Review: A Long Way From Home

A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes you’re just not quite on a writer’s wavelength.

I am convinced I will some day love Peter Carey’s work. The Booker Prize people love him, and that goes a long way with me. He’s Australian, and I’m crazy for Richard Flanagan’s work. And he picks subjects that appeal to me, whether the history of outlaw Ned Kelly, a reimagining of Great Expectations (which I haven’t read yet), the story that became the formative (for me) movie Bliss, or this, the story of a road race around 1950s Australia.

And yet…this is the second in a row for me that hasn’t quite hit. I liked The True History of the Kelly Gang at least, though I was aware of thinking I should like it more. This one, well, I feel pretty detached from it overall despite enjoying many of the scenes and characters.

This opens with a line that promises a masterpiece, “For a girl to defeat one father is a challenge, but there were two standing between me and what I wanted which was – not to fiddle faddle – a lovely little fellow named Titch Bobs.” That’s a great voice, and it suggests we’ll get a love story of a kind, likely one wrapped around what the back cover suggests will be a road race.

Except that’s not quite what this becomes. Half of the chapters come from Irene’s perspective, and that voice persists for a long time (though never with quite the same wonderful and snaking rhythm). She isn’t pursuing Titch, though, so much as hoping to be his full partner in marriage, their prospective auto dealership, and eventually, the race. But even then, over time, those concerns become incidental as Titch gradually assumes some of the overbearing qualities of his own father, suspecting her of an infidelity that is true in only a passing and forgivable way.

The other half of these chapters are narrated by Willie Bachuber, the Bobs’ next-door neighbor and a regional quiz show star who’s fled his wife and daughter over what he thinks is her affair with a “black” Aborigine. Willie is drawn to Irene on sight, but this isn’t a story of their illegitimate attraction either.

In the end, I guess I’m not sure what this is about.

On the one hand, there’s an intriguing exploration of genetic determination throughout this. [SPOILER:] We learn eventually, for instance, that Willie is not – as he believes – the son of the gentle German couple who raised him but rather the product of an Aborigine and the white woman he raped. His own child, then, is actually his, and he’s been inadvertently betrayed by story and genetics. (And, as a consequence, he ends the novel attempting to fit into an Outback Aboriginal community.) Similarly, we see the good-hearted Titch unable to make himself much different from the obnoxious father he long tried to flee.

And, yet, those strains don’t become evident for a long time, and they leave too much of the novel unaccounted for.

On the other hand, this seems in part to be about the notion of “taming” Australia into a “modern” state, one that it’s possible to circumnavigate by car. For all that this novel is arranged around that metaphor, it doesn’t cover either the long build-up to the race nor the strange aftermath.

I add that confusion to the often-irritating way that the dual narrators function. I like the possibilities of two different story-tellers, but here Carey seems often clumsy with it. We’ll get one character narrating a scene and then another narrating the same one from a different perspective. That’s something of a pet peeve of mine, maybe because I’ve tried to make it work and found it’s unsatisfying.

In any case, there are certainly flashes of the brilliance I expected here, but they aren’t connected to each other. I’d like to give another of Carey’s novels a shot, but I find my expectations lowering. It may be that he isn’t the great writer his reputation promises, and it may be I’m simply not the reader for him.


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