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Political is personal in Carey's Amnesia

Amnesia by Peter Carey
Amnesia by Peter Carey

It used to be we were insulated from our enemies by oceans and walls, by physical obstacles that, if they didn't effectively impede the invaders' progress, at least served to warn us of their coming. Later we would learn that the real enemy is within, embedded in our society and perhaps even within our genes and hearts. Part of the modern condition is to know there's nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.

Amnesia (Knopf, $25.95), the 16th book by Peter Carey, an Australian novelist who lives in New York, is a curiously charged modern story with some Victorian virtues. It is a ripping, sometimes baffling yarn that can be read as a snapshot of a world balanced delicately on a high wire of technology, ripe for the sort of disruption that can these days be accomplished by pale young people in dim and airless rooms, clicking mouses and staring into the digital void.

What has happened is that a virus has made its way into Australian prison system computers, unlocking all the doors and setting free political dissidents and hardened criminals. The virus also infects computers of the United States corporations that developed and licensed the software -- thousands of American correctional facilities are also affected.

It emerges that this is the work of a 30-year-old hacker who calls herself Angel. Her real name is Gabrielle Baillieux, the privileged daughter of an Australian movie actress and a liberal member of the country's parliament. Her Anonymous-style followers insist that all the consequences of the attack were deliberate, that Angel launched an attack on the United States.

Her mother Celine, worried about the consequences if Gaby is extradited to the U.S. for trial (where she would face the death penalty), argues that her daughter is a relative innocent who is being exploited by these cyber-radicals, that she lacks the wherewithal to carry out these attacks alone and that her intention was to free only a few dissidents.

After an old family friend, a socialist real estate developer named Woody "Wodonga" Townes, bails Gaby out of jail, Celine ensconces her in a secure undisclosed location. Then she and Woody enlist another old college friend, a shambling, discredited journalist named Felix Moore, to write her story.

Felix is in dire need of money. He's just lost a defamation lawsuit, making him anathema to prospective employers. His wife has thrown him out of the house he's just burned down (he was ordered to destroy all remaining copies of his defaming book). But his reasons for taking on the story are more complicated than financial necessity.

Back in the day, Felix was in love with the exotic Celine, and for a brief moment the working-class son of a car salesman from the little town of Bacchus Marsh might even have thought he had a chance with her.

Furthermore, the story gives Felix a chance to pursue his perennial obsession with American interference in Australia's domestic business. He sees the Australian government as a lapdog client state and the Americans as bullies who can't understand that Gaby "could no more be their traitor than their patriot."

It is interesting to note that Felix Moore (one of his nicknames is "Moore-or-less-correct") shares a few attributes with Carey. They were born in the same Melbourne neighborhood and their family histories are similar, as is their ambivalence toward U.S. hegemony and their sympathy with people determined to unearth the truth by any means necessary. (Carey has written in support of Wikileaks founder and fellow Aussie Julian Assange.)

Yet the overarching political critique is less interesting than the personal story that Felix crafts, ostensibly in defense of Gaby, which stretches back to her grandmother and a little known and long suppressed World War II incident.

The Battle of Brisbane consisted of two nights of rioting in November 1942, when American troops faced off against their Australian allies in Queensland's capital city. Sexual jealousy was perhaps the prime reason for the fighting, in which an Australian soldier was killed and hundreds of combatants on both sides were injured. American soldiers were paid as much as six times that of their Australian counterparts; they had better uniforms and access to goods such as ice cream, chocolates and nylon stockings. As a result, they attracted the attention of Australian women and the rancor of Australian servicemen, who grumbled that the Yanks were "overpaid, oversexed, and over here."

Felix also connects Celine and Gaby to the fall of Gough Whitlam's ruling Labor Party. Gaby is born the precise moment on Nov. 11, 1975, when the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, announces he has dismissed Whitlam, the constitutionally elected prime minister, and replaced him with a minister more amenable to U.S. interests.

These two real events, largely forgotten by Australians and the world at large, serve as linchpins for Carey's invented narrative and resonate with Amnesia's themes of willful and coerced forgetting. "We were naive, of course. We continued to think of the Americans as our friends and our allies. ... It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot it right away."

While obviously targeted at an Australian audience -- the text is peppered with names of real people and one imagines that it's geographically specific -- Carey is the sort of bumptious writer who throws out dozens of interesting ideas a page. He's not always so good with his follow-through though, and some readers will likely be exasperated with the second half of the book, which all but strands us with Felix's primary source material -- audiotapes made by Celine and Gaby (it's often difficult to tell which) that more or less coalesce into a portrait of a precocious and often ignored child who eventually finds a digital Svengali.

But Felix isn't just building a portrait of a new kind of revolutionary. He's rebooting himself:

"He had been a journalist with one story, one cause, one effect. He had been born in the previous geologic age while Gaby was born in the Anthropocene age and easily saw 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."

Stylistically, Carey is great fun to read. If you're only familiar with his most popular (in this country, at least) and most conventional novel, Oscar and Lucinda, then you might not be prepared for his pragmatic use of punctuation and his tendency to blow past certain farcical elements like a drunken bull elephant. You might be occasionally befuddled and antagonized by Amnesia, but you won't forget it.

...

Though it was released in September, Maureen Corrigan's So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (Little, Brown, $26) deserves to be remarked upon. Corrigan, the book critic for National Public Radio's Fresh Air, has written an enthusiastic and contagious love letter about this somewhat gnomic little book, which most of us probably encounter too young.

Corrigan, like most Americans, first read F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel in high school and misapprehended it. But after years of close re-reading, she has -- like most discerning people -- come to appreciate the book and wonder at its seemingly inexhaustible treasures.

She understands it as a work by an artist contemplating what he regarded as the inevitable failure of his own life. Gatsby remains the most American of novels, if not the Great American Novel that some would make of it. Fitzgerald took as his subjects aspiration and social attainment, self-invention and self-pity; he was attuned to the signals of snobbery and horrified that he might be found out. Fitzgerald was the Great Pretender; his work is consonant with that lesser or greater part of ourselves we secretly believe fraudulent. He understood the American prerogative for self-invention and anticipated the arrival of such self-made artists as Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.

Corrigan's love letter to this novel is erudite and surprising, and charmingly free of academic cant. People will read it for instruction, but it should be for pleasure.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

Style on 02/01/2015

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