Sebastian Smee

The art of the matter

issue 03 June 2006

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Peter Carey’s ropy, visceral prose casts a powerful spell. It has a swarming, improvised quality which besieges and easily overwhelms objections, including any reluctance to credit his convoluted, sometimes outlandish plots. And yet those plots remain a problem. They somehow bring a hint of affectation and conceit to a sensibility, a way with words, that is otherwise stridently free from mannerisms.

Theft: A Love Story is told by two narrators in alternating chapters. One of them is Michael Boone, or Butcher Bones, a once renowned Australian painter now enduring a humiliating slump in fortune. He relates the bulk of the tale. But his account â” boasting, impassioned, furiously honest â” is corrected, warmed and frequently undermined by his mentally damaged brother, Hugh, or Slow Bones.

Butcher looks after Hugh, a marvellous literary invention who stands at an awkward, innocent angle to the world and, like Lennie in Of Mice and Men, doesn’t know his own strength.

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