“My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey”

I read this novel only recently and, as one does, I read it from beginning to end. While the story was well told, I found it confusing in that it did tend to jump around in a somewhat confusing way. Had I read the author’s notes at the end first, a lot of my confusion would have been eliminated. It seems that at some time in the early 1940s, two Australian soldiers with time on their hands, though the war in the Pacific was at its height, one afternoon sat down to cooperate in the writing of some poetry which, under the name of Ern Malley they sent off to the literary magazine “Angry Penguins”, ostensibly from the sister of her dead brother. The poems were declared the work of a major new poet by the editor of “Angry Penguins” who published them. He was than humiliated when the fraud was revealed and then, to add injury to insult, the editor was prosecuted because he had published a work with banned sexual overtones that had shocked his readers. It was this case that Peter Carey used as the basis of his novel, but inventing and embellishing as he went along.

Carey replaces Ern Malley with Bob McCorkle, a poet dreamed up by Christopher Chub who replaces the two Australian soldiers, and who perpetrates the same hoax. Sadly, for Chub, his hoax backfires when his figment of the imagination, Bob McCorkle, suddenly turns up as a vengeful, 7 feet tall Australian who claims ownership of Chub’s poetry and hate for the man who gave him birth but denied him a childhood. Chub, too, is publically humiliated but much worse than prosecution happens to him. The story is convoluted with many narrators and also with a huge geographic spread but it held my attention to the bitter end when I discovered the genesis of the story.

Bernard Gallivan
April 2019