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Summary
Summary
Peter Carey has won the Booker prize twice for his ventures into historical fiction, True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda. Now the acclaimed Australian author is set to address a rather more contemporary situation. Amnesia is a thrilling and witty journey to the place where the cyber underworld of radicals and hackers collides with international power politics.
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
Peter Carey's fiction is turbo-charged, hyperenergetic. His language has little time for quiet passages; his minor characters, even at their most incidental, are endowed with details of appearance and speech that belie their status; his narrative lines, when they run into difficulties of any kind, blast through them by introducing new inventions and new possibilities. This is what makes him Dickensian. Amnesia, his 16th book, follows many of its predecessors in yoking these energies to a historical moment, then associating it with something urgent in contemporary times. It is a novel about hacking, and because it shows the revenge of a disaffected Australian on colonial powers, is therefore bound to bring Julian Assange to mind; specifically, it is concerned with the notorious moment in mid-70s Australian history, when the Whitlam government was brought down by American and British interference, in a way that is now largely forgotten (hence the title). The link between past and present is Gaby Baillieux, born in Melbourne hospital on 11 November 1975 at the precise moment the governor general is announcing the overthrow of Australia's elected government. Raised by her actor mother, Celine, and Labor party politician dad, Gaby is by turns a protected and a neglected child, before she turns to direct action of a digital variety with a pioneer internet marvel called Frederic Matovic. Eventually, they are imprisoned for their pains - and then, in a moment of almost biblical wonder, released when an internet worm busts open the automatic locks on the doors in prisons around the world. Not that Gaby's story emerges as straightforwardly as this. In the first part of the book, our narrator is Felix Moore, an elderly but still wildly energetic liberal journalist. "A shit-stirrer, a truffle hound for cheats and liars and crooks among the ruling classes." When we first meet him he is at low ebb - the loser in a high-court defamation case, commanded to destroy copies of his offending book. When he does so, he accidentally burns down his house, thereby damaging his prospects still further, and alienating his long-suffering wife, Claire. Enter Woody "Wodonga" Townes, a conveniently wealthy supporter who has just bailed Gaby and now arranges for Felix to get the exclusive on her story. In this way, he expects to clear Gaby's name, and to fill Felix's pockets. Why should he bother? Because Woody is also an old friend of Gaby's mother. Still with me? Carey's book is whirling and intricate, yet such is the excitement of the writing, we take the ride very gladly. And as Felix undertakes his research, we not only learn about Gaby's grandmother and mother, about significant forgotten episodes in Australian history (more amnesia correction), about institutional corruption and the infancy of computers, but also sympathise with his own plight - as he is amused, bemused, kidnapped and finally confined to a remote house where Woody demands that he finish his task of writing. In the second half of the book, Felix is replaced as narrator by a melange of voices that appear on the interview tapes he has been given to form the basis of his book. Sometimes it is Gaby's voice that we hear, sometimes Celine's; sometimes we are taken aside to sympathise with Felix in his isolation and discomfort. Gradually, as the pieces fit together, we begin to appreciate that this work is the making of Felix, because it allows him to learn from the generation younger than his own, and from Gaby in particular. "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." At the same time, we come to see Gaby as someone who is at once violently disruptive, and brimming with a thoroughly decent hatred of corruption. As the book approaches its climax, her particular rage is turned on the company Metwat, and their connection with Agrikem, who are poisoning the public water supply. Exposing their practice becomes her "crime", and it is for this reason that she and Frederic get thrown into jail. Like many of Carey's books, Amnesia generates an aura of the fantastical but is completely grounded; it is high-spirited but serious, hectic but never hasty. Sometimes the vital elements of the story don't all move at the necessary speed (perhaps we are allowed to forget Felix's wife too much, before he is eventually reconciled with her; perhaps not enough is made of his age and how it might affect his activity). But this doesn't stop Amnesia being a deeply engaging book. It responds to some of the biggest issues of our time, and reminds us that no other contemporary novelist is better able to mix farce with ferocity, or to better effect. Andrew Motion's The New World is published by Jonathan Cape. - Andrew Motion Caption: Captions: Gough Whitlam, after being dismissed as Australian prime minister in 1975 Enter Woody "Wodonga" Townes, a conveniently wealthy supporter who has just bailed [Gaby Baillieux] and now arranges for [Felix Moore] to get the exclusive on her story. In this way, he expects to clear Gaby's name, and to fill Felix's pockets. Why should he bother? Because Woody is also an old friend of Gaby's mother. In the second half of the book, Felix is replaced as narrator by a melange of voices that appear on the interview tapes he has been given to form the basis of his book. Sometimes it is Gaby's voice that we hear, sometimes [Celine]'s; sometimes we are taken aside to sympathise with Felix in his isolation and discomfort. Gradually, as the pieces fit together, we begin to appreciate that this work is the making of Felix, because it allows him to learn from the generation younger than his own, and from Gaby in particular. "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." - Andrew Motion.
