Peter Carey

Peter Carey: making it up as he goes along

He cheated at school, rewrites the classics and is happy to admit to being jealous of his friends' success. The two-time Booker winner reveals why he likes breaking the rules

Emma Brockes

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 March 2012 23.00 GMT


Peter Carey, photographed in his New York home: 'I have a highly energised, addictive personality. My wiring is strange.' Photograph: Flora Hanitijo for the Guardian

Peter Carey's first thought was to write about engines. He had been reminiscing about his father's car business, in a town called Sale in Gippsland, Australia. When Carey was growing up, his father sold cars to local farmers, engines customised "to get them up the steep bloody hill". That set him to thinking about oil, which triggered thoughts about Henry Ford. Carey's mind has a pinball tendency to ricochet madly and so, eventually, he found himself thinking about a mechanical duck: the 18th-century automaton designed by Jacques de Vaucanson. "And that led me off on a whole other way of dealing with things that were in my head." If a single image united all this, it was the long-range effect of industrialisation: "An overheated planet. Perhaps. As a place where I might have started."

Carey's reluctance to summarise his new novel comes down, perhaps, to just how eccentric and unsummarisable it is. The Chemistry Of Tears is split between the story of Catherine Gehrig, a museum curator in present-day London, and the 19th-century man whose mechanical swan, modelled on the Vaucanson, sits on her desk, waiting to be reassembled. Carey allows that it's "pretty nutty" but, "I suppose the thing that led me there was that I was looking for an engine that would be about the Industrial Revolution and all its wonders and inventions, and also the consequences, which we're living with now. I guess I could have had a steam engine or something, but this really appealed to me and I sort of set off with it."

The action could not be farther from his home in New York or his background in Australia. Carey has always been comfortable moving continents, in fiction as in life. For 20 years he has lived in SoHo, in downtown Manhattan – one of the last residents, he says, to buy his loft from an artist, not a hedge fund manager. It would seem the last place on Earth to achieve the peace of mind necessary for Carey's work, but he is, by his own admission, peculiar in his practices. He doesn't chastise himself for breaking off to go online while writing.

"No. For someone with my attention span, it's fine. I'd be very critical of anyone else doing it, but I have a highly energised, addictive personality. I go from one state to another state, and I'm very deep into it. My wiring is strange."

The only disruptive influence has, somewhat fittingly, been engine noise from the street outside. It is why we meet in a corner cafe rather than his flat. "Oh, I get irritated. I'm having a great feud with the fucking ice-cream truck across the street; the engine would run at a particular pitch and went on and on and on. And I thought, well, I could shout at this guy daily or I could beat him legally, but there'll be millions more coming back." Today, he's having double-glazing installed and his loft is overrun with builders.

We are in his favourite booth at a local cafe, where Carey orders wine and oysters. If he had to identify the main strength in his character, he would go for enthusiasm, he says, reaching right back to childhood and in evidence today. At 68, he has the high, slightly ramshackle energy of a 22-year-old, his thoughts materialising so fast, his speech can't always keep up with them. He refuses to be bored, and if the price is anxiety, or danger, or even failure, he says, he will settle for that. The first great upset of his life was failing his university exams. His parents weren't wealthy, but had scrimped to send him to a good boarding school. Looking back, he says with some amusement, he must have been an odd little fellow, but he didn't feel it at the time.

"I mean, I must have completely not fitted in, because I came from a predominantly lower middle/working-class town, where I thought we were rich, to Geelong Grammar, which was very posh. And I think it was really only when I left there that I understood where I'd been. And I had a good time. I was intensely nerdy. I'll tell you how nerdy I was; I was captain of… it wasn't the bottom team in football, but it was something like that, and I was really fearless. So I'd go on with my glasses taped on to my head, and I remember once we had a match somewhere and some kid said, how do you catch it? But I was protected by having a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm."

Also, a kind of belligerent optimism. When he got to university, he thought he would be an organic chemist. Then he thought he'd be a zoologist. He had no aptitude for either, started faking his science experiments and then failed his exams anyway. Given their investment in him, his parents were remarkably sanguine, he says, although he felt awful. "I was horrified. My mother, in one of the great conforming clichés of our family, said, 'Worse accidents happen at sea.' They didn't make me conscious of it."

