Saturday 17 May 2008

Spectator 180th Anniversary Blog
 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Peter Hoskin

Pete suggests


His Illegal Self

Dial M for mother

Peter Carey
Faber, 272pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780571231515
Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk
Caroline Moore
Wednesday, 13th February 2008

Caroline Moore's take on the new book from Peter Carey

Peter Carey’s fictions are like a powerful old-fashioned car driven with the modernist hand-brake on — revved-up narrative that stutters, stalls, leaps in unexpected spasms.

With a less good writer this would be intensely annoying. Carey runs through many of the tricks of post-modernism — the tricksy shifts, the dislocations of chronology and viewpoint, the refusal to allow the reader the common courtesy of speech-marks, which might make it altogether too easy to know what is going on — yet, time after brilliant time, he carries it off (sometimes better than others; but this is one of his best). His tricks move beyond mere trickiness.

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