Editors Reads Verdict
Carey's most intellectually rich novel — the dialogue with Dickens is playful and serious simultaneously, and the questions it raises about who gets to tell whose story are genuinely important.
What We Loved
- The Dickens dialogue is conducted with both affection and critical intelligence
- The character of Tobias Oates raises genuinely uncomfortable questions about the ethics of using other people's lives for art
- The Australian perspective on the English 'home' that colonials were supposed to long for is original and sharp
Minor Drawbacks
- Readers unfamiliar with Great Expectations will miss much of the resonance
- The novel's intelligence occasionally outpaces its emotion
Key Takeaways
- → Every retelling of a canonical story is an argument about whose perspective the original excluded or distorted
- → The writer who extracts another person's story for their own art participates in a kind of theft, whatever the artistic result
- → Colonial subjects were expected to desire a 'home' that was built on their labor and did not want them
| Author | Peter Carey |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Vintage |
| Pages | 306 |
| Published | September 1, 1997 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction |
Jack Maggs Review
Jack Maggs is Peter Carey’s brilliant and unsettling dialogue with Charles Dickens — specifically with Great Expectations — conducted from the perspective of the colonial subject whom Dickens’s original story had treated as a plot device rather than a person. In Dickens, the Australian ex-convict Abel Magwitch returns to London to see the gentleman he secretly funded, is discovered, and dies in prison. In Carey, Jack Maggs — clearly that figure — gets a novel of his own, and the difference is the point.
The London Maggs returns to in 1837 is Dickens’s London rendered from the outside — the world the empire was built to sustain, seen through the eyes of someone who was exported to Australia as labor and formed as a human being there, in the convict settlements that Victorian England preferred not to think about. His search for his “son” Henry Phipps — the young gentleman whose education he funded anonymously — is the engine of the plot, but the novel’s real subject is what Phipps represents: the fantasy of belonging to a ‘home’ that was built on your suffering and regards you as a criminal.
Meanwhile, a young novelist named Tobias Oates — transparently Dickens — is using hypnosis to extract Maggs’s memories for his fiction, exploiting the ex-convict’s vulnerability for his own artistic purposes. The parallel structure asks uncomfortable questions about the ethics of storytelling: what does it mean to use another person’s suffering as material? Who owns a life story? What is owed to people whose experiences are taken without their full understanding of what is being done?
The novel’s intelligence is considerable, and it wears its ideas lightly enough that it never stops being a compelling Victorian thriller.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Jack Maggs" about?
A postcolonial reimagining of Great Expectations: an Australian ex-convict named Jack Maggs returns illegally to London to find the young gentleman he secretly funded, while a novelist named Tobias Oates uses hypnosis to extract Maggs's story for his own purposes. A brilliant novel about exploitation, colonialism, and the ethics of storytelling.
What are the key takeaways from "Jack Maggs"?
Every retelling of a canonical story is an argument about whose perspective the original excluded or distorted The writer who extracts another person's story for their own art participates in a kind of theft, whatever the artistic result Colonial subjects were expected to desire a 'home' that was built on their labor and did not want them
Is "Jack Maggs" worth reading?
Carey's most intellectually rich novel — the dialogue with Dickens is playful and serious simultaneously, and the questions it raises about who gets to tell whose story are genuinely important.
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