Carey, however, was determined not to put them in that situation again. He applied and was accepted for a degree in architecture, but decided, at the last minute, that he couldn't go through with it. "I couldn't ask them to pay for it. For what? How did I know it would work out?"

Instead, he moved to Sydney and joined a small advertising firm, where his real education began. It was the era of Mad Men, but the series makes him laugh in derision; Sydney in those days was a long way from Madison Avenue and he and his colleagues were not exactly Don Draper types. The alcohol consumption was insane, he says; they had that in common. But, "[The Americans] were so straight. We were not straight. When someone comes into the office and is walking around and the floor is absolutely sticky, and says, 'What's wrong with the floor?' 'Dunno,' and it was because we'd been smoking dope and spraying the air with adhesive spray to kill the smell! It was a different world. I liked that."

Even when he was on the board of Grey's Advertising in Sydney, there was still no real pressure to conform. Carey was living in a hippy community at the time, and came in for a meeting with some American executives dressed in flip-flops, pyjama trousers and a secondhand Hawaiian shirt. "And I was a board member!" he says. "And my friend said to me once, 'You don't know how you look. You have no idea.'"

Carey wasn't exactly playing at hippydom – the lifestyle suited him, he says, and he assumed, as he does in most situations, that it would go on for ever. On the other hand, "It was a very privileged position. You know, you're pretending to be radical, with a credit card." The main thing was, the advertising work was relatively undemanding and paid well enough to free him up to write most days a week. He is grateful for those years, but is still half embarrassed at having been a hack copywriter. He primly refuses to repeat any of the slogans he wrote, won't allow for the possibility that copywriting influenced his style as a fiction writer, and is still smarting from the reaction he got in some quarters when he first won the Booker, in 1988, for Oscar And Lucinda: Ad-Man Wins Booker Prize. "You know? Fuck you, too."

And yet, "Advertising really was like a huge arts council grant."

He was mainly working on short stories then; gamely sending them out and absorbing the rejections. There had been books in his house when he was growing up – "Reader's Digest condensed books, The Robe, Georgette Heyer" – and his mother had encouraged and was proud of his reading. The brevity of his style, which doesn't waver no matter how long a novel he is writing, comes down to boredom as much as aesthetics. Oscar And Lucinda is a 500-page novel made up of 111 tiny chapters, which he thought of as tiles tessellating into a perfect whole. "I was very anxious when I was writing Oscar And Lucinda. I would take other books off the shelf to check my chapter length was OK. John Irving did it, so it was OK. Four pages."

He often feels as if he has no choice in the matter; a book will come out the way it has to come out, even in the face of its author's reservations. Carey won a second Booker in 2001 for True History Of The Kelly Gang (the only other writer to have won the prize twice is JM Coetzee), which Carey thought would be a suicide mission, given the licence it took with an Australian legend and the unconventional language he wrote it in. "A huge risk. But I had no choice about it."

What's the antidote to that kind of anxiety?

"Alcohol's quite good. For very bad anxiety, you can have a pill." He laughs. "Alcohol's a bad idea. Pills are stupid. I don't know. The weird thing about the anxiety is that's what's exciting about doing it: the risk. What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, what have I done?"

This was after writing Jack Maggs, a retelling of Great Expectations from the point of view of the convict and another huge presumption, as Carey saw it – particularly coming from an Australian. It took him many years to shrug off his sense of colonial insecurity. He came to London first in his 20s, one of the earliest to arrive by plane, not ship, and loved the city immediately, not least, he says, because unlike in Sydney, when he walked around Notting Hill, no one threatened to beat him up for having long hair. But he was also riven with a sense of self-hatred; that he wrote, and spoke, from a standpoint of zero cultural authority.

Two things, separated by many years, stick in his mind as significant in shaking that off. The first was towards the end of his initial stay in London. He had been in the city for a year and was intent on staying for ever. "And then suddenly I realised – I remember, I had a motorbike and I was buying some petrol – I could stay all my life in this country and not understand the person at the gas station. I thought, ah. And very soon after that I went back to Australia."

