AMNESIA
By Peter Carey
307 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.
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. 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. You can pick any page at random and locate an energy that never seems to flag. 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.
E. M. 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. 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. 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.
Felix Moore is a middle-aged leftist journalist in self-inflicted decline. 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. 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. (Many leftists had implicated Green in Suharto’s anti-Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965, where he was then serving as ambassador.)
Political rage at what he sees as this long-forgotten and underdiscussed injustice drives Felix’s febrile and iconoclastic consciousness. 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. Townes wants Felix to write the biography of a young woman, Gaby Baillieux, who has been accused of an act of cyberwarfare against the United States. She is alleged to have created something called the Angel Worm, which has hacked its way into large parts of the American prison system and liberated hundreds of felons.
What are Townes’s real motives? Felix is suspicious, but Gaby’s mother, Celine, an actress of sorts, is an acquaintance of both men. Indeed, Celine was once a member of Felix’s youthful group of leftists back in the ’60s and ’70s, and so, out of sexual-nostalgic loyalty to the mother, he agrees to collaborate with Gaby (who has gone underground) and tell in book form the true story of this idealistic daughter’s crime. It is this investigation and retelling that forms the spine of Carey’s narrative, during which Felix’s marriage dissolves and he ends up living like a tramp on a desolate island where he has to perform his ablutions in a self-dug hole.
“I had not,” he confesses, “been thought of as the kind of writer who might make a difficult character lovable. My most notable work of fiction, ‘Barbie and the Deadheads,’ had been a satire. As a journalist it was my talent to be . . . a truffle hound for cheats and liars and crooks amongst the ruling classes. These pugnacious habits had served me well for a whole career but the story of the young woman demanded I become a larger person, a man who had it in his heart to love our stinking human clay.”
But does he? Felix’s odyssey is also a way for Carey to explore what could be called the secret social history of the Australian left, and it is one of Carey’s gifts that he can do this while also exploring the — to us — obscure topographies and social milieus in which that history was played out in the decades after World War II. To do this, he flashes back to the story of Celine’s mother in Brisbane at the time of the so-called Battle of Brisbane in 1942 — anti-American riots in which one person was killed and many injured. He has perfect recall of place and name; he can finger Australia’s urban landscapes like a blind man reading Braille. But Felix’s character does not, in the end, grow appreciably larger, nor does love of the stinking human clay become his willing burden. The second half of the novel splinters into different perspectives and voices, some in the third person, some in the first, and as it does the reader’s eye becomes confused and delayed in a mass of intertwining threads.
Yet the shift from first to third person at the center of the novel feels like the correct move, because it comes at just the moment when Felix’s voice has started to become suffocating. Indeed, there’s something in these bohemian, freewheeling, self-intoxicated middle-class radicals that demands its own satire, and it could be argued that Carey has supplied it — but from a position of all-forgiving sympathy.
Gaby herself is a type that’s easily recognizable: a slightly insufferable and self-righteous child of privilege giving her life over to radical causes. “Gaby was a Labor Party child.” At one point, she gets into a furious row with her liberal father, Sando, who observes that “she looked hostile, spoiled, superior.” Needless to say, she accuses him of being a coward, of not being radical enough in his own time. They proceed to argue about an environmental activist called Mervyn Aisen, with whom Gaby has been working:
“That was when he told her what he really thought about the Aisens. That their so-called ecological activism was an attempt to return to some fantasy of white Australia populated by good blokes and mates and everything was dinky-di and the blackfellows fed themselves unhindered on the creeks of Coburg. It was territorial, Sando said. Did you see any Turks or Lebanese amongst their planting party? No, of course not. The Aisens were using the language of socialism to reassert white privilege.
“Listen to you, she shouted. Listen to yourself. You sound insane. They’re fighting these polluting bastards and so are you.”
It’s a telling exchange, insofar as class and race are often the elephants in the noisy rooms of middle-class radicals, though Gaby’s cybercrime — she closes down prisons in the course of her blazing career — doesn’t slump into futility since, after serving three years in prison, a new worm released by her followers opens the doors and lets her walk free to continue the struggle. Felix, meanwhile, remains a hack, with a movie version upcoming of his satirical potboiler, “Barbie and the Deadheads.”
The greater question is how a novel of this kind can wear its politics so obviously and discursively on its sleeve without defusing the sinister and economical tension its narrative needs. There’s no real dread in the momentum of “Amnesia.” Perhaps Australia, in our own minds, is today too prosperous and self-confident for the events of 1975 to cast much of a menacing shadow, as they might have had this novel been about, say, Indonesia, that other supposed victim of Marshall Green’s machinations. That said, Peter Carey is no mean stylist, and his pages will always yield their pleasures. Their angry energy stays with you all the same.