Peter Carey Talking Books

We talk to Peter Carey at this year's Hay Festival.

Welcome to Talking Books here at Hay, in Wales. Described by some as

the most important literary festival in the Western world and a book

lover's paradise, ringing together the greatest writers and thinkers

alongside musicians and scientists. -- bringing. It is my great pleasure

to welcome Peter Carey. APPLAUSE. Peter Carey is that rather

read East, a writer who has won the man Booker prize not just once but

twice. -- rare beast. Born in Australia, as I am sure everybody

here knows, his native land is often the back drop and indeed the full

ground for many of his novels. But he has lived in New York for many

years. -- foreground. His latest novel Amnesia is also set in

Australia. A writer who requires several bottles of wine to find his

muse, sadistically autobiographical? -- strictly. Very close. Explain to

me why your novels have such a wide audience. You said, if I have a

pattern I would rather I didn't have a pattern. I would rather every book

the new and unpredictable, damn it. Sometimes I look at something I have

done which I think is so original, something I have never done before,

and I think, oh my God. I am me and there are certain days when I repeat

myself and I am just hoping people don't notice. They clearly don't.

You are also someone who likes to do a huge amount of research before any

new book? Well... Yes. I don't know whether I really like to do it, but

I've become accustomed to doing it. One of the first times I really did

it was with Oscar and Lucinda and the idea was so strong that it would

involve writing about Victorian times in this country and in

Australia and I thought, I can't do this. The characters were meant to

have gone to Oxford University and I flunked out of Monash university

after one year and I was rather frightened about writing about

Oxford in the 19th century. I was terrified. I began to accessible in

research at = U I had to. And then I found that you can do this and write

about things that you would -- were not there to witness and if you do

and you work hard enough then you can make up all sorts of weird stuff

that will be acceptable to people who know the history, but never

really happened, but might have happened. So in the end rather than

being a restriction it is an encouragement. And there is clearly

a lot of research but the book wears it very lightly. Sometimes when

writers to research they are so keen for you to know that everything is

described in ludicrous detail, what you do it in a light hand I think.

The most important thing is the story and characters, not the

research. There was another book, an historical novel, actually I hate

historical novels, set in the past. That was Jack Maggs. I suddenly

thought that if the character was writing he had to use a quill and

that would affect how the character thinks. What does that mean to write

with a quill? You have to know if the character is going to use it. I

found in the end A4 page description from exactly the year of the book

which talks about how to choose a quill, how to cut it. --A four page.

In the end in the novel it probably end up being six words, a very minor

part. But I was writing from a position of strength. Did you try it

yourself? Certainly not. Now you do and interesting distinction between

an historical novel and one set in the past. What is the difference? An

historical novel is something I don't want to read. I think of my

novels as modern novels. Jonathan Miller said a fabulous thing. Not

that I used to hang out with him all the time, but I was in a radio show

once. I think it was Oscar and Lucinda and he said, oh, I get it. I

see. It's a science fiction of the past. And I still don't totally get

it in that I can explain it, and yet it feels completely right to me.

Your latest novel has a much more modern setting, so at the heart of

Amnesia there are these controversial political events which

you describe, but then there is also the idea of what technology...

Impacts technology can have on people's lives. I was living in New

York at a time when Julian Assange was arrested. One of many people

whom the land of the free wants to see in jail, for a long time.

Although he is an Australian citizen. In the United States

somehow he became a traitor. I still can't see how that really works, how

an Australian citizen can be a traitor in the US, but they believe

that to be true. Because he is Australian no one really remarkable

fact that he was Australian, and yet I heard him speak and I knew the

Aireys Inlet he had lived. I knew something about his mother. I think

she had been a counterculture hippie sort of person. She was certainly a

puppeteer. She had been on the left during the period I'm talking about.

