Novelist Peter Carey has always been interested in the grotesque, as was evident as early in his career as Illywhacker (1985). This fascination, combined with the more fantastical elements of his work, make him something of a fringe magic realist. Jack Maggs (Faber, £15.99 in UK) sees Carey return partly to the period world of his 1988 Booker winner Oscar and Lucinda. Just as Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) acts as a mirror of sorts for the early chapters of Oscar and Lucinda, the spirit of Dickens fairly dances through this one.
Not only has Carey written a lively pastiche Victorian novel, drawing on the facts of the life of Dickens the man, but in Jack Maggs he has made a conscious salute to Dickens the writer and to storytelling at its most colourful.
"It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London," begins the narrative, immediately announcing its debt to Great Expectations. The hefty stranger who arrives in London in 1837 - the year Victoria came to the throne - is described as having a large, hawkish and high-bridged nose, "his eyes were dark, inquiring, and yet there was a bruised, even belligerent quality which had kept his fellow passengers at their distance all that long journey up from Dover". Carey places his man in a surprisingly welcoming London night world: "The city had become a fairground . . . even the bridges of the Thames were illuminated." The Haymarket area is likened to a "grand ball". It is also presented as a city which has changed sufficiently for us to deduce that the stranger is returning home from a long sojourn.
Soon after arriving at the house he seeks, Maggs finds himself being offered a job he knows nothing about. The connection with Magwitch of Great Expectations (1861) is deliberate; Carey cleverly offers clues while keeping some answers safely in his pocket, to make sure the reader races along, as quickly as the narrative itself. Maggs's arrival at No 29 Great Queen Street proves timely, as one of the two footmen has killed himself. The owner of this gentleman's residence is "no more a gentleman than the man who was presently entering his household in disguise". Percy Buckle not only has a Dickensian name, he is a Dickensian character, a humble grocer from Clerkenwell who only the previous year has inherited both the house and the Lyceum Theatre.
Buckle is a vividly drawn portrait of a passive and possessive man driven to violence by violence. Presiding over his new household with the edgy uncertainty of a man in awe of his altered status, he seems to live in fear of his staff, a comic cast of insolent caricatures headed by his pretty mistress, Mercy Larkin, the maid he saved from a fate worse than . . . well, you can imagine. Buckle wants to be left to read in peace, and now he finds his household upset by the arrival of Maggs. The below-stairs scenes are well done, and such is the manic pace, confidence and light touch of Carey that the story, although predictable enough to be a parody of Victorian melodrama as a genre, beguiles the reader from start to finish - borrowings, cliches, caricatures, coincidences, conveniently overheard conversations, mistresses known as "My Good Companion", and all.
Into the yarn enters the flamboyant and already famous Tobias Oates, a young writer, hack journalist, amateur hypnotist and cheat who is living by his wits. In exchange for providing temporary ease for Maggs, he begins to unravel the stranger's story and of course soon detects that he has spent time in Australia. Meanwhile Mercy has developed strong feelings for the gloomy and menacing stranger. Lor'! there'll be trouble afore long . . . .
And there is. The fact that Carey's post-colonialist and definitely post-feminist performance here is far better than many similar pastiche works attempt by English writers is not really a surprise. He has always been a clever, inventive, original writer, with a magpie's feel for information and a peculiarly European intelligence. What does surprise here is his restraint. If ever a Victorian novel was written in shorthand, this is it. Maggs is an exercise in authorial restraint. Considering Carey's fascination with objects, particularly gadgets and inventions, an interest he indulged so widely in Oscar and Lucinda, he is here unusually exact, economic and almost abrupt. No details are superfluous, and his characterisation is sharp and funny, but does not degenerate into grotesquerie.
Despite the black sub-plot, the dark story of young Oates caught up in the worst sort of domestic intrigue, Carey never loses sight of his anti-hero's story. And it is this which presents one of the most curious aspects of the book. The only real weakness this novel has is the portrayal of Maggs. Of all the characters, he is by far the most uninteresting and never emerges from beneath the shadow of Magwitch. Particularly unconvincing are the long narrative sequences, drawing on harrowing social history such as child labour, in which Maggs records his life story in the hope that his adopted son, Henry Phipps, might read it. This is intended to assist the young man's understanding of the maligned man who has, true to the conventions of the Dickensian novel, kept him in material comfort all these years. As expected, the snooty younger man hates his benefactor.
Also true to novels such as this, there is always the blurred line between where fact ends and invention begins. Still, what can one say when Carey has had the foresight to announce in his author's note that "the author willingly admits to having once or twice stretched history to suit his own fictional ends". Not even Carey's lightness of touch and high-speed narrative, spanning all of three weeks, can conceal the darkness at the heart of Jack Maggs. If there is a message it is that in Victorian society the poor suffered outrageously and women in particular accepted humiliation as part of their lot. Tobias Oates weeps over the bodies of children who die in a fire yet has no compassion for his mistress - and sister-in-law - when she becomes pregnant and so threatens his domestic arrangements. Desperation and cunning are vital to survival in this tragicomedy.
While The Tax Inspector (1991) remains Carey's finest book to date, this dark, skilful remake of Victorian fiction demonstrates Carey's imagination, artfulness and convincing mastery of a 19thcentury genre. Just one question, though: what makes a late 20thcentury writer set out to impersonate a Victorian novelist?