New York Review of Books Review
NOW THAT THE politics of hacking has assumed an importance hitherto unknown, the theme Peter Carey has chosen for his latest novel seems especially timely. In many ways, it's a departure from his previous work, although throughout "Amnesia" he maintains the temper and Rabelaisian fury of a prose we know all too well. You can pick any page at random and locate an energy that never seems to flag. His sentences hit their intended marks with an emotion that often feels like exasperated cruelty, and none of his characters are spared a little bloodletting. E.M. Forster is said to have remarked that when he began a novel he lined up his characters and admonished them: "Right, no larks." Although it's a wise course of action, a novelist might as well do the opposite if he or she has a mind to. The cast of "Amnesia" seems to have been told to have all the larks they want, because that's what Carey wants in his own playfully somersaulting sentences. But does this serve the interests of a narrative that sets out to forge a digital-era spy story, calling into question the relationship of the author's native Australia with the reigning superpower? The answer is: yes and no. Felix Moore is a middle-aged leftist journalist in self-inflicted decline. The first part of the novel is narrated in his voice and brings us into his feverish, disintegrated world: "I had published several books, 50 features, 1,000 columns, mainly concerned with the traumatic injury done to my country by our American allies in 1975." He refers, if American readers aren't aware, to the dismissal by Australia's governor general, Sir John Kerr, of the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam under what could be called ambiguous circumstances. Elected in 1972, Whitlam had a liberal stance - including hostility to Australian involvement in Vietnam - that was said to have enraged the United States and its ambassador, Marshall Green. (Many leftists had implicated Green in Suharto's anti-Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965, where he was then serving as ambassador.) Political rage at what he sees as this long-forgotten and underdiscussed injustice drives Felix's febrile and iconoclastic consciousness. But it's for money that he accepts an offer from an old friend, a businessman named Woody Townes - a slightly overdrawn caricature of corporate villainy, but in some ways the most entertaining character in the book, a "great bull" full of wind and bile and grotesque energy. Townes wants Felix to write the biography of a young woman, Gaby Baillieux, who has been accused of an act of cyberwarfare against the United States. She is alleged to have created something called the Angel Worm, which has hacked its way into large parts of the American prison system and liberated hundreds of felons. What are Townes's real motives? Felix is suspicious, but Gaby's mother, Celine, an actress of sorts, is an acquaintance of both men. Indeed, Celine was once a member of Felix's youthful group of leftists back in the '60s and '70s, and so, out of sexual-nostalgic loyalty to the mother, he agrees to collaborate with Gaby (who has gone underground) and tell in book form the true story of this idealistic daughter's crime. It is this investigation and retelling that forms the spine of Carey's narrative, during which Felix's marriage dissolves and he ends up living like a tramp on a desolate island where he has to perform his ablutions in a self-dug hole. "I had not," he confesses, "been thought of as the kind of writer who might make a difficult character lovable. My most notable work of fiction, 'Barbie and the Deadheads,' had been a satire. As a journalist it was my talent to be... a truffle hound for cheats and liars and crooks amongst the ruling classes. These pugnacious habits had served me well for a whole career but the story of the young woman demanded I become a larger person, a man who had it in his heart to love our stinking human clay." But does he? Felix's odyssey is also a way for Carey to explore what could be called the secret social history of the Australian left, and it is one of Carey's gifts that he can do this while also exploring the - to us - obscure topographies and social milieus in which that history was played out in the decades after World War II. To do this, he flashes back to the story of Celine's mother in Brisbane at the time of the so-called Battle of Brisbane in 1942 - anti-American riots in which one person was killed and many injured. He has perfect recall of place and name; he can finger Australia's urban landscapes like a blind man reading Braille. But Felix's character does not, in the end, grow appreciably larger, nor does love of the stinking human clay become his willing burden. The second half of the novel splinters into different perspectives and voices, some in the third person, some in the first, and as it does the reader's eye becomes confused and delayed in a mass of intertwining threads. Yet the shift from first to third person at the center of the novel feels like the correct move, because it comes at just the moment when Felix's voice has started to become suffocating. Indeed, there's something in these bohemian, freewheeling, self-intoxicated middle-class radicals that demands its own satire, and it could be argued that Carey has supplied it - but from a position of