"A Long Way from Home" by Peter Carey

    Anything by Peter Carey cries out to be read, and his latest novel, "A Long Way from Home," certainly should be. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
    The novel is set in the early 'fifties. With a rather slowly developing introductory section, we meet the Bobs family: "a lovely little fellow, Titch Bobs," his wife Irene (one of the two first person narrators) who is devoted to him, and the eccentric patriarch, Dan Bobs, who constantly puts down and represses his son Titch.
(For US readers, 'Titch' is the English nickname for anyone vertically challenged.)
    Titch is in the process of trying to establish a Ford dealership in the small town of Bacchus Marsh, 33 miles from Melbourne. The effort fails, but behind his back Irene sets him up with Holden, the Australian arm of General Motors. 
    The other narrator is Willie Bachhuber, the son of a German pastor, married very young, divorced, failing to pay child support, and working as a teacher in Bacchus Marsh until he is suspended for dangling a trouble-making pupil out of a second-floor window. He is also a constantly winning participant in a rigged radio quiz show. He lives in a run-down house next to the Bobs family.
    The second part moves into Titch and Irene's participation in the 'round Australia' motor race/rally, The Redex Trial, with a course of some 10,000 miles--up the east coast, across the top of the continent, down the west coast, east along the southern coast, and back up to Sydney. For many long stretches the roads were unmade and treacherous, sometimes seemingly non-existent, and the cars took heavy punishment. Titch and Irene drove their specially prepared Holden, and they took along Willie Bacchuber as their map-reader and navigator. Titch ditches Willie somewhere deep in aboriginal country, far to the north of Perth, and he is stuck as a teacher in an aboriginal community. The focus of the third section--although still following Titch and Irene to their winning finish in The Redex--is on Willie's life in the aboriginal community, where he works as a teacher. Carey has admitted that his novels set in Australia had little on the history of aboriginals, and this novel was partly motivated by a desire to repair that omission.
    There some surprises along the way that I deliberately do not mention.
     Just a final book cover blurb: from The Economist--"Carey is one of the finest living writers in English. His best books satisfy both intellectually and emotionally; he is lyrical yet never forgets the imperative to entertain." And two other blurbs label him as "Dickensian"--and I certainly recognized this quality in this novel.









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