Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey
Jan. 19th, 2008 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones and his "damaged two-hunderd-and-twenty-pound brother" Hugh, Theft: A Love Story once again displays Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption.
I admire this book a great deal, but I can't say that I really enjoyed it.
Carey does well in creating two distinct voices for Butcher and his brother and really does a great job in conveying their personalities. Butcher is a selfish, self-centred man, fully focused on creating his work and bitter that he is no longer in fashion and thereby unable to command high prices. Hugh is an idiot-savant (at times, too savant for my liking) and with a tendency to TALK IN CAPITALS at odd times in his narration. In reality, the story is about the relationship between these two men - the resentment that Butcher feels for having to look after his damaged brother and the resentment that Hugh feels for never being allowed to do what he wants to do - and is explored through a plot concerning the theft of a painting by Leibovitz (Butcher's favourite artist and the person whose work inspired him to paint in the first place).
We meet Butcher and Hugh in the small outback town of Bellingen, where they're living in a house belonging to Butcher's patron, Jean-Paul, maintaining it for him whilst Butcher paints. Into their life crashes Marlene, a woman Butcher assumes is American, trying to get to Butcher's neighbour, Dozy (who owns the Leibowitz painting) in order to authenticate it. When the painting later goes missing, it's Butcher who is suspected of the crime and he's forced to return to Sydney, where he again meets up with Marlene and when she tells him she can help revitalise his career with a show in Tokyo, they become lovers and embark on a journey that takes them to Tokyo and Manhattan. On the way, Butcher and Hugh learn more about the Leibowitz family and Marlene's connection to them and also the dark scam at the heart of the story.
Carey is a lyrical writer and he excels at setting scenes and creating a sense of place. However, compared with the richness of the Butcher and Hugh characters, I felt that Marlene was too slight and trite a character to be truly believable and really wanted to know more about her and her relationship with Olivier than what we get on the page. Ultimately, Butcher was too bitter and unpleasant a character for me to feel drawn to, but I did feel tremendous sympathy for Hugh, albeit there were times when I'd have liked to see Carey play down the savant quality and show him as a simpler human being. Also, I felt that the plot hinged on a huge improbability (one that I'm not going to give away because I don't want to spoil it), but it was a fact that really irritated me because I'd been hoping for a more fulfilling pay off to the scam than what we're given.
The Verdict:
It's okay. I admire Carey's technical skill as a writer (which is extraordinary) but I felt that the central character of Butcher was too much for me to empathise with, which prevented me from really enjoying the story.
Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones and his "damaged two-hunderd-and-twenty-pound brother" Hugh, Theft: A Love Story once again displays Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption.
I admire this book a great deal, but I can't say that I really enjoyed it.
Carey does well in creating two distinct voices for Butcher and his brother and really does a great job in conveying their personalities. Butcher is a selfish, self-centred man, fully focused on creating his work and bitter that he is no longer in fashion and thereby unable to command high prices. Hugh is an idiot-savant (at times, too savant for my liking) and with a tendency to TALK IN CAPITALS at odd times in his narration. In reality, the story is about the relationship between these two men - the resentment that Butcher feels for having to look after his damaged brother and the resentment that Hugh feels for never being allowed to do what he wants to do - and is explored through a plot concerning the theft of a painting by Leibovitz (Butcher's favourite artist and the person whose work inspired him to paint in the first place).
We meet Butcher and Hugh in the small outback town of Bellingen, where they're living in a house belonging to Butcher's patron, Jean-Paul, maintaining it for him whilst Butcher paints. Into their life crashes Marlene, a woman Butcher assumes is American, trying to get to Butcher's neighbour, Dozy (who owns the Leibowitz painting) in order to authenticate it. When the painting later goes missing, it's Butcher who is suspected of the crime and he's forced to return to Sydney, where he again meets up with Marlene and when she tells him she can help revitalise his career with a show in Tokyo, they become lovers and embark on a journey that takes them to Tokyo and Manhattan. On the way, Butcher and Hugh learn more about the Leibowitz family and Marlene's connection to them and also the dark scam at the heart of the story.
Carey is a lyrical writer and he excels at setting scenes and creating a sense of place. However, compared with the richness of the Butcher and Hugh characters, I felt that Marlene was too slight and trite a character to be truly believable and really wanted to know more about her and her relationship with Olivier than what we get on the page. Ultimately, Butcher was too bitter and unpleasant a character for me to feel drawn to, but I did feel tremendous sympathy for Hugh, albeit there were times when I'd have liked to see Carey play down the savant quality and show him as a simpler human being. Also, I felt that the plot hinged on a huge improbability (one that I'm not going to give away because I don't want to spoil it), but it was a fact that really irritated me because I'd been hoping for a more fulfilling pay off to the scam than what we're given.
The Verdict:
It's okay. I admire Carey's technical skill as a writer (which is extraordinary) but I felt that the central character of Butcher was too much for me to empathise with, which prevented me from really enjoying the story.
