Unusual Life of Tristan Smith - Peter Carey (1994)
NUMBER: 70
Genre: Fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 450
Satisfaction rating: 6.0
OVERVIEW:
Peter Carey has wholly reimagined the world in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. It is vaguely futuristic, underlain with the sediment of a recently ruined past, just post-colonial, culturally monolithic, and although everything seems familiar, nothing is quite recognizable. Our guide here is Tristan Smith himself: a freak of nature, a ‘cracked and mended pot’ of flesh that hides a ‘normal’ human being. Tristan is everything one could ask for in a companion and interpretive center of attention - one way or another - wherever he goes, he is sharp-eyed and quick-witted, unsentimental and unforgiving: the perfect witness to the fact and extraordinary effect of his own ‘monstrosity.’. Tristan, faced with death from the first moment of his energetic and ambitious life takes us barrelling through his adventure.
MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:
Carey is often criticised by his detractors as writing novels that are ‘difficult’ or ‘inaccessible’. After reading, and enjoying, some of his most notable works (Oscar and Lucinda, The Illywhaker, The True Story of the Kelly Gang, etc) I never really understood the charges levelled against him. Well, even as a fan, I will be the first to admit that I found the first 200 pages of Tristan Smith almost impenetrable. In Tristan Smith, Carey has invented a world which, for a very long time, seems to serve little purpose but to over complicate a story centered on family abandonment. Of course I pushed on, I owe Carey at least that, and as I suspected there is a pay off by the end of the novel and his rationale for painstakingly presenting the clashing cultures of these two fictional countries is evident. However, this invention does not serve as a sole motivation for pushing on with the book, it is Tristan who must carry the weight and unfortunately I felt his story was all too often polluted by excessive detail, not on the person but the place.
That said, Carey has undertaken a remarkable exercise and deserves credit. Tristan Smith does take his reoccurring theme of cultural/national identity to another level. Even for that alone I suspect I would enjoy the story so much more on rereading. But unfortunately, the one thing I am learning as I undertake this reading project is that there are so many books and so little time. Reading is a luxury and often one chance is all a book will get. For me, at least, I may never have a chance to really get into the fabric of this one and until I do I have to say that its initial experience falls a little flat.
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