Dial M for mother

Peter Carey’s fictions are like a powerful old-fashioned car driven with the modernist hand-brake on — revved-up narrative that stutters, stalls, leaps in unexpected spasms.

With a less good writer this would be intensely annoying. Carey runs through many of the tricks of post-modernism — the tricksy shifts, the dislocations of chronology and viewpoint, the refusal to allow the reader the common courtesy of speech-marks, which might make it altogether too easy to know what is going on — yet, time after brilliant time, he carries it off (sometimes better than others; but this is one of his best). His tricks move beyond mere trickiness.

This is not just because his novels are often ‘about’ trickery — about illywhackers, con-men, art-fakers, fraudsters. In the hands of a less full-blooded novelist that would merely add a thin layer of stale post-modern self-reference. Carey engages because he is engaged: as a creator, he is never paring his fingernails, but has, like the boy in this viscerally gripping novel, ‘earth packed in black moons’ beneath them.