Peter Carey’s Amnesia melds the personal and political

NOT since The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) has Peter Carey written a novel so concerned with cultural identity.

Peter Carey’s new novel hints at Julian Assange in its tale of a whistleblower and a journalist. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

FOUR decades have passed since publication of Peter Carey’s miraculous debut The Fat Man in History. And if the stories of that 1974 collection were not the first in our literature to incorporate emerging currents in American writing, they remain exemplary artefacts of a cultural turn, away from Britain and towards the US. Our tendency has been to read the ­antipodean surrealism of those early tales in mainly aesthetic terms, as assured formal borrowings from the metafictional and magical realist experiments of that historical moment. Yet those aesthetic decisions also had a political aspect.

Recall the crafted weirdness of Carey’s mini-narratives, their upside-down inside-out vision of reality. They were grotesque and discombobulating fun, of course, but they were also perfectly designed vehicles for a writer trying to identify and describe a presumed vacancy at the heart of his home culture. Could it be, they seemed to say, that we have a hole where our identity as a people should be, and that into this vacuum are ineluctably drawn the most dynamic cultural forces from elsewhere? As to the most vibrant influence back then, Frank Moorhouse put it best with the title of his 1972 short story collection: The Americans, Baby.

The question of the degree to which our social reality is shaped by outside forces is one for sociologists and historians. Whether our personal experience of the world is altered by soft imperialism properly belongs to the creative writer. With the publication of Carey’s 13th novel Amnesia, a dystopian political thriller, it is worth making the case that for all the exquisite formalism of his fiction and its debt to everyone from Faulkner to Kerouac to Bob Dylan, the US-based Aussie novelist has maintained a complex and deeply ambivalent attitude towards the interplay between Us and Them.

Not since The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) has Carey written a novel so concerned with cultural identity. And never before has he made the struggle for self-assertion against foreign intervention so literal. Amnesia takes as its background the belief that in 1975, in common with countries in central and South America, Australia’s elected government was overthrown by the CIA: a coup so bold, emerging from such a trusted and admired source, that our collective response has been a traumatised forgetting.

The promulgator of this alternative history is Felix Moore, a legendarily rumpled left-wing journo who was a young adviser to Jim Cairns during the heady, utopian early days of the Whitlam government. Felix has latterly become something of a magnet for legal proceedings as a result of his wilder speculations: his most recent book has just been pulped by court order when an old friend and colleague, Melbourne property developer Woody Townes, comes to his rescue with a new project, the biography of a cyber-activist named Gaby Baillieux.

Gaby led a successful effort to hack the Australian prison system. Her stated aim was to release thousands of asylum-seekers by remotely opening the electronic locks on their cells, but the same worm also sprung the locks in US correctional facilities whose software Australia had purchased. Cyber-terrorism is a crime that carries the death penalty in the US, and its authorities want the young Melbourne woman extradited to stand trial. Townes wants his old friend to write Gaby’s story: to humanise her in ways that will ensure a protective public as US pressure increases. He pays the penniless journalist $10,000 and sets him up in a glass tower overlooking the Melbourne CBD with a laptop and a well-stocked cellar, demanding a quick turnaround on the project. Yet, despite the handsome emolument, the tailor-made material, the anti-American frisson of it all, Felix flounders and delays.

Closer outline of those complications that stymie Felix’s best intentions would spoil the plot-dense progress of a novel by an author who usually relies on knockabout picaresqueness and vivid prose to shape his works. It is enough to say that Amnesia borrows from Graham Greene and John le Carre a fascination with how the personal and political can become so entangled as to defy clear-cut categories of right or wrong. Carey follows them both in reformulating EM Forster’s famous hypothetical: ‘‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’’

A few sentences on, we hear Forster’s echo again: there ‘‘lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer’’.

As Felix delves into Gaby’s past and understands the circumstances of her upbringing and the motivations that have driven her to this point, he comes to appreciate once again the moral efficacy of telling truth to power, come what may. The paradox is that others, including Gaby, will suffer as a result of the journalist’s ­rediscovered backbone. Even noble creeds ­demand sacrifice.

When the hacker’s actress mother reads the journalist’s stuttering early chapters, she is ­appalled and furious: “‘Everything you’ve written is reprehensible,’’ she declares. To which Felix responds, ‘‘Of course’’. “The truth is ugly and often frightening. We have placed truth in our stained-glass windows but when it arrives in person, unwashed and smelly, loud and violent, our first act is to pull a gun on it.’’

In a manner that is, regrettably, overly programmatic, Carey has Felix reconstruct Gaby’s biography, only to discover it runs on parallel tracks to the history of America’s antipodean interventions. From US troops in wartime Queensland to the current moment in which Middle Eastern drone strikes are based on surveillance gleaned from Pine Gap, the relationship has entailed a profound imbalance of power: an asymmetry that figures such as ­Edward Snowden and Julian Assange recently have sought to correct.

In this sense, Amnesia grows out of real events. Carey was sounded out as a potential ghostwriter for Assange’s memoirs. He refused the job but the burr stuck: a good deal of Assange’s early experience is translated into the novel in the person of Frederic Matovic, Gaby’s boyfriend and fellow hacker. The old anarch Felix evinces admiration for the purpose and intelligence that the couple display, while Carey does his best to wring poetry from the opaque procedures of writing code: “Think of Montaigne writing an essay, shaping ideas, seeking beauty, clarity, simplicity and concision. A good code language lets you do this.’’

Yet the best sections of the novel remain those attached to Carey’s direct Australian experience, back when Monash University was a construction zone and Carlton a bohemian haven: any time, indeed, when he momentarily forgets his more didactic intentions and revels in language and place for its own sweet sake: “The northeasterly had already travelled across the Pacific Ocean, past the old crouching beast of Lion Island and was now barreling and bluffing up across what is called Pittwater, up to Brooklyn, under and over the bridge, seeking all those wooded bays along the way, swallowing the long wide stretch then running into Berowra Waters and Pumpkin Point.”

Mostly, though, there is an unambiguousness at work in Amnesia that works against its success as fiction. The world too obviously intrudes and imposes itself on Carey’s creative imagination. Felix is a frustratingly febrile container of consciousness, half-indestructible larrikin, half-lachrymose clown, and his see-sawing relationship with Woody, crucial to the narrative, never achieves satisfactory equilibrium. In his previous novel, The Chemistry of Tears, Carey’s desire to transmit a message of ecological urgency sat awkwardly beside its human stories of love and grief. The same is true here. Which is not to say that Carey has ever penned a fiction not worth reading. He is an admirable writer, not despite his faults but because of them. In book after book he rushes in, tests boundaries, takes risks, relying all the while on cantankerous charm and his innate dexterity as a prose writer to repair any ­wobbles. It is the ferocious forward motion that impresses most.

In this instance, however, Carey and his fictional handmaid Felix have bumped up against the absurd situation of the present. Both come from a world in which a whistleblower and a journalist or two could bring down a president. Meanwhile, in the digital present, torture, spying and other malfeasances once apparently reserved for the most ruthless authoritarian ­regimes has become commonplace in the liberal West. What fiction, even by an author as wily and talented as Carey, could capture the hyperinflation of information we are experiencing, or anatomise power when power has become so dispersed, or rationalise a social and political order whose ­fealty to profit threatened its very existence?

As Felix ruefully acknowledges: “How path­etic his ambition now seems, how small his own imagination. He had been a journalist with one story, one cause, one effect. He had been born in the previous geologic age while she [Gaby] was born into Anthropocene age and easily saw that the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself.”

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Amnesia

By Peter Carey

Hamish Hamilton, 384pp, $32.99