The second incident was a moment of realisation that the Brits were as full of shit as all the people over whom they claimed superiority. Carey was socialising in a group of British men, discussing a book about sexism in Australia. "And they're all sitting there nodding their fucking heads about these awful sexist Australian men. And there was something horrible about it. And I thought, ah. No. No. So I stopped doing it [agreeing with them]. Because I'm not sure English men are really any better... their style might be different, but it's the same thing."

His first short story collection, The Fat Man In History, came out in 1974, his first novel, Bliss, in 1981. Then came Illywhacker, the picaresque tale of an inveterate liar with the famous first line – "My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity" – and the novel that, thanks to its popularity among students, gave Carey a kind of hipsterish cachet. The author seemed fun and bitchy and the antithesis of the typically agonised literary novelist, the levity of his prose never at odds with the seriousness of his ideas. The one thing Carey did not much care for was writing about himself: a few travelogues and a slight memoir, about a trip he took with one of his sons, called Wrong About Japan.


Peter Carey on his so-called rivals in the literary world: 'There are people that you don't like because you're jealous of them until you meet them… Then you meet them and discover they've been jealous of you, and you become friends.' Photograph: Flora Hanitijo for the Guardian

And a piece for the New Yorker, which he now regrets writing, about his experience as a young man in Australia helping his girlfriend have an illegal abortion. It is, as one would expect, a moving and unhistrionic piece about the difficulties they faced, practically and morally, and sadly not as quaint as it might be, with abortion still one of the main issues in the Republican primaries. "I hadn't thought of that, but it's true," he says. Naively, he thought he could publish the piece in the US and have it somehow escape the notice of the press in Australia. That didn't work. "The Sydney Morning Herald rang and said if you don't let us run it, we'll quote you to within an inch of your life. So I gave in. But it was a stupid thing to do." His ex-girlfriend, still in Australia and bothered by the publicity, was, he says, "terrifically nice about it. But it was the sort of thing that I really shouldn't have done. I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life. In the New Yorker, it ran under the headline A Small Memorial. The Sydney Morning Herald ran with My Never Ending Wish, or something melodramatic like that. And it felt very tabloidy."

It is a measure of Carey's success that his private life should be of interest in the first place. When he left Sydney 20 years ago, he was, he says, already at that level where, as well as people being "nice to me and smiling at me, they even wrote the kind of shitty things they write about people who are doing OK". He left with his then wife, Alison Summers, a theatre director, to take up a teaching post in New York. "But here it is, 20 years later. Children. And an English wife."

That is his second wife, the publisher Frances Coady. Six years ago, after their divorce, Summers caused a tabloid stir by accusing him of basing a horrid character in his novel Theft: A Love Story on her and giving lots of interviews to that effect.

"It's all crap, completely untrue. All that fuss – people who read the book knew... So there are people who write about books they haven't read – it happens all the time."

Did it curtail him in his writing at all?

"No. Why would I be curtailed by it? I can't live like that. It's not possible."

Carey is very good at writing women. They leap out of his books, strong, peculiar, as driven by wayward and inexplicable passions as their male counterparts. Gehrig, in his new novel – "off her face with rage and cognac" – is eminently believable in a believably grotty London landscape. But it is Lucinda who is still his greatest achievement. "She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul." Encountering the strength of Carey's female leads, you wonder, of course, about his mother. He grins. "Oh, she was totally formidable. She used to sit there in the garage and men would come in and she'd argue with them about car parts; things a lady used not to do. And they'd say, I want to see the manager! And she'd say, I am the manager. My dear mother was a nightmare in all sorts of respects, but I had a very strong sympathy for her position."


