An ambitious young man on the make, from broken beginnings, the novelist Oates hides behind a veneer of popular success and precarious respectability. As it turns out, at the heart of his story too will be the hideous death of his sweetheart as a consequence of their unthinking rapture. The writer draws out Maggs’s life, not unlike the artist-Vivisector in Patrick White’s novel, deforming it for his own purposes as he goes, until that becomes another story. It will be published decades later as Oates’s great work, The Death of Maggs.

There are lesser inventions in this maze too, byways at every turn, and the shadows of stories we do not follow. I had expected an account of Maggs in Australia, but there are few hints of what the colony offered the dispossessed of nineteenth-century Britain. From the moment of transportation, Maggs disappears into a netherworld from which he brings back the searing image of his brutal flogging by an officer of the Crown – and two dark locks of baby’s hair. (Was the mother Aboriginal?) A synoptic conclusion, showing the growing Maggs family finding its place in the Australian good life, is pointedly far from the apocalyptic ending Oates imagines for his novel’s monster.

Whose novel? As will be familiar to those who know it, another house of fiction is joined by flights of Escher staircases to the fictions I have already outlined. Both Tobias Oates’s The Death of Maggs (published in final form in 1861) and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs have their resemblance, as in a hall of mirrors, to Charles Dickens’s marvellous, moving Great Expectations, first published in 1860–61. Carey’s novel imagines the interaction between a novelist and the real-life material that might issue, transmuted beyond recognition, in a literary classic. That’s if we see Oates as Dickens, Maggs as Magwitch, Dickens’s convict–benefactor, and Phipps as Pip, the callow youth who moves towards self-knowledge in response to Magwitch’s return.

Perhaps Carey’s conceit is that this is the sort of grubby reality that Dickens turned into his shining tale, the rank humus from which the sweet Victorian flower of Great Expectations grew. Carey’s atmosphere is one of dark farce, impelled forward by desirous, anxious, half-mad obsessives and fools (mostly men) who scuttle back and forth across the confined stage of London hell-bent on their own vanities and schemes. It could be called sub-Dickensian, an Antipodean revenge on one of Albion’s literary glories, in which Jack Maggs shows a blameless child, whose felony was little more than play, demonised by the criminal justice system and later, having done time, no less demonised as the returning outcast, the wolf in black sheep’s clothing, the wild colonial raider. Carey, whose fiction Oscar and Lucinda (1988) was loosely called ‘Dickensian’, is performing an act of homage to the progenitor–novelist. Yet Dickens’s book becomes an almost carceral extension of the labyrinth, with Jack Maggs imprisoned by the very comparison it asks for. I cannot read this novel as if I had not read Great Expectations, but there will be many who can, and maybe they’ll have a freer time of it.

In the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, the hero enters the labyrinth to slay a flesh-eating monster to whom youths and maidens have been sacrificed. He finds his way out of the labyrinth by following Ariadne’s silken thread. (Later, in one version, Theseus abandons Ariadne on an island where she dies in childbirth, pregnant with his child.) What monster is our hero slaying here?

Two figures collide in the role of hero, the titular Maggs and the scribe Oates. They are bound by parallels and the sharing of intimate secrets. Both are incredible in their behaviour. Of the two, Oates becomes the more compelling creation, magnetising the novel with his own voracious energies. In satisfying his craving for money, love and recognition, he unravels himself too – as the writer of fiction spins invention from his own guts. Does Oates the novelist shade into Carey the novelist? If Maggs is the monster Oates would skewer in words, as he is the monstrous father-figure whom the false son, Phipps, would slay, what is the monster at the heart of Carey’s labyrinth?

Guilt of the classic kind, for the unintended consequences of blindly committed acts; for the discrepancy between desert and reward; for faking it and getting away with it; for the writerly feasting on other people’s lives: is this the deep connective tissue beneath the candle-lit skins of Carey’s gallery of comic grotesques? Cherchez la femme whose thread will show us a way out. For Maggs it’s Mercy. In Buckle’s demented English household, she is a loony-tune looking for an escape. Going to Australia with Maggs, she makes a new life for both of them. The greater intensity, however, is reserved for two other women, Maggs’s Sophina and Oates’ Lizzie, or more precisely for their hideously induced miscarriages, unflinchingly observed as cruelties for which there can be no forgiveness, no way out.

It has been a long journey from Carey’s earliest works to this elaborate metafiction, with its pastiche prose, its stage lighting, its wound-up plot. There seems no place now for the inwardness and vulnerability that his first fragmentary pieces peeled back in prose as natural as breath:

Every single organ in my body is quivering. It is bad. I had wished to take things slowly. There is a slow pleasure to be had from superficial things, then there are more personal things like jobs, the people she likes, where she was born. Only later, much later, should be discussed her fears about the souls of aborted babies. But it is all coming too fast, all becoming too much. I long to touch her clothing. To remove now, so early, an item of clothing, perhaps the shawl, perhaps it would do me no harm to simply remove the shawl.

(‘Peeling’, The Fat Man in History, 1974)

 

No one who knew Tobias had any ... understanding of his unholy thirst for love. He had not known it himself. He did not know the curse or gift his ma and pa had given him: he would not be loved enough, not ever.

He never really knew this truth about himself, not even when the fame he craved was finally, briefly, granted him and he travelled from city to city like a one-man carnival act, feeding off the applause of his readers. Even when it was thrown in his face, so to speak, he did not see it.

In the first we experience excited sensitivity, the possibility of connection, a rush towards fulfilment. In the second, core truths are encapsulated and held at a distance; there is disconnection, repetition, and a final static fate.

Jack Maggs flickers and flares, but the stop-start rhythms of the short chapters, the restless shifting of focus, and the staccato dialogue obscure any larger clarity or grand design that might emerge. As it hurries to its climax, the book leaves a sense of something unfulfilled, of some other sort of life struggling in vain to reach the light from all this rich compost. It is as if the novelist’s ingenious, entertaining structures have become dislodged from his deepest creative impulses. Ariadne’s thread is broken. We are lost in the maze.