Peter Carey
Vale Glen Tomasetti
Glen Tomasetti (born in 1929) – author, poet and folksinger – died on June 25. Tomasetti’s 1976 novel, Thoroughly Decent People, was the first book published by McPhee Gribble (the second was Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip). Her novel Man of Letters was adapted for the ABC by Alma de Groen. Tomasetti continued to write poetry into her last months. Her uncompleted biography of Hepzibah Menuhin was almost twenty years in the making.
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.
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The first draft didn’t have Tristan, this deformed little character. Then I was reading to the kids, Beauty and the Beast. It was very beautifully written, terribly moving – and they were moved. I read it to them many times, thinking it would be interesting to look at that. Then, round about this time, I was walking along the street and glimpsed a terribly deformed young man in a wheelchair. I couldn’t bear to look at him yet I carried with me afterwards a vision, this bright, bright intelligence and this weird twisted-up face. It was quite moving and, having flinched from it, as from a fire or being cut, I began to make myself think about what was in there. That really goes back again to the very beginning of my work, the short stories. In the very beginning I was affected by Faulkner and As I Lay Dying because Faulkner was giving rich, interior worlds to people who you might otherwise pass by. That’s been a continual thing in my work, perhaps.
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By now most of us already know, whether we’ve read it or not, that Peter Carey’s new novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is about God, glass and gambling, and that in the last few pages a glass church floats up the Bellinger river. We know because the book has been reviewed in just about every major newspaper and magazine in the country. There have been speeches and public appearances, extracts, profiles and interviews. This is the sort of literary event that publishers dream of. Carey’s last book, Illywhacker, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and sold sixty thousand copies of the paperback edition in Australia alone– astonishing when you consider that the average new novel by an unknown writer appears in a print run of three thousand. It’s not bad going for a writer who has only five published books to his credit. What’s more, Carey is now in this mid forties, which is mere chickenhood for a writer, so we can reasonably expect him to build a most illustrious career indeed.
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