I.e. Read that she had been harassed by police. So I sort of "Julian

Assange's mother must have been really distressed about what

happened in 1975 and that would have been close to his life. From then on

I am dancing to fiction. So you wanted a very different character to

be the hacker. First of all, a lot of people in making a novel like

this is mechanical in the beginning. So while the first things is he

can't be Julian Assange. She is a she. That is pretty obvious thing to

do, but it's a start at least in the way you are going to differentiate

your character. The character is also going to be... By necessity be

the child of a Melbourne-based Australian Labor Party family, who

are there to see Labour come to power and the father will be a young

politician who was elected and who will be there long enough for his

daughter to see... Fail to do what he thinks she should do. So out of

all of those things you begin to build a family dynamic and you start

to see through this young woman will be. How hard was it for you to get

into the voice, into the inner character, of a teenage girl? It is

not hard when... Firstly we've all been young, so even though to look

at us no one would end -- think that. That's not something anybody

forgets, especially writers. We all feed on the past all the time. But

the thing to be really whereof is the present and what people are

going through and the presence of it. One is looking at all of the

social and individual forces. Always being anxious, thinking, I can't do

this. How I going to write about sex with a... Say 16, 17, 18-year-old?

How am I going to do that without being a creep or being read as a

creep? These are things that one is anxious about all the time and then

I hope resolves satisfactorily in the end. So the book has twin lines.

There is Gaby, and then the older writer. Tell us about him. Felix is

the sort of character who I am sure was very common in the United

Kingdom in that period. I am talking about through the 60s and 70s. In

other words, he is a writer who drink is an enormous amount. He has

very passionate political views. He is certainly of the left. His

personal life is wildly imperfect. And yet there is something true

about the things that he believes that he felt constantly in his

personal life and compromises himself continuously. Americans find

it a little bit difficult to find a character like that lovable but

think it is still possible here, I hope. I think you can tell us a bit

more about him from the reading you have picked. Some of the twist in

the plot are brought to light. He is brought to an island so he is able

to write. He is kidnapped and locked up to write what he have to write.

And, by the way, for the record, it was not my idea to read this at all.

He was tired and hot and his heavy lids and fleshy nose shone with

perspiration. Yet when he arrived on the threshold he was not

particularly giddy. This 1-room hut it would lead to shake and shudder

in the westerly winds, rippling in the gusts like a sailing boat, was

on that sunny morning opened to the benign south-easterly. And when the

dishevelled fugitive arrived on the top of the steps he was surprised to

find his quarters were actually hospitable. Of the many things his

eyes might alight upon he did see the garden spade hanging from a hawk

inside the door, but there was much else to look at. The glass was

window, if you could call it that, above the old porcelain sink was

occupied by a huge elephant skinned and what are, ghost gum, he thought.

This move, pink and grey bark was luminous in the sun and the

characteristic rusty blemish on the trunk harmonised so well with the

same sink that the latter seemed artfully intentional. He kept his

box clutched against his soft stomach, staring at the tree which

he would later know in quite another way. I'll take that, the boy said,

meaning the visitor's possessions. But the man's litter and attention

had now shifted to some half-dozen shelves that had been fixed in place

beside the window. On one of the lower shelves and assortment of

canned beans and Campbell soups, a number of four litre casks labelled

Hunter Valley red. The description that gave no assurance that the wine

inside had not been worked with a shovel full of chips, stirred with a

garden rake and strained to reach its present market niche. The

visitor made a dull sound, his cheeks hollowed briefly and his

mouth puckered privately. He placed his box on the rough countertop

beside the sink and, being unconscious of his own side, plunged

his hand deep in his pocket. -- own sigh.

What I think is intriguing is that you share some things with Felix,

but you have him coming from your own home town. What was it like

rowing up in Bacchus Marsh? It was a town of about 5000 people in the

late 40s, when I was a kid in the early 50s. The class... I thought we

were really posh, because my mum and dad had a small General Motors

dealership, and the people with staters with the doctor and the guy

who owned the quarry -- status. It was a heavily working-class sort of

town, so towards the end of my time in the Bacchus Marsh state school,

there were kids that had been kept back a few years, so we were

probably nine or ten. A kid would stand up and start to walk out of

the schoolroom and the teacher would say, hey, where are you going? They

would say, I've turned 14, you can't bloody touch me. Bacchus Marsh was

sort of like that. The poor of those kids would get all of their teeth

pulled out to save themselves trouble later. I'm sure that would

not be unheard of in the United Kingdom in that period, that poorer

people, knowing what it would gust for their teeth, would have them...

