Whitlam, Assange inspire Carey
Peter Carey is in Melbourne flogging his latest book Amnesia, about an Australian female cyber-terrorist, a kind of Julian Assange in drag. When I call the two-time Booker Prize winner's hotel, he's wolfing down the last of a cold steak sandwich. Gough Whitlam had died earlier that week and was still on his mind.
"You look at all these front pages, these huge pictures of Gough, and it was also some of these same newspapers which were very helpful in getting him out of office," he says, observing en passant that any mention of the CIA's purported role in Whitlam's dismissal still gets you labelled as "a conspiracy theorist, rather unstable and perhaps idealistic or just a fantasist of some sort".
Plus ca change. "(In Amnesia) I was trying to make the point about the continuing American interference in the internal affairs of other countries," Carey says. "So I suppose that's where I started my journey. And along the way I get to deal with a lot of other things. Including giving you a chortle."
That's right. Amnesia is hilarious. You know Carey's on about some dreadful stuff but you can't help laughing. Here's one of the book's main characters, Felix Moore, who's been commissioned to write the biography of beautiful hacker Gaby Bailleux by his old mate, the left-wing property developer and patron of atonal composers, Woody Townes:
"I worked as a journalist in a country where the flow of information was controlled by three corporations… I was overweight and out of breath but I was proud to be sued, reviled, scorned, to be called a loser by the rewriters of press releases. I took comfort from it, which was just as well because there was comfort nowhere else."
"Assange was the person who set me off," the New York-based Australian author admits. "But I was really determined that I was not going to write about him. Firstly, I couldn't do it, I didn't know enough. If I was going to do that, I'd have to be a journalist. I'm not a journalist. Whenever I get to something that's supposed to be a report, I start making things up. You guys go to jail for that sort of thing."
Which is why one of his first decisions was to make his hacker a woman. "That then forces you into an interesting choice," he says. "Because the women who do write code and hang out in those circles are often marginalised but tend to be really interesting people."
Carey denies he was ever offered the job of writing Assange's memoirs. "It wasn't like I rejected anything or indeed any offer was ever made. I was talking about Assange with some admiration. I was asked if I wanted to write the book. I said I don't think so. And that was it."
The job fell to Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan: the biography never eventuated, but O'Hagan did write a very funny story about the experience for The London Review of Books.
The other thing you'll notice about Amnesia is the pared-back, hardboiled style. The author of Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang admits it's symptomatic of getting older.
"As I get older I spend more and more time obsessed with getting rid of words," the 71-year-old author says. "When I was younger, people would talk about sentences needing a minimum of words, I'd go, 'What a load of bulls…. Who do you think you are -- Ernest Hemingway?'
"Now I get such pleasure from getting rid of words. It's like boiling down or reducing a sauce, it makes it more intense and flavoursome. You taste it and go, 'F…, how did you make it like that?'"
No doubt it's the kind of advice he might pass on to his students at the City University of New York's Hunter College, where the former advertising copywriter is Distinguished Professor and executive director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. "I love teaching," he says. "And I love the way all the students here support each other."
Surely as a writer he must love living in New York too? "It's terrible! There are too many distractions."
'(Julian) Assange was the person who set me off. But I was really determined that I was not going to write about him.'
