Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (147 page)

As resourceful young Americans of that time did, Crichton had worked his way through college but, unlike other young Americans, he did so by writing half a dozen works of popular fiction under the pen names ‘John Lange’ and ‘Jeffrey Hudson’. They were slyly chosen. Jeffrey Hudson is history’s most famous dwarf and ‘
lange
’ is German for ‘long’. Crichton stood 6 feet 9 inches in his socks. One of these ‘tuition fee’ novels,
A Case of Need
(1968), won the 1969 Edgar Allan Poe award
and convinced Crichton that there were richer pickings at the typewriter than in the laboratory – particularly for a man who knew something about labs. A year later, in 1970, Crichton was the first SF novelist to make the
NYT
bestseller list with
The Andromeda Strain
. It centres on invasion, not by aliens (Crichton is on record as disbelieving in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe) but by a lethal micro-organism. The text is speckled with computer printouts, graphs, tables and pseudo-scientific bulletins. What
The Andromeda Strain
did, with its hi-sci-fi lingo, was to give the Great American Public a handle on the moonshots.

Crichton candidly admitted he had taken the idea of
The Andromeda Strain
from Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Poison Belt’ and the ultra-documentary style (including computer printouts and graphs) from Len Deighton’s similarly encrusted
Ipcress File
. It was
Scientific American
made palatable for those who never made Engineering 101 and didn’t know a neutrino from a neutered cat. Crichton was a great science teacher. You want to know what nanotechnology is? Forget Wikipedia; read
Prey
(2002). Ditto the Human Genome Map and
Next
(2006). Ditto
Timeline
(1999) and the ‘worm holes’ that physicists like Stephen Hawking theorise about. Ditto behavioural psychology and
The Terminal Man
(1972).

Posterity will inscribe various critical verdicts on Michael Crichton’s tombstone. He was a Great Educator, via the sugar-coating of fiction. He was also a pig-headed contrarian:
Disclosure
(1994), based on the ‘fact’ that men are the luckless victims of sexual harassment, making up at least 25 per cent of such offences, is calculated to infuriate women. The dense accompanying information about the tricky manufacture of out-sourced computer hard disks does not mollify. His justification for writing
Disclosure
was that novels like his were the only place where the subject of reverse sexism could be ventilated. Fiction was outside ‘the protected area … where things aren’t debated or fully discussed’. It may also be that he was sore about alimony. One of his four divorces had recently cost him $20 million, almost a third of his annual income at that time. None the less he survived such dents to his ballooning fortune in good shape. The Jasper Johns he kept in his bedroom went for $29 million in May 2010, and his whole art collection for little under $100 million.

The least palatable of Crichton’s works is
Rising Sun
(1992), a ‘yellow peril’ novel, permeated with racist stereotypes which fantasised a sneaky Japanese corporate takeover of America – Pearl Harbor via the country’s boardrooms. It coincided with the collapse of the Japanese economy and Tokyo’s postponement of world domination for at least a few more years. Crichton’s touch failed even more spectacularly in 1980 with
Congo
(super-gorillas), the film of which regularly does well in polls of all-time turkeys. Most cross-grained of the Crichton oeuvre was
State of Fear
(2004) with its thesis that global warming is nothing but a big scam by
scientists hungry for research grants and that ‘environmentalism’ is a religion – unworthy of scientific respect. It became a favourite novel of George W. Bush, and Crichton was called to give evidence on climate change to Congress. That a mere novelist should be so listened to infuriated the senior environmentalist in the US, Al Gore, who, when his turn came, told Congress: ‘If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says, “You have to intervene here,” you don’t say, “Well, I read a science fiction novel that says this isn’t important.”’ When he wrote
State of Fear
, Crichton (always very secretive about his personal life) may well have been in the early throes of the throat cancer which would prematurely kill him. Ironically, he believed, despite his impressive medical qualifications, that such ailments were typically psychosomatic in origin – the body’s fictions.

Well, we’re the only country on earth, as far as I know, that has its beginnings in a concentration camp, a penal colony. And a genocide, too. That affected us forever.

Peter Carey was born in the delightfully named township of Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, Australia. He offers a thumbnail description of the place in one of the more perversely autobiographical of his novels,
Theft: A Love Story
(2006): ‘We were born and bred in Bacchus Marsh, thirty-three miles west of Melbourne, down Anthony’s Cutting. If you are expecting a bog or marsh, there is none, it is just a way of speaking.’ Distinctive ‘ways of speaking’ are a central element in Carey’s fictional method – as is the misleadingness of words, particularly Australian words. His father was in the motor trade and had the prosperous General Motors franchise. At eleven Peter was packed off to board at Geelong Grammar School (annual fee, £600), an institution which claims among its alumni Rupert Murdoch and Prince Charles. Neither of them coincided with young Carey’s six years there. Those school chums would have been the making of an interesting novel.

The route to the worldwide fame Carey now enjoys was indirect. He attended Monash University in Melbourne and did a year’s science before dropping out in 1962. The given reasons are vague. A car crash is mentioned, as is disaffection with chemistry. And, in that hectic decade, dropping out was a rite of passage. Australia’s
business world was meanwhile booming and Carey found remunerative freelance employment in advertising agencies in Melbourne and Sydney, reading modern fiction all the while. Pioneer fabulists such as Borges and Kafka were of particular interest to him, although he records that it was reading Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
which was primal. In his spare time he wrote himself and had the odd piece picked up by little magazines. His day job took him across the country and abroad and, although as yet unpublished (his first four submitted novels were either rejected by publishers or withdrawn), his abilities were noted by fellow writers. He was ‘driven’ by the desire for literary success. One of his three wives accuses him of being willing to sacrifice everything for it – including wives. This latency period of his creative life lasted for thirteen years.

