Peter Carey: Winning is
Peter Carey on being shortlisted for Best of the Booker
Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Best of the Booker award. How does being shortlisted for this one-off award compare with your previous nominations?
I can say I am "honoured" to be in the company of these great writers, and do it without my nose becoming even a millimetre longer.
You have already won the Booker Prize twice - once for Oscar and Lucinda and once for True History of the Kelly Gang? How did you feel when you won the Booker for Oscar and Lucinda?
Like being run over by a truck.
You've mentioned the ‘tall poppy syndrome' before (when you have a field of poppies and one poppy gets taller than the rest, the head gets chopped off) as an example of how success is celebrated in Australia. Are you getting worried?
Tall poppy lopping is not a simple incremental equation, and is more accurately portrayed as:
ST > 65
PS = F --------------------
1943
wherein F is Planck's fictional constant.
This, obviously, is a cyclic system that -- whilst upwardly trending - is characterised by increasing swings of amplitude with time (T) . Should Oscar and Lucinda actually win the Booker of Bookers I would hope for no more than a damn good hedge clipping.
You have said that you are sometimes ‘surprised at the intensity of the emotion that the work might have produced in a reader'. When you wrote Oscar and Lucinda, did you ever imagine how much the book would really touch people in the way it has, or be as successful in the longer term?
For three years, on most days, through many drafts, I sat at my desk and gave everything I knew or could imagine to this story. Some days I was depressed, others exhilarated. Every day I was drained by what I had done That is to say -- an awful lot of emotion has been brought to the conception and execution of this novel. Sometimes I wrote things I did not know I could imagine, but I always knew what the journey was about. Certainly, knew how the novel would end. My readers, of course, had no idea, so they often experienced a wild intensity of emotion that was greater than I could have prayed for. As for me, I could not have felt like this for three years without becoming clinically insane.
In Oscar and Lucinda both the main characters have an incident from their childhood which is their coming of age. What do you think was your rite of passage into becoming a writer? Was there a definite turning point?
I failed first year science, got a job in an ad agency, fell amongst people who were writing novels at nights and weekends.
As part of the 40th anniversary celebrations, the Institute of Contemporary Art is hosting a season of Booker at the Movies. Oscar and Lucinda was made into a very successful film starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett. Do you think great books make great films, or is something lost in translation?
A novel is made of paper and ink, a film of light and electricity. Almost everything that makes a novel a novel - not least the sentences - is removed when a novel is "adapted" to the screen. I don't think the word translation can be used here.
What thrilled me about the movie was the that a number of artists who loved my book wanted to make something new from it. Gillian Armstrong's direction,. Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett's performances, are intense and beautiful readings of my novel. It was extraordinarily moving to be able to feel these reader's hearts and imaginations.
It has been said that more than any other Australian writer you are interested in creating viable Australian origin myths. Is that true? And is that a conscious decision?
The truth, sort of, once, sometimes, not so much.
My Life as a Fake is based on the 1943 Ern Malley scandal, and it seems that the con-man/Illywhacker is thematic in your work. Do you think all storytellers are con-men?
A con man's intention is to deceive his un\witting victim, an ambition that is antithetical to art.
This, of course, is why we are so upset by fake memoirs. The author has lied to us. There has been a breach of trust. No matter how clever the writing we are unlikely to forgive the author for the deceit.
The writers of literature, on the other hand, make a clear pact with their readers . This is not unlike the deal that magicians make with their audiences. The magician's audience have paid money to be tricked. That's why they're there, in pursuit of both wonder and the hope that they can spot how the trick is done. Of course there is much more to it than this, but I hope it makes the point, however crudely
The Angry Penguins were a literary and artistic avant-garde movement in the 1940s. Have you ever considered yourself part of the Angry Penguin tradition, and if so do you still?
The Angry Penguins were interesting enough, but I am more in the Magic Pudding tradition.
You used to write advertising copy during the early part of your literary career. What would your slogan be?
I like Vonnegut's imaginary tombstone in Slaughterhouse 5
"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
Do you listen to music when you write? What's on your iPod?
What's an iPod?
What would be your Booker of Bookers?
"It's not for me to say" - Johnny Mathis, 1957
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