|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2006 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
Theft
by Peter Carey |
|||
|
Rating: |
** |
|||
|
|
(Mildly Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Deceit Two characters
alternate as narrators of Peter Carey’s new novel, Theft.
Talented painter Butcher Boone narrates most chapters, and his brother, Hugh,
narrates the others. Both brothers are larger than life, both a bit mentally
unbalanced, but in different ways, and both find ways to deceive others. Here’s
an excerpt of both narrators, all of Chapter 3 (Hugh), and the beginning of
Chapter 4 (Butcher), pp. 20-25: Phthaaa!
We are Bones, God help us, raised in sawdust, dry each morning. I am called
Hugh and he is called Butcher but the pair of us are meat men, not river men,
not beggars hiding in damp shacks with floods and mud and mould, with a hook
hanging from the front verandah to skin the eels. We were born and bred in
Bacchus Marsh, thirty-three miles west of All in
that town were FULL OF HIGH SPIRITS like Sam Sawnoff in the book The Magic Pudding. Like
Barnacle Bill and Sam Sawnoff we always fought and wrestled. Bless us. I
wrestled with my dad and my grand-dad as did Brother Butcher Bones, a big man
if not the biggest. He could not stand to lose to me. God save us what a bag
of tricks he had to use Full Nelson. Half Nelson. Chinese Burn. I did not
grudge him, never. Wrestling was the best thing any day. Many the time in the
sawdust we did the old charge and grab the knackers, blood is thicker than
water as they say. This was long ago but we were all large men, none but
Granddad larger than myself. When he was seventy-two he had a disagreement
with 35-yr-old Nails Carpenter dropping him on his bum in the public bar of
the Royal Hotel. Carpenter played RUCK for Bacchus Marsh but would never
return to that WATERING HOLE not even when Granddad was safely dead and
buried up at Bacchus Marsh cemetery, butcher’s grass around the hole, so
clean you could have displayed loin chops along the edge. Not even then would
Nails return to the Royal although his old mates would barrack him from the
doorway, come in, come in, we will shout you a shandy. Nails dropped dead in
1956 while pedaling up the Stanford Hill. Carpenter
should have known to drink his shandy and start again. When they teased me I
TOOK IT IN GOOD PART even if I might have murdered them. Like that. I was a
GENTLE GIANT. Our father was Blue Bones on account of he had red hair when
young so they called him Blue meaning red. That is a general rule to go by if
you come from OVERSEAS. In Look at
that Poke, he is poking her. But I could take a JOKE and get a POKE fast slow
anyway you like you might be surprised. The Bones
were butchers. We had our own slaughter yards at the former DRAYBONE INN. In
the gold-rush days this was where they would change the coach horses for COBB
& CO but now it was where we brought the beasts to end their days. Never
did a Bones take life lightly. If it was a fish or an ant, then possibly. But
a beast’s heart tips the scales at five pounds and no matter how many you slaughter
you cannot do it without a thought. There was a sort of prayer YOU POOR OLD
BUGGER or other stuff more serious I’m sure, and then they cut its throat and
caught the blood in the tin bucket to save for sausage. It is a big
responsibility to cut up a beast but when it is done it is done and
afterwards you go to the Royal and then you come home THE WORSE FOR WEAR I do
admit. After that you rest. It is in the Bible re Sunday: you must not work,
nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy
cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. Poor Mum. I was not to be a butcher,
bee-boh bless me. My brother was three inches shorter still he took my true
and rightful name. It’s a doggie dog world. Butcher Bones had the
opportunity to keep up the family business in Bacchus Marsh but by the time
Dad had his stroke Butch had met the GERMAN BACHELOR who gave him postcards
to stick on the wall above his bunk. Those cards turned his head. The German
Bachelor was permitted to be a teacher at Bacchus Marsh High School where he
instructed the children of men who had lost their lives fighting Germans in
the war. I don’t know why he was not in gaol but my brother came home and
said his teacher was a MODERN artist and had attended the so-called BOWER
HOUSE. If Dad had known the effect of that Bower House on his oldest son he
would have gone up to the school and dropped the German Bachelor like he
dropped Mr. Cox after he strapped me for answering incorrectly. Blue Bones
took Coxy out of the room and across the street behind his van. Coxy’s feet
lifted six inches off the ground. That is all we saw, but knew much more. It was my brother who
inherited the nickname Butcher and that is a joke that anyone can see for it
was he who refused the knife and scabbard. From the German Bachelor he got
the habit of shaving his skull the DICKHEAD also the postcards of MARK ROTHKO
