A Long Way from Home, Peter Carey’s 14th novel, uses the story of a light-skinned Indigenous Australian who has been brought up white to address the country’s brutal history of racism … Carey has found a way to delve deeply into a topic that was previously morally unavailable, so that what starts out feeling like a typical, jauntily whimsical Peter-Carey-by-numbers soon becomes something more complex and powerful … His best novel in years, maybe decades.
What a delightful writer Peter Carey is, and how varied are the delights he offers. A Long Way From Home,’’ the 14th novel by the two-time Booker winner, displays many of the typically polychromatic Carey pleasures ... Any novelist can write about anything, as long as he or she does it in an aesthetically convincing and morally attuned way, and Carey does both splendidly here. A Long Way From Home charts old territory and strikes out in new directions. It’s one of Carey’s best, and boldest, efforts yet.
The early chapters, set in postwar Australia, feel like the setup for a rom-com road race … Prescient readers might catch sounds here and there of the drama that lies ahead, but everyone else will probably jump out of this slow-moving plot before it reaches the main event. That’s too bad because Carey eventually arrives at a profound and poignant story, though it has little to do with the zany car race … The action in these latter chapters is often oblique, obscured further by elliptical conversations, partly in dialect. But that’s an intentional and rather brilliant representation of Willie’s plight. He’s a man determined to unearth the richness of Aboriginal culture even while respecting its secrets. Those conflicting goals ultimately find perfect expression in Carey’s strange narrative.
As Carey guides readers across this vast, often barren landscape and into each character’s complicated personal history, he further delves into his career-long fascination with the dark underbelly of Australian history. Carey is a giant of contemporary fiction, and with this powerful, pertinent exploration of race and national identity, the importance and resonance of his work is freshly and enjoyably affirmed.
If the title conjures polite restraint, the novel itself is reliably free-flowing. And why not? Carey is once again in his happy place, Australia’s past, this time the 1950s, where he’s free to fill the text with all the evocations he savors as an expat ... As usual with Carey, the voices lead. His narrators are voluble and digressive ... Carey sets an impressive and enjoyable goal of reaching the finish line. Characters, like dead spark plugs, like a twisted fender, get kicked aside, killed off, even when the early chapters hint at depth and promise ... With all its inventive momentum, all its pleasurable beats, the fast pace of the race, the scenery unfurling, the novel ends up far from where it started, in a place of historical reckoning and colonial guilt.
Everything Carey undertakes in A Long Way From Home is accomplished with clarity and elegance. Like the best of his books, this one keeps the reader in its grip with sharp turns of plot and muscular language ... A Long Way From Home is a major work and an exciting one; it sprawls, but not uncontrollably. The tragedy is deep and affecting, but even in pivotal moments, it is neither unrelenting nor unrelieved. Along with the evil, there is good in his universe, and it works to set right some injustices and redress old wounds.
These two rich, ripe voices, beautifully realised on the page, are the joy of the novel and at the heart of its achievement … In summary his idea feels good: a technology-fuelled race across the mapped surface of the Australian landscape becomes instead a journey inwards, into its true past and its different meanings, and into the race crimes buried shallowly under its surface. And yet the book’s energy seems to lapse in this long section where Bachhuber is stuck in the outback. I think it’s partly a problem with the language and with those voices. Carey wants to break the frame and take us through the picture into a new way of looking, but his character’s kindly period idiom is incommensurate with the depth of his discoveries … The story of the crimes against Indigenous people is present more hauntingly, because more obliquely, in earlier parts of the novel.
Carey’s eye for zestful storytelling is as sharp as ever — as is his ventriloquist’s ear … A Long Way from Home’s strength — that hyperactive zest — is also its chief flaw. Often it feels as if the author is not so much writing a story as wrestling a whole armful of them; no sooner does he have one pinned down than another escapes, squirming through the antipodean dust … For all its comic brio, A Long Way from Home tugs inescapably towards tragedy, and often seems overwhelmed by it. Traversing territory seeded with bitterness and sorrow, past numberless sites of outrages against indigenous communities, Willie and Irene are unsure how best to navigate; and perhaps that is Carey’s anxiety too.
A Long Way From Home starts off in a highly entertaining vein and then morphs into something altogether darker and more introspective ... Carey demonstrates an extraordinary ear for language and the ability to capture his characters’ styles of speech. His writing is studded with Aussie slang that takes a few chapters to get used to, but his evocative descriptions of the outback need no translation. He’s created characters whose quirks and peccadillos make them both lovable and flawed until suddenly, the narrative thrusts them into a different story altogether. Carey’s gift is that readers are willing to follow him on this journey of self-discovery, cleverly disguised as a road trip.
..the trio’s odyssey, in addition to being a rollicking adventure, leads to a startling exchange of worlds. Bigotries are confronted. Hidden histories are revealed. Carey colors his antic, sidewinding prose with place names, slang and fauna that use the fabric of language itself to evoke this 1950s Australia. His take on his characters is both tart and affectionate ... A Long Way from Home is a frolic with depth, a flight of fancy with tough resonance.
This picaresque comedy goes thematically deeper as it heads into the Outback … And off goes the novel in some surprising directions at which the setup barely hints, as it illuminates a country very different from the ‘monocultural’ one upon which the government insists, discovers that racial identity may not be as simple as black and white, and upends the relationships between the married couple and their neighbor and the very notion of who is the novel’s protagonist and who is the sidekick. In the guise of a period piece, Carey's novel raises issues of culture and race that carry a thoroughly contemporary charge.
Carey’s unfortunate latest starts out being about a race and ends up being about race, but it’s marred by so many ‘what’s going on here?’ moments and convenient plot-changing contrivances that readers will wonder what story Carey’s trying to tell, and how … Carey’s prose is cutting and often quite funny, but that alone doesn’t save the overly shaggy story. This won’t go down as one of Carey’s better efforts.
