the novel's end, he is in his early 20s. He is raised by his mother Felicity, a Voorstander who has adopted Efica as her own and identifies with its creative ambitions. "We have a whole damn country to invent," she tells another actor in the small, left-wing, avant-grade theater company she runs. Tristan's father, Bill Millefleur, is an Efican who later migrates to Voorstand. Tristan himself is the ugly duckling of this international union.

a gruesome little thing. He is small, not small like a baby, smaller, like one of those wrinkled furless dogs they show on television talk shows. His hair is fair, straight, queerly thick. His eyes are pale, a quartz-bright white. They bulge intensely in his face. He has a baby's nose—but in the lower part of his severely triangular face there is, it seems, not sufficient skin. His face pulls at itself. He has not lips, but a gap in the skin that sometimes shows his toothless gums.

This deformed mouse-like boy grows into a man "three foot six inches tall, bandy-legged, club-footed, rag-faced," but his consciousness and his intelligence form the moral heart of the book. When the adult Tristan eventually makes the long, hazardous and tiring journey to Voorstand himself, he undergoes an astonishing transformation that turns Carey's theme of cultural domination into something grotesque, compelling and finally irresistible. The wild (Efican?) ironies of the novel's concluding events on the streets of Saarlim and, in the velvety confines of a plush "trothaus" (apartment) there, derive directly from the possibilities created by Tristan's deformities. Carey makes the most of having his innocent Efican abroad. Along the way Tristan is robbed, intimidated, and ultimately put in extreme danger of his life. He might be so ugly as to disgust casual bystanders in the street, but there is something indestructible about him, too, perhaps because he is guileless, generous and good.

Before all this can happen, however, Tristan becomes a not-very important activist against the alliance between Efica and Voorstand. The whole political mood of the novel is reminiscent of Australia in the early- to mid-1970s, the period of the Vietnam War and the sacking of Gough Whitlam as prime minister, when anti-American sentiment reached fever-pitch in some quarters of Australian society. (Voorstand goes to war against Burma, with Efican support.) Many people of Carey's generation absorbed American culture with their mother's milk, but they were also suspicious about the extent of its influence. Australia, some thought, had become the "Coca Colony." When the Whitlam government, which had pulled Australian troops out of Vietnam and sought to formulate an independent foreign policy, was sacked in 1975, some detected the hand of the CIA, up to its old tricks. These sorts of echoes help explain why this book seems to reach back to the atmosphere of Carey's early work. In part it fictionalizes the political context in which he began to publish. (For the record, Tristan Smith dates his autobiography with the year 426EC, which puts him in his mid-50s at the time of writing. Carey himself is in his early 50s.)

The dominant cultural form in both Voorstand and its satellite Efica is the Sirkus, Voorstand's "thrilling, spectacular, addictive, but also heartless" brand of mass entertainment, sometimes seen live and sometimes on vid, as Tristan would say. Its impact in Efica, we are to understand, is comparable to the influence of Hollywood and American television in Australia today. But the Sirkus has its own traditions and rituals that are inseparable from the mainstream values of Voorstand itself, where mice have souls, and it is supposedly taboo to kill any animal. Behind the Sirkus is an elaborate Franciscan ideal, introduced to Voorstand by those "brave Dutch heretics," the "Settlers Free," who were intent on a "Sirkus Sonder Gevangene"—a circus without "prisoners," that is, one without animals.

The idea has now been corrupted at the same time as the long-dead Settlers Free, with their folksy values, shining eyes and simple lives, have been elevated into the misty realms of the Great Historical Past, when Voorstand was a kinder, gentler place. It matters not that "grey furry Bruder Mouse with his iridescent blue coat, his white silk scarf, his cane" is now "nothing more than a logo-type, the symbol for an imperialist, mercantile culture." The global power of the Sirkus increases regardless, even though, as Tristan notes, "in its celebration of the individual, in its inequitable rewards for luck, in its invitation to have the audience be complicitous in the not infrequent death of performers, it ran counter to everything we Eficans held so dear."

Voorstandish readers of this book will detect in Carey's account of that nation's cultural and religious pieties a compelling parody of the uses to which Christian fundamentalism can be put, and a cool insight into the way that nostalgia for a sanitized past can intensify the confusion of the present. "We were decent people then," laments Mrs. Kram, a denizen of Saarlim City. "Bruder Mouse was not a clown. We knew him when we saw him…. We did not have all these codicils and revisions to the old laws. We ate beans and rice and raagbol pudding. We did not rape and murder. We did not thieve. We were better then."

The Mouse, the Duck and the Dog, Sirkus stars all of them, fill the heads of Carey's characters. Donald, Mickey and Goofy were never so palpable as the appalling creatures Tristan encounters on his voyage to Saarlim. If all the world is not a stage now but a themepark, we really are destined to become the residents of Voorstand and Efica. Could there be anything worse, Carey seems to be asking, than a situation in which practically everyone espoused the values of mass culture, especially in societies that did not create them? Tristan might know what's wrong with the Sirkus, and he might even, by seeming to be a part of it, have his final revenge on the Sirkus; but the Sirkus will continue to expand, like the universe itself. Driving [The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith] is the savage irony of the provincial who has learned that the metropolis is merely a larger and more powerful province than his own. "All art is provincial," Felicity declares, but her son Tristan, berating his reader from Voorstand, provides the rider that perhaps inspired Peter Carey to write the novel in the first place. "You have no idea of your effect on those of us who live outside the penumbra of your lives."