and the idea that ART IS FOR BUTCHERS NOW. He learned from the German
Bachelor that art had previously been restricted to palaces where it was
viewed behind high gates by Kings and Queens, Dukes, Counts, Barons. In any
case he refused the apron when our poor mother begged him put it on. His
father could not speak nor move but it was obvious he would like to clout
Butcher across the ear hole one last time. Auld Lang Sine. After Dad had his
stroke there was no more SLAUGHTER. It is hard work to
slaughter a beast but when it is done it is done. If you are MAKING ART the
labour never ends, no peace, no Sabbath, just eternal churning and cursing
and worrying and fretting and there is nothing else to think of but the
idiots who buy it or the insects destroying TWO DIMENSIONAL SPACE. There is nothing sure or
certain it would seem no matter how you shave your skull or boast about your
position in AUSTRALIAN ART. One minute you are a NATIONAL TREASURE with a
house in Ryde and then you are a has-been buying Dulux with your brother’s
DISABILITY PENSION. You are a CONVICTED CRIMINAL a servant living on a Tick
and Thistle farm. The puppy was a cattle dog
but there were no beasts for him to work with so he never learned his purpose
on the earth. Bless him. I wrestled with him before he passed. Ascended, poor
tyke. He was a licky dog. He liked a toss, a good fall over in the grass. By
dint of playing he got ticks all lined up, dug into the edges of his floppy
ears like cars parked outside a Kmart or a Sydney Leagues Club. The day I met
him I removed each tick, one by one, God Bless him. My brother heard him
barking at the Duck but he was making art and never spared a thought. Your dog is DEAD Hugh.
Butcher Bones gave not a FLYING FUCK about the puppy. He said your dog is
dead and then he went off with the woman on the tractor and left me listening
to a river the colour of a yellow cur, fucksuck flood, tugging, pulling
stones out of the bank, beneath our feet, everything we stand on will be
washed away. 4 The phone call I got that
night from Dozy Boylan would make me laugh for days to come. “Mate,” he said,
and I knew that he was hiding in his bathroom because I could hear the echo.
“Mate, she’s hitting on me.” He was full of shit, I told
him so, although not without affection. “Shut up,” he said. “I’m
bringing her back to your place now.” I expressed loud amusement
and that was rude and stupid and I have no excuse except—my overactive friend
was a sixty-year-old farmer with soup in his moustache and trousers curling
above his cinched-in belt. She was hitting on him? I snorted into the phone,
and when he turned on me soon after, I never doubted why. In an astoundingly short
time he came roaring across my cattle grid. I’d had a drink or two already
and this was perhaps why it seemed so wildly funny, the audible panic of his
off-road lugs rippling across the wooden bridge. By the time I had changed
into a clean shirt, the old man had already performed a high-speed Y-turn and
when I emerged on the front porch the taillights of his All Terrain Invention
were disappearing into the night. I was still smiling as my visitor entered.
Her hair was drenched again, flat on her head, dripping down her cheeks,
collecting in the lovely well of her clavicle, but she was also smiling
and—for a moment anyway—I thought she was about to laugh. “How was the crossing?” I
asked. “Were you scared?” “Never by the crossing.”
She sat heavily in my chair and exhaled—a different person now, messier, less
brisk. She produced from the folds of her borrowed poncho, a magnum of 1972
Virgin Hills which she held like a trophy in the air. Later she told me that I
had cocked my head, looking at the wine like a sulky dog, but that was a
misunderstanding. This was a prize bottle from Dozy’s cellar. There was nothing
to explain it and the mystery was made deeper by her manner—she was suddenly
so full of energy, kicking off her gum boots, opening up a drawer—did she
wait to ask permission? She located a corkscrew, ripped out the cork,
brushed down her skirt, sat cross-legged on the kitchen chair and, while she
watched me pour the Virgin Hills, she just plain grinned at me. “O.K.,” I said. “What happened?” “Nothing,” she said, her
eyes sparkling to the point of carbonation. “Where’s your brother? Is he
O.K.?” “Asleep.” Whatever dark visions she
then conjured—probably the drowning dog—she could not stay with long. “The
good thing,” she said, raising her glass, “is that Mr. Boylan knows his
Leibovitz is real.” “Jacques Leibovitz?” “That’s the one.” “Dozy owns a painting by
Jacques Leibovitz?!” In many respects, the art world itself
is another character in Theft,
and Carey weaves the power of art throughout the book, especially in the
power of relationships driven by both desire and deceit. Steve Hopkins,
June 26, 2006 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the July 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Theft.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
