Highbrow Hoaxers

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Australian novelist Peter Carey frequently finds inspiration in his country's rich social history. In True History of the Kelly Gang, he chronicled the exploits of the bushranger Ned Kelly. In Jack Maggs, he penned a brilliant fantasia about an Aussie convict crossing paths with Charles Dickens. Carey's new novel, My Life as a Fake, is an absorbing, mind-bending tale incorporating another odd corner of Australian history: one of the nation's most bizarre literary scandals, the Ern Malley hoax.

In 1944, two conservative, antimodernist poets invented a literary working-class hero—a garage mechanic who composed surrealist verse, which his creators stitched together from snippets of Shakespeare, a dictionary and a U.S. Army report on mosquito control. They submitted the works of "Ern Malley" to Angry Penguins, a respected literary journal in Adelaide, intending to ridicule the unclothed emperor of modern poetry. Their joke had a bitter, unintended result, however, when the magazine's editor was tried on obscenity charges.

Carey quotes original documents from the scandal extensively but updates the action to the early '70s and transports a now lone hoaxer, Christopher Chubb, to Kuala Lumpur. The book's narrator (and Chubb's hoaxee) is Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a highbrow literary review based in London. When Chubb shows her a single page of verse written by Bob McCorkle (the novel's Ern Malley), Wode-Douglass becomes obsessed with publishing work bearing his name. The mainspring of Carey's story is a fascinating statement by Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, years after the original hoax was exposed: "I still believe in Ern Malley." In Carey's rendering, Bob McCorkle, the fictitious poet, is not only believable but actually comes to life—and then proceeds to haunt Chubb, his creator, to a gruesome end. It is a thoroughly gripping melodrama, rich with implications about the power of the imagination—and the greater power of fate.

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This tale of a monster emerging from the human mind and the international pursuit of a crumbling manuscript closely follows the canons of the 19th century Gothic novel. Yet Carey does right not to belabor his debt to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which haunts every page. Carey unfolds his plot in a Chinese-box construction of narration within narration, focusing mostly on Chubb's telling his story to Wode-Douglass in a hotel bar in K.L. It's a convention straight out of a Regency-era chiller: the aged friar revealing the horrid skeletons in the abbey closet.

Much of the fun lies in Carey's bravura manipulation of the clichés of genre fiction. Some readers might find the diabolical Chinese women in the grisly finale to be an offensive caricature, reminiscent of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu epics, but the scene plays absorbingly well as the denouement of a revenge tragedy.

As he did in True History of the Kelly Gang with its deliberate misspellings and solecisms, Carey sets stylistic obstacles in the reader's way in his new novel. He abjures the use of quotation marks for dialogue, which gives his pages a stylish, neomodernist look, but as the narrative structure grows more convoluted, the reader is often left wondering whether a line is dialogue or the narrator's commentary. Given Carey's many allusions to T.S. Eliot, this complexity might be intended to suggest the elusiveness of certain knowledge about human identity—or it might be merely pretentious. And his attempts to give the novel a high-literary gloss, with frequent references to Eliot, Ezra Pound and other 20th century masters, sit uneasily with the book's penny-dreadful ancestry.

The setting in Kuala Lumpur before the gleaming malls and the luxury hotels were built gives My Life as a Fake a pungent, sweaty reality that enlivens most of its pages. But when the action quits Malaysia, Carey wanders into fairyland, as in an inaccurate reference to "religious police" in Bali arresting people on the streets during Ramadan—apparently a confusion of the Muslim fasting month with the Balinese Hindu feast of Nyepi, a single day of sequestration and introspection. Although observance of Nyepi is enforced by temple authorities, Indonesia, unlike Malaysia, does not have religious police. Yet none of these peccadilloes detracts from the novel's momentum, which continuously hurtles the reader forward. Eliot himself, in an essay defending Wilkie Collins, the Victorian master of melodrama (and author of a great thriller with an Asian setting, The Moonstone), laid down the dictum that the first requirement of any literature is that it be interesting. In this regard, Carey succeeds decisively.