I confess I began Carey’s new novel Theft: A love story slightly weary of his continuing love affair with fakery and the overloaded conceit of his previous novel My Life As a Fake (2003). I therefore approached with resistance this new story about Butcher Jones, alias Michael Boone, a boy who escaped the Australian cultural wilderness of Bacchus Marsh to become a great but out-of-style painter, then an art hoaxer.

Butcher and his mentally challenged brother Hugh, for whom he is the sole guardian, are warriors in a battle against a lack of generosity and insight, not least the ugliness of ‘opinion’, expert or otherwise, as it is marshalled in the cause of art. They are also locked into certain understandings and misunderstandings of their own.

Theft is Carey’s latest ode to misunderstanding, a narrative swept along by an undercurrent of the author’s very particular views on art, artists and the art of being misunderstood. Like much of his previous work, this is a large-canvas novel with aspects visual and visceral in ways beyond its immediate subject. The hint of subtext is more pointed than in his earlier picaresque fictions, even though Theft moves with the pace of popular crime fiction, a pace driven by the frustrated ambitions of its characters. Were it not for a carefully constructed antiphonal narrative, the plot might have been too complex and chaotic to comprehend, but Carey’s choice of narrative structure has liberated him. He manipulates both pace and perspective superbly, and the contrast between the voices of the brothers describes an arc of relationship that traditional narration and dialogue could not achieve.

Butcher’s narrative screams at us with self-love, and the artist’s wounded ego, lurching unexpectedly into resentful diatribes, is slapped on the reader’s table like a bad hand of poker: he has fallen from grace in the ‘art world’, a world he doesn’t even believe in, either because or in spite of his talent. We understand there has been a ‘theft’ of his ‘great works’ as ‘marital assets’ in a divorce, and we are invited to become intimate with the aspects of his psyche whose urgent need for expression cannot be quelled by the consumption of large quantities of alcohol.

Relief from this bile comes via Hugh’s narrative, which offers a strange stillness, haunting us with hints of another story about love; not the romance between Butcher and a canny female art forger but love in its many other forms. Hugh not only understands more than his clever artist-brother and reluctant caretaker; he understands more than anyone else in the novel. All of this is somehow made transparently clear in the candour of his faux naïf utterances.

The resemblance between William Faulkner’s Benjy in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Carey’s Hugh are marked: both characters are profoundly isolated by mental illness, but their lived experience and commentary on life is privileged as the greater narrative moral force. In the interview quoted earlier, Carey repeats comments he has often made about the influence of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) on his work in the early days of his writing career. Given the timing of the interview, the comparison between Benjy and Hugh seems even more relevant.

There is also development in Theft of what is often acknowledged as Carey’s strength as a novelist: his ability to detail, sometimes grossly, the most abysmal human conduct while rendering a character sympathetically. This particular gift was not especially stretched in True History of the Kelly Gang, since Australian national mythology makes it hard to find anyone who doesn’t view the bushranger–outlaw sympathetically, but if the self-regarding and self-pitying Butcher can seem plausibly human, if flawed, then Carey is clearly not about to lose this gift.

It is, however, with the character of Hugh that Carey has taken his greatest gamble yet as a writer. Although the idiot savant prototype can take a well-earned place in the pantheon of novelistic devices, we would expect a novelist writing in the twenty-first century to render such a character with great care and great particularity. Carey must have found his problem was dangerously reversed: how to stop readers feeling the wrong kind of sympathy – pity without empathy. Carey has risen to this challenge, as Hugh’s ‘state’ – his hugeness, his clumsiness, his sorrow – appears to lessen as his voice emerges. Carey gives him an impressive vocabulary of Australian slang, placed like direction markers on a journey back to a world Hugh understands, that of his Australian childhood: the Marsh, a sleep-out, a butcher’s shop, a drunken dad, a pious mum, the comfort – and the discomfort – of having his condition ‘understood’.

So in Theft the writer’s risk-taking has become a great fictional success, a subtle intertextual comment given the novel’s own commentary on the lottery of art, one that can only be actualised by readers who may or may not be inclined to that understanding of the novel. The same readers might be right, too, in detecting a stronger than usual autobiographical thread in this new novel. Carey’s works have always been liberal with references to places he knows well, from Bellingen in northern New South Wales, where he once part-owned a property, to New York, where he now lives. In Theft, the compass narrows perceptibly to include curiously affectionate and detailed descriptions of Bacchus Marsh, the Victorian town where Carey grew up.

Even these, though, are superficial markers compared with what amounts to a commentary of considerable spleen in the voice of the once-famous artist-protagonist. At times, Butcher seems to conduct a meta-narrative a bit like a cartoon character given both dialogue and thoughts, with readers treated to regular commentary on what it’s like to be resented as an international Australian success, or to have one’s art works transferred as marital assets in a divorce settlement.

Carey would no doubt resist this reading, just as he laments what he might call ‘expectations of the real’ among his readers (and reviewers). He understands that this is, to some extent, a legacy of his having chosen to base fiction on historical events, but it is also the consequence of the extraordinary level of detail Carey seems to feel is necessary to bring these worlds to life. In Illywhacker (1985) and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), wild conceits seem natural and inevitable, and there is no trace in the prose of the effort required in bringing that to pass. This is less the case with Theft.

Carey is surprisingly evasive about the research aspect of his writing, particularly the extent of it. In the Birnbaum interview, he claims to have no patience for the task and approves of E.L. Doctorow’s advice: ‘Do as little as you can get away with.’ Yet this simply does not ring true in the case of Theft, which reveals layer upon layer of the most informed and detailed knowledge of artistic construction, paint composition, painting technique, and the craft of forgery dating back some hundreds of years.

Unlike those earlier fictions, here the detail is rendered as separate, an activity, an artefact; it is not part of the emotional world of the novel but is delivered lecture-style out of the voice of its most qualified character. Consequently, and ironically, the effort of novelistic artistry is all too transparent, and the detail the reader is invited to absorb seems to serve a functional purpose without necessarily offering an equivalent reward to the imagination.

Theft is therefore an unsettling mixture of the best and the worst of Carey: a witty fast-paced yarn which nevertheless depends too much on information delivered with less subtlety than one would wish for. There is, of course, compensation: Carey has not lost his clear delight in language, and the novel is full of colourful and emotive lashings of Australian vernacular and a wonderful laconic irony that only his best prose can deliver. Mockery and empathy are impossible to separate and for all the petty hatreds strewn across the unlucky paths of the characters, not to mention their having to stare down premeditated evil, Carey somehow manages once again to place a loving hand on the shoulder of humankind.