Peter Carey’s new novel, ‘Amnesia,’ tells energetic tale of many voices

“Amnesia” by Peter Carey (Knopf, 307 pages, $25.95)

Carey, a two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is Australian, and his new novel is not only set there but is concerned with political history that will be unfamiliar to most U.S. readers.

He begins, like many writers, with a premise that invites a narrative to explain how we got here. Young Gaby Baillieux has released a virus called the Angel Worm into Australia’s prison computer system. As a result, hundreds of asylum seekers walk free.

Furthermore, because Americans run the prisons there, the doors of some 5,000 jails in the United States are also open.

The question the novel wants to answer is, How did Gaby arrive at this juncture, and what then happens to her?

With his usual energetic prose, his thorough characterization and his arresting narrative voice, Carey tells us Gaby’s story. But he does so in a creative way that involves many others and ends up addressing broader historical concerns.

The book’s first part, just over a third of its length, is told in first person by Felix Moore, a left-wing journalist who has published “several books, 50 features, 1,000 columns, mainly concerned with the traumatic injury done to my country by our American allies in 1975.”

The events of 1975, Moore says, are all part of “The Great Amnesia.” That’s when Australia’s Governor General dismissed the Labor Party government led by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, which was opposed to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Moore and other leftists believe this dismissal occurred at the behest of the U.S. government, and he’s still angry about it. “America would do what it liked and Australia would behave like the client state it always was.”

Moore has his own problems. He’s lost a court case and owes thousands of dollars, and his marriage is falling apart. So when Woody Townes, a wealthy businessman and an old friend, offers to pay off his fine if he’ll write Gaby’s story, he agrees.

He meets with Gaby’s mother, Celine, a former actress who is acquainted with both men. She and Felix were part of a group of leftists back in the 1960s and ’70s.

Gaby has gone underground, and Celine puts Felix in touch with her. This clandestine arrangement reads with the suspense of a spy novel, as Celine has Felix kidnapped and taken to an out-of-the-way place to do his writing. It’s also unclear what Woody’s motives are, as he tries to find Felix and retrieve what he’s written.

The second part of the novel switches to third person, as Felix works from cassette tapes and other sources to retell Gaby’s biography, which includes Celine’s story as well.

One of the tensions the novel explores is between Felix’s journalistic impulse to tell the truth and Celine’s desire to protect Gaby from any kind of negative portrayal.

He turns in pages periodically, and at one point Celine reacts to what Felix has written about her: “Everything you’ve written is reprehensible.” Felix acknowledges that the truth is often ugly. “We have placed truth in our stained-glass windows but when it arrives in person, unwashed and smelly, loud and violent, our first act is to pull a gun on it.”

Nevertheless, as he sets about writing Gaby’s story, he realizes “the story of this young woman demanded I become a larger person, a man who had it in his heart to love our stinking human clay.”

Carey weaves his narrative around the story of Gaby, who grows up with social justice concerns and falls in love with computer programming, and Felix’s writing of her story.

Carey’s prose is full of detail and color and is often compared to Dickens, whose work he alludes to in much of his fiction. Here’s a description of Matty Matovic, a thief and the father of Gaby’s boyfriend: “He was snake-eyed, slim with a pool-hall hunch, always stalking around some imaginary table. He was drop-dead handsome until you saw his missing teeth.”

Her story is arresting, if a bit disordered. And we see her developing a radical conscience, which disturbs her parents, who have become less radical as they’ve aged and want to protect her.

But Gaby claims “it is my job to take the heat and do the time.” She comes to see that “the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself.”

Felix, meanwhile, feels like “a mill puppy,” producing his pages without knowing how they will be used. “The hammered sentences, the deeply imprinted pages, are delivered to others with no guarantees of what parts will be excised, what calumnies inserted.”

The novel wraps up tidily, as if apologizing for the scattered nature of the narrative up to that point. In “Amnesia,” which is also the title of the book Felix writes about Gaby, Carey has deftly combined a character study, a political screed, some history lessons and an up-to-date story of cyber activism. This can feel confusing at times, but he wraps it all in a prose style and voice that feel alive and let us glimpse another world.

This story was originally published March 7, 2015 at 6:12 PM with the headline "Peter Carey’s new novel, ‘Amnesia,’ tells energetic tale of many voices."