all-forgiving sympathy. Gaby herself is a type that's easily recognizable: a slightly insufferable and self-righteous child of privilege giving her life over to radical causes. "Gaby was a Labor Party child." At one point, she gets into a furious row with her liberal father, Sando, who observes that "she looked hostile, spoiled, superior." Needless to say, she accuses him of being a coward, of not being radical enough in his own time. They proceed to argue about an environmental activist called Mervyn Aisen, with whom Gaby has been working: "That was when he told her what he really thought about the Aisens. That their so-called ecological activism was an attempt to return to some fantasy of white Australia populated by good blokes and mates and everything was dinky-di and the blackfellows fed themselves unhindered on the creeks of Coburg. It was territorial, Sando said. Did you see any Turks or Lebanese amongst their planting party? No, of course not. The Aisens were using the language of socialism to reassert white privilege. "Listen to you, she shouted. Listen to yourself. You sound insane. They're fighting these polluting bastards and so are you." It's a telling exchange, insofar as class and race are often the elephants in the noisy rooms of middle-class radicals, though Gaby's cybercrime - she closes down prisons in the course of her blazing career - doesn't slump into futility since, after serving three years in prison, a new worm released by her followers opens the doors and lets her walk free to continue the struggle. Felix, meanwhile, remains a hack, with a movie version upcoming of his satirical potboiler, "Barbie and the Deadheads." The greater question is how a novel of this kind can wear its politics so obviously and discursively on its sleeve without defusing the sinister and economical tension its narrative needs. There's no real dread in the momentum of "Amnesia." Perhaps Australia, in our own minds, is today too prosperous and self-confident for the events of 1975 to cast much of a menacing shadow, as they might have had this novel been about, say, Indonesia, that other supposed victim of Marshall Green's machinations. That said, Peter Carey is no mean stylist, and his pages will always yield their pleasures. Their angry energy stays with you all the same. A digital spy story that calls into question Australia's relationship with America. LAWRENCE OSBORNE'S most recent novels are "The Ballad of a Small Player" and "The Forgiven."
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 it was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed. Because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations the worm immediately infected 117 US federal correctional facilities, 1700 prisons, and over 3000 county jails. Wherever it went, it travelled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: THE CORPORATION IS UNDER OUR CONTROL. THE ANGEL DECLARES YOU FREE. This message and others more elaborate were read, in English, by warders in Texas, contractors in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, in immigrant detention camps in Australia, in Woomera, black sites in the Kimberley, secret centres of rendition at the American "signals facility" near Alice Springs. Sometimes prisoners escaped. Sometimes they were shot and killed. Bewildered Afghans and Filipinos, an Indonesian teenager wounded by gunfire, a British Muslim dying of dehydration, all these previously unknown individuals were seen on public television, wandering on outback roads. The security monitors in Sydney's Villawood facility read: THE ANGEL OF THE LORD BY NIGHT OPENED THE PRISON DOORS, AND BROUGHT THEM FORTH. My former colleagues asked, what does this language tell us about the perpetrator? I didn't give a toss. I was grateful for a story big enough to push me off the front pages where I had already suffered PANTS ON FIRE. I was spending my days in the Supreme Court of New South Wales paying Nigel Willis QC $500 an hour so I could be sued for defamation. Nigel's "billable hours" continued to accrue well past the stage when it became clear that he was a fuckwit and I didn't have a chance in hell, but cheer up mate: he was betting 3:2 on a successful appeal. That my barrister also owned a racehorse was not the point. Meanwhile there was not much for me to do but read the papers. FEDS NOW SAY ANGEL IS AN AUSSIE WORM. "Would the defendant like to tell the court why he is reading a newspaper." "I am a journalist, m'lud. It is my trade." Attention was then brought to the state of my tweed jacket. Ha-ha, m'lud. When the court had had its joke, we adjourned for lunch and I, being unaccompanied on that particular day, took my famously shambolic self across to the botanic gardens where I read the Daily Telegraph. Down by the rose gardens amongst the horseshit fertiliser, I learned that the terrorist who had been "obviously" a male Christian fundamentalist had now become the daughter of a Melbourne actress. The traitor appeared very pale and much younger than her thirty years. Dick Connolly got the photo credit but his editor had photoshopped her for in real life she would turn out to be a solid little thing whose legs were strong and sturdy, not at all like the waif in the Telegraph. She was from Coburg, in the north of Melbourne, a flat, forgotten industrial suburb coincidentally once the site of Pentridge Prison. She came to