Illywhacker (93 page)
Authors: Peter Carey
Our conferences, mine and Hissao’s, are not remarkable for their wit or elegance. He pours himself a cognac and insults me, sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English. His face has coarsened and is showing the effects of all this alcohol. He has become red-nosed, a little pudgy.
“Why don’t you die, you old cunt?”
That is the standard of the debate, but there are plenty of times when I would happily oblige him, on nights when my once-handsome face is streaked with white lines. My arteries are as clogged as old drainpipes. They make me feel bad. You would not believe you could feel so bad and still not die, but I cannot die. I will not die, because this is my scheme. I must stay alive to see it out.
“Die, arsehole,” says Hissao Badgery.
The poor little fellow. Is he frightened of the enemies who shout his name in the street? Can he feel their passions? Their rage? Is that what it is, my little snookums? He must feel dreadful—he was such a nice boy—everybody liked him—he has not been prepared to be the object of such intelligent and necessary hatred.
For, you see, the emporium is working, sucking rage and hatred towards itself. Such vilifications. Such tempers in the street. Last week we had CS gas drifting through the skylight. The parrots had to be replaced but I drew deep on the gas as if it were honeysuckle. My old optimism is returning.
Did I hear crashing glass, the sound of the first wave breaking as it enters the ground floor? It is this which Hissao fears, this which I wait for, which keeps me alive through all these endless days. But it is not time, not yet.
I take the boy—he is light as a feather—and put him to my breast. His red Bacchus lips pout like a baby. Ah, there. His little lips suck and the contractions are a deep and steady, rhythmic thrum.
It would be of no benefit for him to know that he is, himself, a lie, that he is no more substantial than this splendid four-storey mirage, teetering above Pitt Street, no more concrete than all those alien flowers, those neon signs, those twisted coloured forms in gas and glass that their inventors, dull men, think will last forever.
No, he cannot know.
I close my eyes and do the only thing I can do. I am, at last, the creature I have so long wished to become—a kind man. With my swollen blue-veined breast I give my offspring succour—the milk of dragons from my witch’s tit.
It will give him strength for the interesting times ahead.
Peter Carey is the author of eleven novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.
B
OOKS BY
P
ETER
C
AREY
PARROT AND OLIVER IN AMERICA
HIS ILLEGAL SELF
THEFT
WRONG ABOUT JAPAN
MY LIFE AS A FAKE
30 DAYS IN SYDNEY: A WILDLY DISTORTED ACCOUNT
TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG
JACK MAGGS
THE UNUSUAL LIFE OF TRISTAN SMITH
THE BIG BAZOOHLEY
THE TAX INSPECTOR
OSCAR AND LUCINDA
BLISS
ILLYWHACKER
THE FAT MAN IN HISTORY
P
ETER
C
AREY
BLISS
For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life. Part
The Wizard of Oz
, part Dante’s
Inferno
, and part Australian
Book of the Dead
,
Bliss
is a triumph of uninhibited storytelling from a writer of extravagant gifts.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76719-0
HIS ILLEGAL SELF
Seven-year-old Che Selkirk was raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. The son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties, Che has grown up with the hope that one day his parents will come back for him. So when a woman arrives at his front door and whisks him away to the jungles of Queensland, he is confronted with the most important questions of his life: Who is his real mother? Did he know his real father? And if all he suspects is true, what should he do? In this artful tale of a young boy’s journey,
His Illegal Self
lifts your spirit in the most unexpected way.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27649-0
ILLYWHACKER
In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey’s uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd,
Illywhacker
is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76790-9
JACK MAGGS
The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation. Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as these schemes converge, Maggs rises to the center, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76037-5
MY LIFE AS A FAKE
Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Carey’s
My Life as a Fake
is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious piece of literature Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose genius? As Sarah tries to secure the manuscript, Chubb draws her into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping, and exile—a story that couldn’t be true unless its teller were mad.
My Life as a Fake
is Carey at his most audacious and entertaining.
Fiction/978-1-4000-3088-0
OSCAR AND LUCINDA
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions from the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77750-2
THE TAX INSPECTOR
Granny Catchprice runs her family business (and her family) with senility, cunning, and a handbagful of explosives. Her daughter Cathy would rather be singing Country & Western than selling cars, while Benny Catchprice, sixteen and seriously psychopathic, wants to transform a failing auto franchise into an empire—and himself into an angel. Out of the confrontation between the Catchprices and their unwitting nemesis, a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office, Peter Carey, creates an endlessly surprising and fearfully convincing novel.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73598-4
THEFT
Michael “Butcher” Boone is an ex-“really famous” painter, now reduced to living in a remote country house and acting as a caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh. Alone together, they’ve forged a delicate equilibrium, a balance instantly destroyed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27648-3
TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG
To his pursuers, Ned Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief, and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief, Ned saw his first prison cell at fifteen and by the age of twenty-six had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72467-1
WRONG ABOUT JAPAN
When Peter Carey offered to take his son to Japan, twelve-year-old Charley stipulated no temples or museums. He wanted to see manga, anime, and cool, weird stuff. His father said yes. Out of that bargain comes this enchanting tour of the mansion of Japanese culture, as entered through its garish, brightly lit back door. Funny, surprising, distinguished by its wonderfully nuanced portrait of a father and son thousands of miles from home,
Wrong About Japan
is a delight.
Travel/978-1-4000-7836-3
ALSO AVAILABLE:
Fat Man in History
, 978-0-679-74332-3
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY
1996
Copyright © 1985 by Peter Carey
All rights reserved under International and Pan—American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in the United States in hardcover by
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1985.
Library of Congress Cataloging—in—Publication Data
Carey, Peter.
Illywhacker / Peter Carey.—1st Vintage International ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76425-6
1. Impostors and imposture—Australia—Fiction.
2. Rogues and vagabonds—Australia—Fiction.
3. Aged men—Australia—Fiction.
I. Title
[PR9619.3.C36I45 1996]
823—dc20 95-43450
Author photograph © Craig Voevodin
Random House Web address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/
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