Carey married his first wife, Leigh Weetman, in 1964. Breaking with his habitual pattern of personal reticence in 1995, he published a piece in the
New Yorker
describing a premarital abortion procured with a borrowed £50 (the operation was criminal in 1961). At the age of thirty-one, he finally made it into hard covers with
The Fat Man in History
(1974). This first collection of stories has two singular features: most striking is political indignation. There was, as it happens, rage among Carey’s age group at this period when, as a signatory to the SEATO agreement, Australia had been dragged as a combatant into Vietnam. In one of the stories in
The Fat Man in History
, ‘A Windmill in the West’, Australia is allegorically pictured as split down the middle by an electric fence. On one side of the fence is US territory; on the other side is a vast theme-park-cum-concentration-camp for the delectation of dumb American tourists. As a character says, ‘The Americans pay one dollar for the right to take our photographs. Having paid the money they are worried about being cheated.’ Radical protest of the late 1960s to early 1970s remained a topic of interest to Carey. In one of his later novels,
His Illegal Self
(2008), he would revisit it at mature length.

The Fat Man in History
enjoyed critical and sales success and this relates to its other salient feature. It was not published by any of the commercial Australian, or international, houses, but by the University of Queensland Press. Even after he became a highly profitable author, Carey remained loyal to the small academic outfit which had taken a chance with him.
Oscar and Lucinda
, winner of the 1988 Booker Prize, is to date the only winner with a university imprint. Carey’s loyalty enabled UQP to expand its scholarly publications significantly. However,
The Fat Man in History
and its following collection did not immediately liberate Carey into full-time authorship. He continued to work part-time in advertising, in which he now enjoyed executive positions. He was good at it. During increasingly lengthy breaks, he worked furiously on his writing – always more important to him. His
first full-length fiction,
Bliss
(1981), is the story of an advertising man, Harry Joy. Extravagantly fabulist in technique, it follows Harry’s death and unjoyous resurrection from hell to a more hellish earth than the one he left.
Bliss
won the Miles Franklin Award and virtually every other prize for which Australian novelists are eligible, including one for science fiction. The film rights sold and a film was made, but it was not everywhere successful. A child incest episode, central to the narrative, raised hackles.

The Careys divorced in 1974. For a few years after, he lived with the painter Margot Hutcheson – and took from the relationship an expertise on pictorial art which enriches his later fiction, notably
Theft
. In the mid1970s he was commuting to his advertising work from a bohemian commune base in Queensland. Writing was now preoccupying him more than copy-writing. The decade 1981 to 1991 saw an explosive burst of creativity. After
Bliss
came
Illywhacker
(1985). A version of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, the ‘Confidence Man’, the 139-year-old hero is the incarnation of Australia. The novel aligns itself with other powerfully introspective books on the topic of the country’s 1988 bicentenary celebrations – Thomas Keneally’s
The Playmaker
(1987) and Robert Hughes’s (non-fiction)
The Fatal Shore
(1988). Like those books,
Illywhacker
asked perplexing questions rather than firing off metaphorical rockets outside the Sydney Opera House.

Illywhacker
was followed by the Booker-winning
Oscar and Lucinda
(1988), a work distantly allusive to Edmund Gosse’s memoir
Father and Son
(1907) and more closely allusive to Werner Herzog’s 1972 film,
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
(Carey admires German film-makers and later collaborated with Wim Wenders). This reputation-building phase culminated with
The Tax Inspector
(1991) – interesting biographically for its recollection of the car-dealership world in which the author passed his early childhood. This corpus established Carey as one of Australia’s elite novelists – along with the venerable Patrick White, the infuriatingly slow-producing Murray Bail, and Thomas Keneally (a writer, like Carey, taken with the ‘concentration camp’ origins of his country and even more fiercely republican). What was singular about Carey was how different each of his novels was from all the others in subject matter and preoccupation. He is, in a word, restless.

Restless in every sense. In 1990 his career took a violent swerve. He sold off the advertising firm he part-owned and moved to New York. Here he could write full-time – interspersed with creative writing posts in top-ranked universities. He had by this point (1985) married his second wife, the theatre director Alison Summers, and now had a family. Resident in the US (something which caused occasional chauvinistic grumbles in the home country press), his fictional territory remained Australian and it was in his early New York period that he produced
Jack Maggs
(1997),
the most inter-textually subtle of his works. A fantasia based on Dickens’s
Great Expectations
, it reconstructs the unwritten novel around Magwitch, the transported criminal who, a convict in Australia, supplies Pip’s gentlemanly expectations.
Jack Maggs
is resonant, but not congruent with,
Great Expectations
. It is an unsettling effect frequently encountered in Carey’s narratives – not that he doesn’t write with crystalline simplicity, as in the vivid opening sentences. All those years of copywriting had convinced Carey you need to hook the reader from the first syllable:

It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the bright aura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him – the sign of his inn, the Golden Ox.

Hemingway could not do more with fewer words.

The basic idea in
Jack Maggs
is that once transported to Australia criminals could never – under pain of execution – return to Britain: unless, that is, they acquired a ‘ticket of leave’. By this period of his career, Carey would have needed a mantelpiece as long as a Wild West saloon bar to accommodate all his literary trophies.
Jack Maggs
picked up his third Miles Franklin and his first Commonwealth Writers’ Award. Mischievously he found it ‘inconvenient’ to come to Buckingham Palace to receive the CWA from the English monarch – the implied reason being he had no ‘ticket’ and feared for his neck.