My Life as a Fake
A "literary novel" that really meets the definition! The premise is that the female editor of a British literary magazine tries tracking down an author who created a poetry hoax - and then the fictional poet appears in the flesh. The author in question is named Christopher Chubb, the literary editor Sarah Wode-Douglass, and she is a generation younger than both Chubb and John Slater, another London poet who appears out of her past and insists she go with him to Malaya. Most of the novel is set in Kuala Lumpur and areas around, and a large part of the novel is Chubb's backstory, which Wode-Douglass reluctantly listens to. Chubb is dangling before her another manuscript by the fake poet, Bob McCorkle. But whose manuscript is it, really? Carey leaves us in "believe it or not, as you please" territory. And he leaves his narrator in a similar state.I was never particularly emotionally engaged with any of this, which may not have been the intent in any case. I did find it intriguing as I read through it, despite the minor irritation caused by my difficulty with the Malay quirks in the language (especially Chubb's). There are also a number of very violent episodes, which took me a little bit by surprise in a novel that was, after all, about literature and identity.
Carey is an Australian, and I'm told he based the story on (or perhaps just got the idea from) a literary hoax that is famous in that country. Not knowing that did not materially affect my enjoyment of this accomplished, if perhaps rather over-clever, novel.
