But it’s for money that he accepts an offer from an old friend, a businessman named Woody Townes - a slightly overdrawn caricature of corporate villainy, but in some ways the most entertaining character in the book, a “great bull” full of wind and bile and grotesque energy. Political rage at what he sees as this long-forgotten and underdiscussed injustice drives Felix’s febrile and iconoclastic consciousness.
(Many leftists had implicated Green in Suharto’s anti-Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965, where he was then serving as ambassador.)
Elected in 1972, Whitlam had a liberal stance - including hostility to Australian involvement in Vietnam - that was said to have enraged the United States and its ambassador, Marshall Green. The first part of the novel is narrated in his voice and brings us into his feverish, disintegrated world: “I had published several books, 50 features, 1,000 columns, mainly concerned with the traumatic injury done to my country by our American allies in 1975.” He refers, if American readers aren’t aware, to the dismissal by Australia’s governor general, Sir John Kerr, of the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam under what could be called ambiguous circumstances. But does this serve the interests of a narrative that sets out to forge a digital-era spy story, calling into question the relationship of the author’s native Australia with the reigning superpower? The answer is: yes and no.įelix Moore is a middle-aged leftist journalist in self-inflicted decline. The cast of “Amnesia” seems to have been told to have all the larks they want, because that’s what Carey wants in his own playfully somersaulting sentences. Forster is said to have remarked that when he began a novel he lined up his characters and admonished them: “Right, no larks.” Although it’s a wise course of action, a novelist might as well do the opposite if he or she has a mind to. His sentences hit their intended marks with an emotion that often feels like exasperated cruelty, and none of his characters are spared a little bloodletting.Į. You can pick any page at random and locate an energy that never seems to flag. In many ways, it’s a departure from his previous work, although throughout “Amnesia” he maintains the temper and Rabelaisian fury of a prose we know all too well.
Now that the politics of hacking has assumed an importance hitherto unknown, the theme Peter Carey has chosen for his latest novel seems especially timely.
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