-- cost. I'm not saying this was the whole town, these were things that

happened that I remembered. And I remember all of that very vividly as

my parents, who were in no way posh, decided to send me to do longer.

That is a boarding school. Yes, entered it did go there. -- Geelong

Grammar. The gentry went there. When I left the school, I was a happy and

surviving different sort of person. It was only after I left that I sort

of quite realised where I had been. I had been in school with the people

who ruined Australia, and when Charles was an assistant teacher at

the map. -- Prince Charles. I had an experience of growing up not quite

knowing where I lived. I never thought I'd quite belonged in

Bacchus Marsh, because we were far too posh. I didn't quite belong at

Geelong Grammar because I was far too vulgar and comment. My life has

sort of been like that -- comment. It has been comparatively easy to

unpack my bags in New York City and hang up my clothes, because I think

I have sort of been doing that all my life. What might have been very

difficult for someone else was comparatively easy for someone like

me. That idea of being an outsider, do you think that can be an official

for a writer? I think it is very common for writers -- beneficial. I

mean, it doesn't hurt to spend some time being outside and looking in

and seeing how they are, and seeing how you are, how you are different

and how you can fit in or not fitting. Again and again, you return

to Australia. You are living in New York, yet the detail of the

Australian landscape, the homeland, is very close to you. Well, I don't

think this response would be alien to anybody here. I think I left

Australia in about 1990, when I was 47. So I had lived for 47 years in a

place. Some of that time here, but mostly there. And if anybody here is

old enough to look back on the first 47 years, I'm sure they are very

vivid, and I'm sure you remember them and they have a lot to do with

who you are now. Where you were born and what your childhood was like has

a great deal to do with what you are like now. I'm sure also, to make the

point and not just talk about the novel, you probably think about your

parents every day, or at least many times a week. So all of those past

things which make us, which include country in my case, and did yours,

and place, what makes us who we are. Although I have not been living in

Australia for a long time, these are vivid things. When I first went to

the United States, I was very anxious. That these things would be

boss Jimmy because all my life, that is what sustained me -- lost to me.

One of the thrilling things is what little had been lost. What you have

done is for an international audience, you have given us a real

sense of many aspects of Australian life, and through your book on

Mexicali, an idea of what place he has in the national consciousness of

Australia, which is very interesting -- Ned Kelly. It is hard to transmit

to people from other countries. I did think when I was doing the book,

there are all of these run-on sentences. There are not a lot of,

-- commas in the book. Ned Kelly dictated a number of letters. It was

a 50 page letter he wrote after a rank robbery. The sweeping about him

-- the sweet thing about him is they were kind of heroes among poor

people, but he writes a letter and gives it to the public, and he

really thinks they were printed and distributed it to people to explain

the wrongs that have been done to them and so on. Of course the police

force are not going to print his better and do that. Anyway, the

style of this, it is a hard letter to read, but it has a wonderful,

breathless, Irish Australian voice full of grievance and spectacular

language. About Ned Kelly fighting a policeman, riding him to the ground

and clinging to him like a did volunteer. One of the essential

things about Ned Kelly is that Australia in the early 90s was a

terribly social space. We were a penal colony, and were anxious

ourselves whether we could have a decent society. We of course had

been visiting English contingent. They thought nothing decent could

happen in this place. We in fact with the fruits of the conflict seed

-- convict seed, and we had the convict Stein, and these ideas

continued to trouble my country for a long time. When Ned Kelly began

these series of bank robberies and when the whole of the Victorian

police force were trying to find him, he distinguished himself

firstly by the immense wit and cleverness of his bank robberies.

Secondly by his decency and committing these crimes, where the

bank manager's wife said he was a real gentleman, and after they

finished that robbery, the gang did a display of trick riding, and

people would say things like if he had not been an outlaw, he could

have been a great general. If he is the convict seed, it shows that we

as a people can be truly prescient, and that is one of the other things

we have a deep of Ned Kelly for -- deep love. Peter Carey, thank you

indeed.