As with so many stories of virtual worlds, there is a strong ideological climate constructed. But Carey’s brilliant way of avoiding the didacticism that always threatens books of this sort is that the ideological warfare takes place not so much between two political systems, though they are adumbrated, as between the theatrical life of two countries. This permits ideologies to speak through the body. In one country, the island state of Efica, these are sexual bodies, acrobatic bodies, contorted bodies. In the other, the master state of Voorstand, falling bodies dicing with death contend with pseudophysical images in the shimmering world of simulacra.

The relationship between the two countries is similar to that between South Africa (the Boer experience is explicitly acknowledged by Peter Carey as a model) and a neighbouring area of influence – the suggestion conveyed by language and customs is that it is somewhere like Mauritius. But there is no direct correlation; indeed, every time one is tempted to establish an allegory or even a coherent virtuality, the text neatly sidesteps in a move rather akin to cybersurfing.

One could say that the closest equivalent to the dominant culture, that of Voorstand and its capital, Saarlim, is the grotesquely dichotomised world of the future conjured up by Philip K. Dick in the novel that became Blade Runner or by William Gibson in stories such as Virtual Light. One finds the same contrast of the wealthy technological masters in their marble towers and the grovelling, mutant, kill-you-for-a-buck horde of illegal immigrants and beggars who populate the streets. In Tristan Smith, however, one culture and one architectural icon dominate: the Sirkus and its ubiquitous domes.

The Sirkus, once established as a theatre to enshrine the strongly moral folk tales of the original Voortrekers, has become what the Games were in Rome. The thrill for the elite, the pabulum of the masses, it combines the vast screens and acoustic and visual magic of the latest technology with primitive blood lust, as ever more death-defying human acts combine with virtual reality. Share an electronic orgasm or get splashed with real blood and brains in your front row seat. The performers will do anything for the money, and you can buy anything with yours.

Set against this is the other world, that of Efica. Though still attractive by comparison with Voorstand, its culture is being gradually invaded by the Sirkus just as its politics are controlled through stealth – or through murder if need be – by the machinations of the Voorstand secret police.

The ideological opposition and earlier popular culture of Efica are represented by yet another circus/theatre. This is the Feu Follet where the book and Tristan’s life begin, and where much of the first (Efican) half of the story takes place. This theatre is centred on the body and on immense bodily control. It has its roots in the true circus, and even its obligatory performances of the classics, like the ‘Scottish play’ of the book’s opening, are transformed by circus techniques. But here the actors are not expendable – when they dive from the high wire they have a safety net. They don’t become megastars or earn mega-bucks, their financial and emotional safety net is their collective.

None of this is sentimentalised. Carey knows the world of alternative theatre intimately. It’s all here in a series of unforgettable scenes: the idealism, the bitchiness, the energy, the wild flashes of actor and audience rapport, the shoe-string budgets, the adrenaline and the envy; and all heightened to the point of hysteria by the sudden birth of a monstrous, misbegotten scrap of genius to the actor manager of the Feu Follet, Felicity Smith.

The account of the birth is a tour de force in itself, told from the point of view of the foetus. The time I have spent researching stories of naming and multiple parenting makes me appreciate all the more the wonderful immediacy of literature. Nothing I might write could ever have the impact of the scene after Tristan’s birth when the nurse confronts his three fathers, who love his mother, live with her sometimes, have sex with her, perhaps; each therefore having a different social or biological claim on the mewling scrap of life she has produced. Which, the nurse asks, is Mr. Smith?

But there is no Mr Smith. Tristan bears no father’s name, indeed Smith is only his mother’s pseudonym, and on his birth certificate the whole question of genealogy is resolved when he is registered as Tristan Actor-Manager.

One of Carey’s immense qualities is the way he forces you to rethink conventional gendering. All his characters are highly sexed and freely sexually active, but as for the conventions of feminine and masculine behaviour, forget it. These people make their own lives, and the women are as likely to be fathering as the men to be mothering. The wonderful freedom of his female protagonists has always been one of Carey’s strengths. There are reminiscences in Tristan’s theatre director mother of the women in Illywhacker: Phoebe flying off to another life, Leah doing her emu dance, Emma fiercely nurturing her monster brood.

For Felicity Smith also gives birth to a monster, the clawing screaming figure of that other, the artist, whom most of us, eventually, strangle before it can take over our bodies and our lives. But in this case, generated from a performance of Macbeth, the ‘birth strangled babe, ditch delivered by a drab’ is saved to be raised as the new messiah of the grotesque. His mother snatches him from euthanasia and staggers back to her theatre and her part. Displaying him to her stunned audience, she says, ‘Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none’.

Like all oracles this is true in its own way. Fierce determination and that complete disregard for the wishes or comfort of others, which characterises genius, finally enable the deformed scrap of humanity to become an actor. On the stage, behind the make-up (my God what make-up), and in an ever-progressive series of masks and disguises, he does in the end generate royalty, the absolute power of the successful actor.

The first half of the book ends with Felicity dangling grotesquely from the flies of the Feu Follet, murdered by the secret police. In the second half of the book, set in Voorstand, Tristan takes his revenge. He subverts the whole culture by removing the electronics from a simulacrum of the country’s most revered icon, Bruder Mouse, and re-humanising or re-demonising the creature. In the end our hero escapes; the book refuses closure. I hope this is not just a fashionable gesture but that Tristan and his ambiguous entourage of father-mothers will be back with another volume of his unusual life.

Peter Carey has the chutzpah to set up his masterly work as the latter-day equivalent of the greatest pre-postmodern novel of them all, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Like Laurence Sterne, he entertains, he shocks, and he makes enormous demands on the readers. We jump from mind to mind and from the seemingly real to the frankly incredible. At the same time, like Sterne’s readers, we are led into endless fascinating byways where we can lose ourselves for hours.

There is, for example, the taste of other languages, a playing with the relations of one dialect to another and of English to Afrikaans, French, and Spanish. If you’re a language junkie like me you can explore the glossary to your heart’s content. Carey’s research is remarkable. His use of folklore alone reveals profound knowledge, and yet it is all so lightly handled that the work involved may not be apparent to a casual reader. On the other hand, you may be hooked on history, on oral literature, on cooking, or geography. Then you are led away into the multiple possibilities of the footnotes, chuckling at each simulacrum of scholarship and enticed into even further Sternian speculation. Mind you, you can ignore all these fascinating byways and resolutely follow the main adventures of the protagonist. The choice is yours.

There are three main lines characteristic of Carey’s work which are triumphantly carried through in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. The first is the construction of alternative worlds and virtual realities, which has so startled us from The Fat Man in History and Bliss onwards. This is coupled with the demand on readers that they embark on the same magical tour de force as ‘making the dragon’ (Illywhacker). One more effort, one moment of perfect concentration, and you too can suddenly be transported into a different plane of being.

The second is his subordination of the conventions of society to the demands of the artist, the genius, and the loner, so characteristic of Oscar and Lucinda and now Tristan Smith. This overthrow of convention goes hand in hand with the liberation of the body. No other Australian writer is such a virtuoso of the sensual, of touch, of taste, of colour, and texture.

The third is the way he boldly tears the monstrous and grotesque from their comfortable repression, confronting us, as he has done all the way from The Fat Man to The Tax Inspector, with the knowledge that, until we can inspect, accept, love, or detest the monstrous in ourselves, we can never be truly human.