A Different Approach: Peter Carey's 'Jack Maggs' for Dickens 2012

I've been recommending Peter Carey's 1997 novel Jack Maggs (UK ebook here, US paperback here) for almost as long as it's been around. I usually refer to it as a 'riff' on Dickens' Great Expectations--but I obviously need to be saying more, or less, because I'm not aware of a single reader I ever won for Jack Maggs that way.

Carey's US publisher clearly chose to go the way of saying less: the connection to Dickens has never been mentioned in American publicity for Maggs, perhaps on the assumption that huge chunks of its possible readership had never read Great Expectations, or hadn't reread it in so many years that they'd fear they'd forgotten too much of it, or possibly thought of it as an unpleasant bit of required reading best forgotten. Such generalizations are always tricky: most of the people with whom I've discussed this say they and everyone they know read it as teenagers and found it a difficult book to put down and one of their favorite Victorian novels. Still, it's long been customary to tell prospective readers that no familiarity with Dickens is required of readers of Maggs, and this is, in fact, true.

The next question that always comes up is whether Maggs is 'as good a novel' as G.E. Well, if we assume that such comparisons are meaningful, it would be only fair to point out that not many novels are as good as G.E. You can embrace Maggs without turning aside forever from G.E. Just as you can love Dickens and still find room in your heart for Carey.

Still, most readers of Maggs, I think, will focus on similarities and differences between it and G.E. Carey's title character has a great deal in common with Magwich, the escaped convict whom readers of G.E. first see encountering young Pip in the early pages of that novel. Maggs even has a Pip of his own, now (in 1837, when Carey's novel begins) grown up to be (like Dickens' Pip) something of a gentleman but (unlike Pip) neither hero nor protagonist.

For many readers, the most memorable and perhaps most disturbing character in Jack Maggs, however, will be a young journalist and emerging novelist, full of ambition but uncertain of success, newly married but already emotionally entangled with his beautiful young sister-in-law. His name isn't Dickens (it's Tobias Oates), but if you think your way back to 1837 and Dickens' situation prior to Oliver Twist, the resemblance is unmistakable. This is, needless to say, not Dickens as the most prized of all Victorian novelists: at best, it's an unsentimental (view of) Dickens, Dickens 'warts and all', or warts and then some.

Carey (born in Australia in 1943) has spoken of his long-standing interest in Dickens' Magwich, arguably the first Australian character in fiction. In this context, the first distinction between the two novels is that one is Victorian, the other postcolonial.

Still, for me, Jack Maggs is of particular interest as a novel that lets us think about how writers (like Dickens, or Tobias Oates, to name only two) rework their lived reality and transform it into fiction. (That's what I meant last time by 'a certain kind of novel'.) Maggs suggests how a writer somewhat like Dickens might have transformed a series of events with which his own century was not prepared to confront directly--to form a novel that it could comfortably embrace. So when we read Maggs we get Carey's take on the realities of the Victorian era--which include implicitly that era's own efforts to conceal what it cannot confront.

And we may also get some insight into the... Victorian? (neo)colonial? canonizing?... aspects of ourselves--which might begrudge Magwich, Maggs, or Carey a place at the table.

Is it the right reading for you for the Dickens centenary year ahead? I don't know. But it's my most contrarian recommendation. And, what's more, it's a good read.

Housekeeping, and Returning Home

It was good to be on the road (mostly in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina); now it's even better to be back home. For some reason, however, it's taking me a while to get used to the time change (daylight saving time, elsewhere known as 'summer time', just ended in most of the United States; the November transition is supposed to be easier than the one in March)--and to communicating with everyone again.

I tweeted occasionally from Myrtle Beach, and wrote a few urgent emails, but otherwise focussed more on relaxing than on anything else. I believe I admitted on Twitter that my addiction to the new ABC-TV series Revenge had grown so intense that I started rereading The Count of Monte Cristo as a sort of readerly methadone. Dumas's best books are great to come home to, by the way, and this is surely one of his greatest. By the way, I'm just starting to look for the right methadone for my Once Upon a Time 'issues'.

What seemed to me like the biggest 'event' of last week in the world of (US) ebooks, an event that I would have blogged about last Friday if I'd been at home, was Amazon.com's introduction of its 'lending library', which offers free access to several thousands of ebooks for Amazon Prime customers who own Kindles. This is limited to a single free checkout per owner per month, and your browsing for books to check out begins on your Kindle, in the Kindle Store. For more information, click here.

The main problem I'm aware of as I return to blogging, is that topics are 'clumping': they're occurring to me in clusters that make them less manageable than usual, especially considering my resolution to limit individual posts to a maximum of 500 words.

For example, I've left a great deal unsaid about recommended reading for the Dickens centenary (even after previous posts here, here and here), all of which unsaid material clumps together in a supertopic that you might call 'Contrarian Responses to Dickens 2012'. But the first of those 'contrarian' recommendations--that you read, if you haven't already, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997)--seems also to be part of a second supertopic, for which my best title so far is 'A Certain Kind of Novel' (referring to a kind that I encountered in an accidental cluster in the 1990s and that included, most memorably, both Jack Maggs and Barbara Vine's [i.e., Ruth Rendell's] The Chimney Sweeeper's Boy).

Please bear with me, though, and keep coming back. I promise to do my best to 'get it all down'... even if it takes a few attempts.

Barring some unforeseeable cyberevent (that stops the presses, so to speak), I'll pick up on Wednesday with Jack Maggs--and, although I won't be indiscreet about the plot per se, I'll be quite frank about the kind of novel as which I read it. If it's been out there for 14 years without your reading it, and it's as good as I think it is, then perhaps a little indiscretion about its subgenre is not too high a price to pay.