her own arraignment in a black hoodie, slouching, presumably to hide the fact that our first homegrown terrorist had a beautiful face. Angel was her handle. Gaby was her name in what I have learned is "meat world." She was charged as Gabrielle Baillieux and I had known her parents long ago--her mother was the actress Celine Baillieux, her father Sando Quinn, a Labor member of parliament. I returned to my own court depressed, not by the outcome of my case, which was preordained, but by the realisation that my life in journalism was being destroyed at the time I might have expected my moment in the sun. I had published several books, fifty features, a thousand columns, mainly concerned with the traumatic injury done to my country by our American allies in 1975. While my colleagues leapt to the conclusion that the hacker was concerned simply with freeing boat people from Australian custody, I took the same view as our American allies, that this was an attack on the United States. It was clear to me, straight away, that the events of 1975 had been a first act in this tragedy and that the Angel Worm was a retaliation. If Washington was right, this was the story I had spent my life preparing for. If the "events of 1975" seem confusing or enigmatic to you, then that is exactly my point. They are all part of "The Great Amnesia." More TC. In court, I listened as my publisher got a belting from the judge and I saw his face when he finally understood he could not even sell my book as remaindered. "Pulp?" he said. "Including that copy in your hand." Damages were awarded against me for $120,000. Was I insured or not insured? I did not know. The crowd outside the court was as happy as a hanging day. "Feels, Feels," the News International guy shouted. "Look this way. Felix." That was Kev Dawson, a cautious little prick who made his living rewriting press releases. "Look this way Feels." "What do you think about the verdict, Feels?" What I thought was: our sole remaining left-wing journalist had been pissed on from a mighty height. And what was my crime? Repeating press releases? No, I had reported a rumour. In the world of grown-ups a rumour is as much a "fact" as smoke. To omit the smoke is to fail to communicate the threat in the landscape. In the Supreme Court of New South Wales this was defamation. "What next, Felix?" Rob a bank? Shoot myself? Certainly, no-one would give me the Angel story although I was better equipped ( Wired magazine take note) to write it than any of the clever children who would be hired to do the job. But I was, as the judge had been pleased to point out, no longer employable in "your former trade." I had been a leader writer, a columnist, a so-called investigative reporter. I had inhabited the Canberra Press Gallery where my "rumours" had a little power. I think Alan Ramsey may have even liked me. For a short period in the mid-seventies, I was host of Drivetime Radio on the ABC. I was an aging breadwinner with a ridiculous mortgage. I had therefore been a screenwriter and a weekend novelist. I had written both history and political satire, thrillers, investigative crime. The screen adaptation of my novel Barbie and the Deadheads was workshopped at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. But through this, even while bowing and scraping to get "seed money" from the Australian Film Commission, I remained a socialist and a servant of the truth. I had been sued ninety-eight times before they brought me down with this one, and along the way I had exposed the deeds of Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch (both Old Geelong Grammarians, btw) always a very dangerous occupation for a family man, and apparently terrifying for those who rely on him for succour. As the doors of the mainstream media closed to anyone unworldly enough to write the truth, I still published "Lo-tech Blog," a newsletter printed on acid paper which was read by the entire Canberra Press Gallery and all of parliament besides. Don't ask how we paid our electricity bill. I worked as a journalist in a country where the flow of information was controlled by three corporations. Their ability to manipulate the "truth" made the right to vote largely meaningless, but I was a journalist. I did my best. In "Lo-tech Blog," I revealed the Australian press's cowardly reporting of the government lies about the refugees aboard the ill-fated Oolong. "I can't comprehend how genuine refugees would throw their children overboard," said our Prime Minister. Once again, like 1975, here was a lie of Goebbelsesque immensity. The fourth estate made a whole country believe the refugees were animals and swine. Many think so still. Yet the refugees belonged here. They would have been at home with the best of us. We have a history of courage and endurance, of inventiveness in the face of isolation and mortal threat. At the same time, alas, we have displayed this awful level of cowardice, brown-nosing, criminality, mediocrity and nest-feathering. I was overweight and out of breath but I was proud to be sued, reviled, scorned, to be called a loser by the rewriters of press releases. I took comfort from it, which was just as well because there was comfort nowhere else. As would be confirmed in the weeks ahead, none of my old mates were going to rescue me from the slow soul-destroying grind of unemployment. 