My Life as a Fake By Peter Carey

The non-existent poets society

In one way, obviously, all fiction is fake. It's made up. Double Booker-winner Peter Carey has been playing around with the concepts of fact and fiction for most of his literary life. Truth, he seems to be saying, comes not from the particulars of a certain life, but from an essence.

His last novel, the Booker-winning True History of the Kelly Gang, was a fictionalised account of the life and times of the 19th-century Australian outlaw and people's hero Ned Kelly. While taking huge liberties with the facts, Carey nevertheless created a character that was as real as any ever invented. He also, in his depiction of the relentlessly poor Irish immigrant communities suddenly marooned in the outback, brilliantly explored the roots of modern-day Australia. And with it all being written in a breathless and ultimately very convincing punctuationless dialect, or Kelly's voice, the effect was both hypnotic and extraordinarily powerful.

Australia and a "true" story again lie at the heart of My Life as a Fake, but Carey's new novel is a very different beast. It is inspired by a literary hoax that rocked Australia some 60 years ago. A couple of disgruntled minor poets managed to pass off, to a highly acclaimed but rather pretentious literary journal, some poems they banged out one afternoon as the work of a brilliant dead garage mechanic, Ern Malley. The poems were loaded with nonsensical classical references, sexual innuendo and written in the style of a pissed Ezra Pound, yet the editor of the journal decided that Malley was one of the most important figures ever to emerge in Australian literary history.

When the hoax was exposed, a very angry public effectively sent the two poets into exile, while the editor, Max Harris, never recovered his self-esteem. To make matters worse, Harris was later prosecuted for publishing these "obscenities". Rather touchingly, however, Harris continued to believe in Malley's existence, at least his essence. As he later wrote, "I still believe in Ern Malley. For me Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time. I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets. A young person. A person without the protection of the world that comes from living in it. A man outside." Carey includes the above Harris quote in his Author's Note at the end of the novel, and clearly this is the line he wished to explore - the invention of a creature that then begins to assume a life and importance all of its own.

With a nod to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on the first page, and countless very apt and funny references to everyone from Milton to WH Auden, My Life as a Fake makes no bones about its literary heritage. Sarah Wode-Douglas, editor of the London-based poetry journal The Modern Review, is persuaded to accompany an old family friend, the rakish poet John Slater, on a trip to Kuala Lumpur. This is 1972, though it could be the 1950s for all Sarah's prudishness and Slater's quaint waywardness.

It's never very clear why Slater insists that they go to Kuala Lumpur, but once there, much to Slater's annoyance, Sarah befriends the tramp-like figure of Christopher Chubb - Carey's amalgamation of the two poets who invented Malley. Covered in appalling sores, but still proclaiming genius, Chubb begins to tell Sarah the story of not only how he invented the poet Bob McCorkle (Carey's Malley), but how McCorkle then came to life and terrorised him for the next 15 years. Thinking she can get hold of the "real" McCorkle's body of work - which Chubb hints exists, and which she realises would save her grossly underfunded magazine - Sarah plays along with Chubb's extraordinary story, until, well, she's driven mad by it.

But what a story. Stretching from Melbourne to Sydney, and then across Indonesia and Malaysia, Chubb is at first hunted down by the massive, bestial McCorkle. Then when McCorkle kidnaps Chubb's tiny daughter it is Chubb who does the hunting. McCorkle, now Kurtz-like - big, bald and surrounded by adoring natives somewhere in the middle of a Malaysian jungle - gains the upper hand yet again. It's not until some considerable time later, on a Kuala Lumpur back street, that creator and monster have a final showdown.

However, as Carey's story becomes ever more fantastical, it becomes ever weaker, and more and more like a rather monstrous literary contrivance itself. Maybe this was always Carey's aim, but I don't think so. He has always been a writer who was peculiarly aware of his responsibility to the reader, being interested in charm not conceit. While there are flashes of great wit and humility, and much insight into the nature of creativity and identity, along with some marvellously sticky passages that sink you deep into the steaming streets of Kuala Lumpur and the dark jungles of Malaysia, Carey doesn't quite pull it off. While trying to depict Australia's intellectual inferiority complex - as was, anyway - he forgets to create a story that anyone can believe strongly enough in. He was never going to win a third Booker prize with this novel.