Lives of Artists, Identities of Countries: Dependence, Displacement, Identity, and Australia in Peter Carey’s Theft

Abstract

AFTER MY LIFE AS A FAKE, PETER CAREY, WITH HIS NOVEL THEFT, adds a new dimension to his themes of fakery, truth, and lying. The novel reads as a combination of love story, detective novel, and thriller with a series of mysteries including an intricate plot which is further combined with and supplemented by another theme and symbolic level. In this novel, the protagonist is an Australian artist who is, however, a loser (divorce, imprisonment, poverty, care for his mentally ill brother Hugh), and past his artistic fame. Through the depiction of his life story, narrated mostly by the artist Michael Boone but supplemented by his brother Hugh's narrative voice (reminiscent of the idiot speech of Benjy in William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury, or characters from John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men),1 Carey develops other themes such as love, the relationship between art, business (money), and value, between truth and lie, and between life and art. After being released from prison for an attempt to steal his own work of art from his wife after their divorce, Boone is helped by his benefactor and collector of his works, Jean-Paul Milan. When Jean-Paul visits Butcher Bones, or Michael Boone, an Australian artist, he says that every stupid thing he told me I wrote down in my notebook, an old leather-bound volume that was as precious to me as life itself.2Later in the book, Butcher Bones admits, commenting on his relationship with Marlene, his lover, thatWe had lived for not knowing that Van Gogh was born, or Vermeer or Holbein, or dear sad Max Beckmann, but once we knew, then we staked our lives on theirs. (228)This and the previous passage intimate the above themes and other important issues treated in the book through various connotations associated with the meaning of the word 'life'. The first extract indicates the idea of life associated with the idea of value and art. The narrator indicates that his life story will not be only about life and love, but also about art and its value, since he expresses his artistic sensibility by appreciating both the notebook as an artifact and its contents: i.e. the story he is telling in the role of a writer (recorder of events), which is to say, another kind of artist. Thus, he also symbolically suggests the equality between the value of art and life. The second extract reveals other issues associated with the meaning and connotations of the word 'life' that Carey develops in the process of his complex narrative.On the one hand, this latter extract confirms the value of art just like the former; on the other, it also points to the relationship between life and art, originality (authenticity) and derivativeness (copy), practice and theory. For Butcher Bones, life has a meaning only in connection with love (for his wife, his son, his handicapped brother Hugh, and, finally, his lover, the faker and murderer Marlene) and with art, both creating a mutually interconnected symbolic whole. This manifests itself not only in Carey's depiction of the characters with whom Butcher Bones has a love relationship (most of them are somehow associated with art - his former wife and later lover are art collectors), but also in Michael's narration, which reveals his artistic sensibility through his perception of the world in the role of both artist (writer, painter, and poet) and physical being (brother, lover). Michael's perception of the physical world is marked by poetic, lyrical, and visual imagery that manifests itself in his description of his ex-wife, as in the following example:People would often say she was a queen. From the first night we met my hopsour house began spilling such perfumes - cumin, cardamom, basil, leeks softening in my battered frying pan. It was summer and the garden was drunk with fermented fruit and new-cut grass and in a humble corner of my studio she set up a table where she drew very small images of imaginary natural objects. (95)Carey emphasizes Michael's artistic sensibility later, in another passage in which Michael /Butcher Bones describes his lover and a love scene that finally turns out to be the artistic picture of the passing moment:Her eyes. …