Oscar and Lucinda

Oscar and His God

Oscar Hopkins grows up in a household of radical religious dissent. His father is a Plymouth Brethren minister of fierce conviction, and Oscar’s childhood is organised around the disciplines and prohibitions of that conviction — no Christmas, no music, no accommodation with the world. When Oscar, as an adolescent, feels called toward the Church of England, this is not a mild denominational preference but a full rupture with his father’s world, a conversion experience that costs him his family and his home.

What Oscar carries with him from this formation is not the specific content of his father’s belief but its structure: the conviction that faith requires a wager, that God speaks through chance, that the outcome of events is always a divine communication to those who know how to read it. This conviction leads Oscar, via a series of providential reasonings that Carey renders with affectionate precision, to gambling. If God speaks through chance, then the roulette wheel and the card game are not corruptions of faith but extensions of it — each outcome a message from the divine, each win a confirmation of God’s presence, each loss a test of His servant’s trust.

This theology of gambling is one of the novel’s great comic-serious inventions. Carey is not mocking Oscar’s faith — the novel is too interested in Oscar for that — but he is tracing, with genuine care, the way in which an absolutely serious religious conviction can produce, by its own internal logic, an outcome that looks to the outside world like simple vice. By the time Oscar reaches Australia, he is a clergyman who cannot stop gambling and who does not, at the deepest level, believe he should.

Lucinda and Her Glass

Lucinda Leplastrier is not Oscar’s opposite but his twin. She has inherited, from a father she barely knew, a glassworks in Sydney — an industrial concern that she is determined to run herself, despite every social convention that tells her this is inappropriate, impossible, and unwomanly. She is also a gambler. Like Oscar, she gambles compulsively and without social permission, and the combination of the glassworks and the gambling marks her as someone outside the structures of respectable colonial womanhood.

Carey’s rendering of what it means to be Lucinda in 1860s Australia is one of the novel’s quiet achievements. The constraints on her life are detailed and specific — the legal, social, and economic structures that make it nearly impossible for a woman to own a business or move through professional space — and Lucinda’s responses to those constraints are furious and inventive rather than merely resigned. She is not a feminist in any anachronistic programmatic sense, but she is a woman who insists on inhabiting the space that money and intelligence have given her, regardless of what convention says.

The glass is both her business and her obsession. What draws her to it is its quality of impossible contradiction: glass is a solid that behaves like a liquid, a material that is both transparent and reflective, that can be both structural and ornamental, that is simultaneously strong and shattering. The glass church that becomes the novel’s central symbol — a prefabricated church designed to be transported through the Australian bush and assembled on arrival — is her idea, her commission, and her bet. It is also, in the novel’s governing logic, the most perfect expression of what glass is: an object of extraordinary beauty whose existence requires a degree of faith in the impossible that borders on the delusional.

The Bet and What It Means

The wager at the heart of Oscar and Lucinda is both very simple and impossible to fully explain. Oscar and Lucinda, by the time they make it, are in love with each other in a way that neither can properly articulate or act upon — constrained by Oscar’s vows, by their own social awkwardness, by the particular incapacity of two people who have spent their lives in the grip of compulsion rather than choice. The bet — that Oscar will transport the glass church through the Australian interior to the settlement at Bellingen, and that if he succeeds the church is his — is the way their love expresses itself: sideways, through chance, through a wager rather than a declaration.

What Carey is doing with this bet is something the novel has been building toward throughout: a sustained examination of the collision between English colonial culture — its faith in progress, in the human ability to impose order on the natural world, in the power of rational projects to overcome unreasonable circumstances — and the Australian landscape, which is not interested in being imposed upon and has its own views about what survives. The glass church moving through the bush is England’s faith in its own projects made literal and visible: beautiful, luminous, fragile, and profoundly unsuited to the terrain it is crossing.

The voyage does not end well. The novel has told us from its opening pages that it will not end well — Oscar and Lucinda is narrated by one of Oscar’s descendants, in the frame that organises the whole novel, and that descendant’s existence tells us certain things about what happened and what did not. Carey uses this foreknowledge not to drain the journey of tension but to give it a different quality: we know the glass church will not survive, but we do not know exactly how it will not survive, and watching the characters move toward a catastrophe they cannot see is one of the particular pleasures of historical fiction at its most accomplished.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A luminous, formally inventive Booker winner that uses the central metaphor of glass — beautiful, transparent, and always on the verge of shattering — to illuminate the delusions and desires of two extraordinary characters.