2 a five-star hotel might seem an unwise venue for a bedraggled outcast to lick his wounds but the Wentworth was favoured by my old mate Woody "Wodonga" Townes. My dearest friends all exhibit a passionate love of talk and drink, but of this often distinguished crowd it was Woody Townes who had the grit and guts. He had attended court every day although he had had to fly seven hundred kilometres from Melbourne. Any fight I had, he was always by my side. And when I had endured the whacking from the press I found him where I knew he would be, where he had waited on almost every gruesome afternoon, with his meaty body jammed into a small velvet chair in the so-called Garden Court. The moment he spotted me he began pouring champagne with his left hand. It was a distinctive pose: the heavy animal leg crossed against his shiny thigh, the right elbow held high to ward off the attentions of an eager waiter. I considered my loyal friend's exposed white calves, his remarkable belt, his thick neck, the high colour in his cheeks and I thought, not for the first time, that it is Melbourne's talent to produce these extraordinary eighteenth-century figures. In a more contested space, life would compress them, but down south, at the Paris end of Collins Street, there was nothing to stop him expanding to occupy the frame. He was a Gillray engraving--indulgence, opinion, power. By profession my mate was a "property developer" and I presumed he must be sometimes involved in the questionable dealings of his caste. My wife thought him a repulsive creature, but she never gave herself a chance to know him. He was both a rich man and a courageous soldier of the left. He was a reliable patron of unpopular causes and (although he was possibly tone deaf) Chairman of the South Bank Opera Company. He financially supported at least two atonal composers who would otherwise have had to teach high school. He had also bankrolled my own ill-fated play. Woody's language could be abusive. He did occasionally spoil his philanthropy by demanding repayment via small services, but he could be relied upon to physically and legally confront injustice. In a time when the Australian Labor Party was becoming filled with white-collar careerists straight from university, Woody was old-school--he did not fear the consequences of belief. "Fuck them all," he said, and ground the champagne bottle down into the ice. That would be pretty much the content of our conversation, and three bottles later, after several rounds of fancy nibbles, he called for the bill, paid from a roll of fifties, got me into a taxi and gave me a Cabcharge voucher to sign at the other end. "No surrender," he said, or words to that effect. It was only a short drive across the Anzac Bridge to our house at Rozelle. Here the best part of my life awaited me, my wife, two daughters, but--in the narrow passageway of our slightly damp terrace house, there stood, by poisonous chance, five cardboard cartons of my book, maliciously delivered that very afternoon. Were these for me to pulp myself? Was this not hilarious, that my puce-faced publisher, with his big house in Pymble, had gone to the trouble and expense of having boxes sent to my humble door? I was laughing so much I barely managed to carry this burden through the house. Apparently my daughters saw me and cared so little for my distress that they went straight up to watch the Kardashians. Claire must have been there somewhere, but I didn't see her yet. I was much more occupied with enacting the court order. I could never light a barbecue. I had no manual skills at all. It was my athletic Claire who handled the electric drill, not me. Naturally I overcompensated with the firelighters. Did I really enclose a free firelighter in every book? Was that a joke? How would I know? It was not necessarily self-pitying and pathetic that I set my own books on fire, but it was certainly stupid or at least ill-informed to add a litre of petrol to those feeble flames. I was unprepared for the violent force, the great whoosh that lifted off my eyebrows and caught the lower limbs of our beloved jacaranda. As the flames crawled from the branches to the second-floor extension, I should--people never cease insisting--have picked up the garden hose and put it out. Fine, but these dear friends did not see what I saw. I made my judgement. I chose human life before real estate. I rushed up the stairs and snatched the audience from the Kardashians. Yes, my babies were teenagers. Yes, they resisted, but here was no time for explanation and I had no choice but treat them roughly. Apparently I smelled "like a cross between a pub and a lawnmower." I rushed them out into the street and left them screaming. I don't know what happened then, but somehow the next-door copywriter stole my girls and the Balmain fire brigade were soon pushing me aside, dragging their filthy hoses down our hall and Claire, my wife, my comfort, my lover, my friend was waiting for me. The next bit should remain private from our kids. But I will never forget exactly what was said. 3 claire was clever, kind and funny. She slept with her nose just above the sheets like a little possum. She woke up smiling. She stripped a century of paint from the balustrades and waxed and oiled them until they glowed. She climbed on the roof during lightning storms to remove the leaves from the overflowing gutters. She canvassed door to door for the