Where to Start with Peter Carey: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Peter Carey — whether to begin with Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang, or Jack Maggs. A complete reading guide.
Peter Carey (born 1943) is the Australian novelist who has won the Booker Prize twice — for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) — and whose fiction ranges from fairy-tale invention (Bliss, 1981) to historical reimagination (Jack Maggs, 1997) to the first-person voice of Australian legend (True History). He has lived in New York since the late 1980s; his fiction remains deeply engaged with Australian history, politics, and the legacy of colonialism, while drawing on a range of formal and narrative resources that make him one of the most inventive novelists in the English-speaking world. He is one of only four writers to have won the Booker Prize twice (the others being J.M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Atwood).
Where to Start: Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
The essential Carey — and one of the most romantic and inventive Booker Prize winners. Oscar Hopkins grows up in Devon, the son of a Plymouth Brother, develops a religious obsession with gambling (he interprets the fall of a coin as divine instruction), trains for the Anglican clergy, and eventually travels to New South Wales. Lucinda Leplastrier grows up in the Australian bush, inherits a glass factory, and becomes a passionate but losing gambler. They meet on the ship to Australia and find in each other a kindred spirit.
The novel is structured around the extraordinary wager — to transport a prefabricated glass church from Sydney to the remote mission at Boat Harbour — and it uses this absurd, beautiful project to explore the relationship between faith and chance, between the colonial impulse and the landscape it encounters. Carey’s prose is inventive and warm; the novel’s ending, when it comes, is devastating in the way that only a novel of this length and generosity can be.
True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Carey’s most celebrated novel and his most distinctively Australian. Ned Kelly — the Irish-Australian outlaw executed in Melbourne in 1880, now a national icon — narrates his own story to his unborn daughter in a voice Carey renders as unlettered, unruly, and completely alive: no quotation marks, minimal punctuation, the rhythms of speech rendered in long propulsive sentences that are simultaneously comic and heartbreaking.
The novel traces Kelly’s life from his childhood in the Irish immigrant community of northeast Victoria through his years as a horse thief, his mother’s imprisonment, his siege at Glenrowan, and his execution. Carey’s Kelly is not merely a bushranger but a political figure — a man whose defiance of the colonial power structure his community had suffered under becomes, however briefly, a form of resistance. Won the Booker Prize in 2000; one of the great historical novels in English.
Jack Maggs (1997)
Carey’s most explicitly postcolonial novel — a reimagining of Great Expectations from the perspective of the transported convict. Jack Maggs is Abel Magwitch: a man transported to Australia who has made his fortune there and returned to London in 1837 to find the young gentleman he has secretly funded. The young man turns out to be a disappointment; Jack falls instead into the orbit of Tobias Oates, a charismatic novelist (recognizably Dickens) who mesmerises and exploits him for his fictional material.
The novel is a brilliant postcolonial critique: it shows what Great Expectations looks like from the perspective of the colony and its transported people, rather than from the perspective of the English gentleman whose gentility was funded by criminal transportation.
Reading Peter Carey
Carey’s fiction is driven by a fascination with Australia’s colonial history — the convicts, the Irish immigrants, the bush legends, the relationship between the colony and the empire — and with formal experimentation. He writes in different registers for different books: the lyrical romanticism of Oscar and Lucinda, the unlettered oral energy of True History, the Dickensian pastiche of Jack Maggs. Begin with Oscar and Lucinda for the most beloved and the most emotionally generous; read True History of the Kelly Gang for the most formally inventive and the most specifically Australian; approach Jack Maggs for the most intellectually provocative.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Peter Carey?
Oscar and Lucinda (1988) is the best starting point — the Booker Prize-winning novel in which an English clergyman and an Australian heiress, both obsessed with gambling, meet on a ship to New South Wales and embark on an extraordinary wager: to transport a glass church across the Australian outback. It is Carey's most beloved novel — romantic, comic, capacious, and wildly inventive — and the best introduction to his gifts. True History of the Kelly Gang is the best alternative for readers who want Carey's most formally inventive and most distinctively Australian work.
What is Oscar and Lucinda about?
Oscar and Lucinda (1988) follows Oscar Hopkins, an English clergyman whose eccentric faith leads him to Australia, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an Australian heiress who has inherited a glass factory. Both are compulsive gamblers; both are outsiders to the respectable society they inhabit. They meet on the ship to New South Wales and form a strange, tender friendship that culminates in the wager: Lucinda bets Oscar the glass factory against her hand in marriage that he cannot transport a prefabricated glass church to the remote outback mission at Boat Harbour. The novel is a love story, a colonial history, and a meditation on faith and chance.
What is True History of the Kelly Gang about?
True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is narrated by the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, writing to his unborn daughter in the months before his capture and execution in 1880. Kelly tells his story — his Irish immigrant family, his apprenticeship to the bushranger Harry Power, his years as a horse thief and cattle rustler, his increasingly defiant resistance to the Victorian police — in a voice that Carey renders as an extraordinary stream of unpunctuated, unlettered outrage: vivid, specific, funny, and heartbreaking. Won the Booker Prize. One of the great historical novels in English.
What is Jack Maggs about?
Jack Maggs (1997) is Carey's response to Great Expectations — a reimagining of Dickens's Abel Magwitch, the transported convict who secretly funds Pip's education. In Carey's version, Jack Maggs returns to London from Australia in 1837, searching for the young gentleman whose life he has funded and who turns out to have no interest in him. He falls into the orbit of Tobias Oates, a Dickens-like novelist who mesmerises him and steals his story. The novel is a postcolonial reading of the original: from the perspective of the colony and the transported criminal rather than the English gentleman and his benefactor.
