Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Oscar and Lucinda

by
February–March 1998, no. 198

Oscar and Lucinda

by
February–March 1998, no. 198

Oscar and Lucinda is the next best thing we have to that gleaming oxymoron a contemporary Australian literary classic. It won a swag of prizes (not least the Booker); it is a long vibrant narrative, including history full of the rustle of Victorian costumes, but with a whisper of the horrors on which this country was founded with a brief ghastly moment representing the murder of Aborigines.

Peter Carey’s 1988 novel is also the book a lot of people would turn to if they wanted to show how Australian writing could take it up to the Marquezes and Rushdies, the fabulist tradition where you get realism and fancy with the lot. Oscar and Lucinda has, after all, its glass church on water, its central conceits of gambling, its Plymouth Brethren and megalomaniac clerks and parish hypocrites and Chinese gaming dens, its random happenstance and its dea ex machina.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.