Leichhardt by-election. She was a Japanese-trained potter whose work was collected by museums but there was never a night when I came home from Canberra or Melbourne or a union pub in Sussex Street that she was not waiting to hear what had happened. She was commonly regarded as a perfect mother while I was known to have been unfaithful or at least to have attempted it. I was said to be continually drunk and impatient with decent people whose politics I did not like. I was allegedly unemployable. It was thought I was a communist who did not have the intelligence to see that he had become historically irrelevant. All day Claire ripped her strong square hands with gritty clay, from which human sacrifice she extracted long necks and tiny kissing lips. She cooked like the farmer's daughter that she was, leg of lamb, baked vegetables, proper gravy. But each night she devoured the life that I brought home. My darling was what is commonly called a political junkie--awful term--but I delivered what she wanted most. We had fun, for years and years. Yes, I developed a Canberra belly and was ashamed to jog. She, as everyone remarked, stayed neat and trim. She wore jeans and windcheaters and sneakers and cut her hair herself, eschewing "sexy" legs and teetering fuck-me heels. After the fire I learned that certain mates had wondered if she might be gay. Idiots. None of them had the slightest clue about our love life. We were tender maniacs in ways known only to ourselves. If not for debt we would be in bed today. Some people are good at debt. We were bad at it, and only discovered it in the way people who get seasick learn of their weakness when the ship has left the shore. We were a journalist and a potter thinking they could send their kids to an expensive private school. You get the joke. Earlier I described how I abandoned these children on the footpath. Abandoned? For God's sake, they were almost at the end of their investment curve. To listen to their conversation you would never dream that their parents were both third-generation socialists. Did they even remember their father toasting crumpets in the smoky fire? Can they hear their mother's lovely voice sing "Moreton Bay"? I've been a prisoner at Port Macquarie At Norfolk Island and Emu Plains At Castle Hill and cursed Toongabbie At all those settlements I've worked in chains But of all places of condemnation And penal stations of New South Wales Of Moreton Bay I have found no equal Excessive tyranny each day prevails She sang that to our little girls? You bet she did. We had made the awful mistake of sending the girls to school with the children of our enemies. We thought we were saving Fiona from dyslexia. In fact we were wrecking her family by putting it under a financial strain it could not withstand. I would never once, not for a second, have thought to call Claire timid. How could I know that debt would make her so afraid? We got a line of credit for $50,000 and every time I acted like myself she hated it. She had loved me for those qualities before: I mean, my almost genetic need to take risk, to stand on principle, to poke the bully in the eye. I could not compromise, even when I was--so often--physically afraid. A sword hung over the marriage bed and I did not see it. I refused compromises she privately thought a father was morally obliged to make. And of course the girls had not the least idea of what was at stake. If they paid attention to a newspaper it was only the Life and Style section. I doubt they had read a single one of my words, and had no notion of my work and life. They had never seen the evidence that might have justified my absences. If I allowed Claire's bond to be the strongest it was because I saw how much she wanted them to be "my daughters." Only once I bought them clothing (T-shirts, that's all). Then I learned that this was not my job and I should never try again. Before this final defamation suit, Claire had been the pillion passenger who closed her eyes and hung on tight but the Supreme Court's finding was the final straw. When she heard the size of the damages, she quite collapsed. As a child she had seen the family farm taken by the bank. Was it that? Was it something else? In any case, she did not believe my assurance that "everything will be OK" because Woody had flown up from Melbourne for the court case. He had promised nothing. She was correct to say this, but she could not grasp that this was exactly the sort of situation when you could rely on Woody. Claire could not grasp his influence. She did not care that he had saved me from my burning car. All she could see was that his father had been a slumlord and a thug. Nor did she trust Nigel QC because she believed, correctly, that he was the prosecutor's friend. I told her that did not matter. I was right. If only she had trusted me, I would have got back on the bike and taken her hurtling through the bends at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. I would have won the appeal. I would have sorted out the legal costs, and we would have celebrated as we had celebrated many times before. "Everything will be OK," I said, and it was dreadful to see the fury in her eyes. Excerpted from Amnesia by Peter Carey. Copyright © 2015 by Peter Carey. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted from Amnesia by Peter Carey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
