When Peter Carey visited Melbourne recently, the publicity campaign for Oscar and Lucinda was in full swing and the reviews were rolling in, not all of them ‘rave’. I asked him about his relationship with Australian critics and reviewers over the years and whether his work had been affected in any way:

I don’t think it has but I always feel that there’s the possibility. Somehow or other I think that I’ve been lucky. I feel I could be vulnerable to that, as we all can. Like if one had a really terrible response, universally terrible, and everyone told you you were full of shit, that might then affect you. That hasn’t happened to me, but one’s aware of that sort of risk. If you want to look at the files you’d think that had happened to me, but the odd thing is that there’s another sort of response that a book has that isn’t recorded in the files. I was surprised quite recently to actually go back and look at those Illywhacker reviews. God, I had a rotten press.

The magnitude, if not the quality of that other sort of response has been clearly reflected in sales:

The future and success of books is made ultimately by some sort of consensus of readers, and that’s how they live and have their life and continue for more than the publishing season. And so ultimately that’s how books’ reputations and lives are decided, by a community of readers. So what happens now is merely the fuss and noise that’s made that attracts those readers who ultimately make their judgement. It’s made by all sorts of readers, by academic readers of course, and by just intelligent, interested and passionate readers.

For this reason it doesn’t particularly concern Carey that most reviewers have been unable to resist making some kind of Bicentennial remark about Oscar and Lucinda and to imply some significance in the fact that it has been published in this particular year. In some cases this has led reviewers to over emphasize certain historical aspects of the book at the expense of other equally important concerns:

I think we’ve got to keep on living and breathing. The Bicentennial is a joke. The book comes out this year. I shat and ate this year, too. I write this year and publish this year. If they want to go on with this fraud this year, that’s their business. It’s got nothing to do with the Bicentennial. The Bicentennial is 200 years – the book goes back to 1865.

Perhaps the most interesting and noticeable thing about the press reaction to Carey’s latest book, is not that the response has been mixed, but that while some have seen it as a very bleak book, others have found it quite hopeful.

Some may have been carried away by Carey’s remarks at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Dinner last year when he argued that Australians seem to find it hard to create national heroes, that all our heroes have been magnificent failures, even tragedies. Although Carey admitted at the time that he found it difficult himself to create an unequivocally positive outcome in his fiction, he does hope that readers will find Oscar and Lucinda a hopeful book.

A great deal of the book is, I hope – it sounds a bit of a cliche – a celebration of the human spirit. Something like that. But I love those people, so that one feels something that is passionate and good.

It comes back, Carey says, to the characters, ‘almost to the quality of love the author might feel for the world that the author’s making.’

Even though I recognise the bleakness in a way of the ending, when I think about the book in my heart I feel generally more hopeful, and it’s got to do with that quality. 

Carey feels that on the whole the critical response to Oscar and Lucinda has been a lot more positive than he experienced with Illywhacker. Although he remarked of one reviewer that he ‘might look into his own heart a little bit more’, there has been the joy of reading reviews that have pinpointed things about the book that Carey himself felt were important, like the one that remarked that his characterisations had become ‘deeper and more loving’.

I’ve changed. Slowly. Even within the short stories I really felt intensely for those characters but never allowed myself to express it because I thought anybody else reading the stories would feel a similar amount of emotion and I thought it was somehow cheap to help people to feel things that I felt ... I had to learn how to do it. 

Finally, I asked Carey whether this means that the ‘nightmare vision’ so many of the critics have remarked upon is beginning to melt a little around the edges. Is there, after all, some way for human beings to take charge of their own destinies?

There’s gotta be. I dunno. Don’t ask me. Thank god. Who’d want to be Doris Lessing? What I mean is, you can ask that question of me and I don’t have to answer, but Doris Lessing gets those questions asked all the time … People have wanted and probably will continue to want answers to those really big questions. All I feel I can do is just raise them and puzzle over them like everybody else, and I don’t really know whether I can contribute anything to the discussion.