You bet your life

Margaret Walters

• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
  Faber, 512 pp, £10.95, March 1988, ISBN 0 571 14812 3
• The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
  Cape, 131 pp, £9.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 224 02553 8
• Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel
  Viking, 299 pp, £11.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 670 82117 9

Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one. It begins in Devon, with a Christmas pudding snatched from the child’s lips by his harsh Plymouth Brethren father. It ends – as a direct consequence of that pudding – half a world away in 1866, as Oscar sits, ill and miserable, in a glass church drifting on barges down a remote Australian river. He’s there because of a wager with Lucinda Leplastrier whom he loves – and who will not be the narrator’s great-grandmother. The church itself is airily beautiful, a ‘crystal-pure bat-winged structure’, the product of years of dreaming. It’s also a folly, quite unsuited to the climate, already battered and twisted and cracked. And it’s heavy: made of ‘thirty hundredweight of cast-iron rods, five hundred and sixty-two glass sheets weighing two pounds each, twenty gross of nuts and bolts, sixty pounds of putty, five gallons of linseed oil’. The miserable effort needed to transport it across the trackless bush causes more than one death.

Vol. 10 No. 8 · 21 April 1988 » Margaret Walters » You bet your life (print version)
Pages 20-22 | 2897 words