Eyes on the prize: Carey (left) in 2001 with True History Of The Kelly Gang, his second Booker winner, and (right) in 2010 with Parrot And Olivier In America, his fourth shortlisted novel. Will his new novel, The Chemistry Of Tears, make it five? Photograph: Julian Makey/Rex Features; AFP/Getty Images

He grew up a long way from the feverish circles of literary London, but Carey is – how could he not be – very aware of generational pecking order. It is not polite to speak of these things; he smiles sardonically, and yet he sees no point in trying to deny the rivalry he has with those who are also his great friends. "There are people that you don't like because you're jealous of them until you meet them. And you haven't read their book because it's had so much attention. Then you meet them and discover they've been jealous of you, and you become friends. And you like their work... I think we are [all] competitive. But I shouldn't say we. Because I'll be disapproved of."

How does the competitiveness manifest? "Well, I was in Adelaide with two good friends, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster, and I said, when one of my friends gets a bad review, it's a little hard not to be pleased. And they're going, 'Oh, no, Peter, no.' They wouldn't have it. So. I think I'm both things. There's a part of me that celebrates someone who's really good, when someone's done something beautiful. It's lovely. And it's lovely to feel yourself being bigger than your little self."

Carey is extremely affable, but I wonder if he doesn't have a diva-ish side – didn't winning the Booker twice turn him into a bit of a jerk? "Why would you be a jerk? There are people, when things do go to their head, who get silly and embarrassing or even nasty. It's just about character. Maybe the nerdy boy appreciates... although, often, it's the nerdy boy who becomes most unbearable: power at last! My view is never that sort of view. Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame. In these brutal times."

He continues to enjoy New York. He teaches a creative writing class at Hunter College. He and his wife like to stay in and watch DVDs, talk, walk around the city. Homesickness is something that he feels but also believes to be based on a misunderstanding: "The person going back thinks, incorrectly, that no one else has changed, that they're doing the same old shit they were always doing. But that's not true. It can't be true."

He accepts that living far from his original home will always entail a small amount of sadness. "Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past. It's true about my country; about the past of my country; it's true about loss, death; time. All of those things. I'm not quite homesick now, but it's a sort of a… the past is home."

The other day he dragged out a laptop on to which he had loaded some old Australian folk songs and made his wife listen to them. Carey clears his throat and begins loudly, joyfully and without the slightest inhibition to sing in a broadened Australian accent: "We're the Maryborough miner boys and I'm one of the good old time/and then just to serve him right, me boys, I set his house on fire." He grins and takes a sip of wine. "It makes me very happy."

• The Chemistry Of Tears is published by Faber & Faber on 5 April at £17.99.

Perhaps I just wasn't in the mood, but I couldn't finish this:


True History of the Kelly Gang- Peter Carey

I'm not even sure that I made it through the first 50 pages. Ned Kelly's a very interesting historical character, but Carey somehow managed to disengage my interest.

The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey – review

Peter Carey's storytelling skills are on display in a novel of love, grief and automata, but the tale lacks a human heart

Edmund Gordon

guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 March 2012 11.00 BST


'A thrilling verbal energy': Peter Carey photographed at home in New York. Photograph by Flora Hanitijo

Clock-making and novel-writing are – in spite of a shared need for craftsmanship – rather different activities, requiring nigh-on incompatible skills. The clockmaker deals in absolute precision, working to a design that must forgo all extraneous elements; the novelist can't afford to be so pernickety, but must always venture into the unknown, and create the impression of untrammelled life.


The Chemistry of Tears
by Peter Carey

It might be thought hubristic for an author to draw attention to this contrast, but in his 13th novel (his 12th for adult readers), Peter Carey does exactly that. About halfway through The Chemistry of Tears, Henry Blanding, a Victorian gent with an interest in clockwork devices – who has travelled to the Black Forest, the birthplace of the cuckoo clock, to have a giant mechanical bird (it starts as a duck and ends up a swan) constructed as a "magical amusement" for his dying son – encounters a "collector of fairy tales" in the mould of the brothers Grimm, a man in whom he senses an appreciation of misery and cruelty, a tendency to see "the possibility of violence" in everything around him. The collector's presence in the narrative is conspicuous because so tangential to the plot, and it doesn't take a very donnish turn of mind to view him as a representative literary sensibility, a kind of stand-in for the novelist himself. Another difference between the writer and the clockmaker is that the writer must, as Graham Greene once put it, have a "splinter of ice in the heart", while the clockmaker can go to his trade as a refuge from difficult emotions.

Henry's narrative alternates with that of Catherine Gehrig, a horologist at the Swinburne museum in London, who has been charged with reassembling the mechanical bird a century later. These two strands of the novel are linked not only by the construction (or reconstruction) of the clockwork animal, but by their narrators' grief: Henry's son may, he fears, have died before he has a chance to present him with his gift, while Catherine is suffering after the sudden loss of her lover and colleague Matthew Tindall, a married man and father, whom she is thus forced to mourn in secret.

Carey's exceptional storytelling talents are all on prominent display here. Catherine's and Henry's voices are lustily generated and expertly distinguished from one another; contemporary London and 19th-century Germany are conveyed in lightly distributed yet powerfully evocative physical detail; both narratives are invigorated throughout by a thrilling verbal energy, and an almost unfailing knack for alighting on the mot juste (the "quarrelling" of birds at dawn, the "pulp and fibre" of the human brain). These are precisely the qualities that have always characterised Carey's novels, and which have twice made him an eminently deserving winner of the Booker prize. His perennial themes – the tension between telling a story and telling the truth; the conflicted nature of postcolonial national identity – are distinctively modern concerns, which are nicely accommodated by his trademark brand of funky, roughly vocal, charmingly deranged picaresque.

But while The Chemistry of Tears pays lip service to those themes, the main questions it poses are of a larger, more traditional, and less abstract variety – and these are less easily absorbed into the novel's form. Carey draws an explicit comparison between the clockwork automata that so fascinate Catherine and Henry and the characters themselves. Human beings are also engines, he reminds us, "intricate chemical machines" – so what accounts for our non-mechanistic attributes, our capacity for love and cruelty, rage and grief? How is it that man-made machines can be pieced back together a hundred years after they have last seen the light of day, as Catherine reassembles Henry's automaton, when he himself is lost to the passage of time? As Henry puts it in the novel's starkest passage, "What happens when we die?"

The kind of novel Carey writes – a kind in which character is intimately related to plot – is perhaps not the ideal scaffold on which to hang such grand and unanswerable questions about the soul. In Catherine's sections (perhaps because she does less adventuring than Henry), a dissonance between form and content is particularly apparent. Her grief is always described fleetingly and retrospectively – "I ran a bath… I cried. I shampooed and conditioned and cried again" – without much variation, and without any attempt to inhabit the immediacy of her pain. This is a style well suited to picaresque, a mode that requires profusion of incident above depth of character, but it won't do for a novel that hopes to say something meaningful about human emotion. Catherine always seems to cry on cue; the more she does it, the less we're liable to believe in her grief. For all its brilliance, The Chemistry of Tears is a novel that speaks to the intellect rather than the heart – it is a complex and expertly crafted piece of machinery, but not an altogether convincing representation of life.

The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey – review

Peter Carey's invention is an impressive achievement

Andrew Motion

guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 April 2012 22.50 BST


Silver swan at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham

Catherine Gehrig is a middle-aged horologist working in "the Georgian halls" of the Swinburne Museum, London SW1. For the last 13 years she has been in love with her married colleague, Matthew Tindall, and when he dies suddenly (on 21 April 2010 – the book is full of precisions) she is distraught. Out of charity and to avoid scandal, her boss Eric Croft moves her to the museum annexe in Olympia and gives her a recent acquisition to assemble: a complex mechanical toy that she first thinks might be a monkey, then decides is a duck. (Actually, it's a swan: the transformation of ugliness into beauty is one of many presiding themes.) Croft's hope is that Catherine will be led towards recovery by "the huge peace of mechanical things". In fact she is first irritated, then distracted and eventually bewitched by a story that has some peculiar parallels with her own, and some corrective deviations from it.


The Chemistry of Tears
by Peter Carey

This story, which is told in sections that alternate with Catherine's own, involves Henry Brandling, scion of a wealthy 19th-century railway family, husband of sourpuss Hermione and father of sickly Percy. When Percy falls ill, and all the usual Victorian therapies have failed, Henry becomes convinced that a foreign and mechanical entertainment might heal him. "When my little fellow saw the design of M Vaucanson's ingenious duck," he says, "a great shout – huzza – went up from him. It was a tonic to see the colour in his cheeks, the life brimming in his eyes where I observed the… 'magnetic agitation' which is a highly elevated form of curiosity or desire."

In order to turn these designs into the real thing, Henry travels to the Black Forest south of Karlsruhe, where watch-makers have a reputation for exceptional brilliance (it's the original home of the cuckoo-clock). Here he encounters assorted servants, manufacturers, schemers and dealers, before landing in Furtwangen with Frau Helga, M Artaud the silversmith and collector of fairy stories, the mechanical genius Herr Sumper, and "his golden shadow", the equally ingenious but injured boy, Carl.

While the cogs and pistons of this little society threaten to destroy Henry, rather than help him discover a means of curing his child, Catherine begins to assemble his story and the toy it centres around. It is now that parallels between the two narratives begin to emerge. Sumper, it transpires, is "a most eccentric bully" who is determined to create for Henry "something far superior" to his original desire. Croft, though less obviously manipulative, arranges for Catherine to be helped in her labours by the glamorous young Courtauld girl Amanda Snyde (Carey has always liked tell-tale Dickensian names), who is in fact a sort of spy. Her boyfriend is dead lover Matthew's elder son, and her grandfather is a friend of Croft's – and so able to pass back secrets that emerge during the reassembly of the swan.

Carey manages these time-shifts and other complications with the same easy-seeming mastery that he shows in all his novels. But here the fluency seems especially apt, because it is always devoted to the service of machines that themselves depend on being cunningly assembled and delightful. In other words, there is an immaculate fit of means with themes – although (and because) these themes turn out not simply to concern the beauty of science, but the ways in which science and humans interact and overlap.

We begin to see this all the more clearly as the story rises towards its climax, in which Sumper reveals to Henry that during his previous work-life he has been involved with a certain Sir Albert Cruickshank, a brilliant and underfunded London scientist-cum-engineer (who sounds more than a little like Charles Babbage). Carey is too subtle a writer to spell out precise meanings through this passage of bravura writing, but his intentions are clear enough. While designing the wooden patterns from which Cruickshank's greatest invention will be cast (his Mysterium Tremendum), Sumper gains an understanding of high science that is truly visionary.

Specifically, it is a vision of how to discover order in a random universe – something that runs the risk of seeming crackpot, or being proved unworkable, and yet preserves a kind of nobility. "It soon became clear to me," Henry says, "that what [Sumper] so excitably described as 'deep order' was a True Believer's attempt to give meaning to a mess – children's toys, oriental figurines, turned brass implements, fragments of marble and a huge library of books in front of almost every one of which was placed some curiosity or object, each of which beckoned one's attention." This is the lesson Catherine has to learn more than a century later. Henry pursues a beautiful invention to heal his boy; she reassembles the swan as a means of balancing her grief. In both activities, bounds are set around parts of humanity that are not mechanistic (call them "souls" – a word that appears on the final page of the novel). Yet it turns out that the most tremendous of all Mysterium Tremendums is the body, which operates according to specific laws ("the chemistry of tears"), and which suffers no loss of beauty, or wisdom – or even marvellousness – in the process.

Carey has tackled some of these ideas before (the most obvious precursor to the construction of machines in this book is the transportation of the church in Oscar and Lucinda). But here everything has been designed, tooled, oiled and fitted together with greater economy and an equal panache. Does this mean the book ends too neatly? No. Even as it settles its main concerns, it floats new ideas (was golden boy Carl the young Karl Benz?), and emphasises latent themes (the greater love between parents and children; the endless human capacity for misunderstanding).

Furthermore, its idea of order remains compellingly unstable. It is one thing to devise, like Cruickshank, a machine that accurately maps the sea-bed, so that ships don't run aground and people don't drown. It is another to devise a plan that encompasses all the moods and vagaries of humanity. In their different ways, both Henry and Catherine prove this. They know the rage for order is at once completely sensible and somewhat lunatic. Their broken hearts tell them this.

• Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island is published by Jonathan Cape.