Product Description

Jack Maggs, raised and deported as a criminal, has returned from Australia in secret and at great risk. What does he want after all these years, and why is he so interested in the comings and goings at a plush town-house in Great Queen Street?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42185 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 36 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
As a novelist, Peter Carey is hardly a stranger to the 19th century: his Oscar and Lucinda was a veritable treasure-trove of Victoriana. In this novel, however, Carey has set himself an even more complicated task--reinterpreting not only a vanished era but one of that era's masterpieces. Jack Maggs is a variation on Great Expectations, in which Dickens's tale is told from the viewpoint of Australian convict Abel Magwitch. The names, it's true, have been tinkered with, but the book's literary paternity is unmistakable. So, too, is the post- colonial spin that Carey puts on Dickens's material: this time around, the prodigal Maggs is perceived less as an invading alien than a righteous (if not particularly welcome) refugee.

Of course, rewriting a page-turner from the past offers some major perils, not the least of them being comparisons to the original. Carey, however, more than withstands the test of time, alluding to the formality of Victorian prose without ever bending over backward to duplicate it. In addition, his eye for physical detail--and the ways in which such details open small or large windows onto character--is on par with that of Dickens. Here, for example, he pins down both the body and soul of a household servant: "Miss Mott was lean and sinewy and there was nowhere much for such a violent shiver to hide itself. Consequently it went right up her spine and disappeared inside her little white cap and then, just when it seemed lost, it came out the other side and pulled up the ends of her thin mouth in a grimace." Throw in a wicked mastery of period slang, a subplot about Victorian mesmerism (of which Dickens was, in fact, a practitioner) and an amazing storytelling gift, and you have a novel which meets and exceeds almost any expectation one might bring to it.

Customer Reviews

Sublime storytelling
I've always had a fondness for crime novels set in Victorian London (the book is set in the first year of her reign actually), but few of the many I've read can equal 'Jack Maggs' for the quality of its plot, characters, and language.

This is one of those rare books where you're torn between the constant urge to read on and the awareness that this selfsame act unfortunately brings you ever closer to the end.

Even better than Dickens
Peter Carey's Jack Maggs.

This thrilling and original story, part historical novel and part literary fantasy, is one of the most exciting, erudite, and compulsively readable works of fiction to come along in recent years.

London, 1837. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained as a thief, betrayed and deported to a penal colony in Australia, has reversed his fortunes. Under threat of execution he returns to London after twenty years of exile to try to fulfill his well-concealed heart's desire. Masquerading as a footman, Maggs places himself in the rather eccentric household of Percy Buckle, Esquire. But when the unlikely footman comes under the scrutiny of the brilliant and unscrupulous young novelist Tobias Oates, an enthusiastic dabbler in mesmerism, Maggs's secrets are revealed and he is forced to take desperate, sometimes violent action. A powerful and unusual homage to Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Jack Maggs displays all of Peter Carey's broad historical and artistic knowledge, his masterful command of character, and his powerful moral vision.

Fulfilling Expectations Peter Carey's new novel, Jack Maggs, spins an enthralling variation on a Dickens classic

Banished for life to New South Wales, a convict eventually returns to 19th century London, risking hanging if the law discovers him, all because he wants to see Henry Phipps, the young English gentleman he has "made" by sending money from abroad. Does that premise sound familiar? It will to those who have read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and remember Pip's turmoil when he learns that his elevation in society has been financed by the fearsome felon Abel Magwitch. The novel being described here, however, is Peter Carey's Jack Maggs. What the dickens is Dickens' plot doing in Carey's new fiction?

Nothing very promising, those familiar with postmodernist literary and largely sterile ironies might guess. In this instance, they would be wrong. For one thing, it is not necessary to know a single word of Great Expectations to have a fine, suspenseful time reading Jack Maggs. Carey takes a cue from Dickens but then ad-libs an original and freestanding performance, replete with the sorts of twists and shocks and coincidences that originally gave page turners a good name. And those readers who retain a clear sense of Dickens' novel will encounter a trove of subtle allusions, not just to the 19th century author's life and works but also to the predatory relationship between an inventor of tales and the real-life subjects who find themselves grist for this creative mill.

Jack Maggs' search for Henry Phipps bumps into an immediate obstacle: Phipps is not to be found at the house where Maggs' money installed him. So the convict takes an expedient job as a footman at the house next door, the better to spot Phipps when he returns. Very quickly--Carey mimes perfectly the Victorian novelist's skill at making the implausible seem inevitable--Maggs comes to the attention of one of his master's dinner guests, the rising young author Tobias Oates. When Maggs, serving the wine, collapses from the pain of a tic douloureux in his cheek, Oates volunteers to relieve the servant's anguish by mesmerizing, i.e., hypnotizing, him. Maggs, a man desperate to keep secrets, is at the mercy of Oates, a man avid to exploit them.

The struggle between Maggs and Oates, a character obviously based on Dickens and lacking only the original's extenuating genius, forms the stem of Carey's plot. But, as befits a mock-19th century novel, there are many fascinating exfoliations. All of Carey's major characters come equipped with vivid childhoods--not just Maggs, thrown on a Thames mud flat as an infant and adopted in order to be trained as a thief, or Oates, humiliated and impoverished young by a feckless father. There is also Mercy Larkin, who befriends Maggs and who was sent into prostitution when barely more than a child by her own mother.

Because of the publishing mores of his time, Dickens could not write directly about prostitutes or abortionists or homosexuals, although coded references to them could be discerned by those in the know. In Jack Maggs, Carey breaks the old code and produces something wonderfully new.

Tracks of the cat
Jack Maggs arrives in London carrying a dark secret in his baggage. He's escaped the ferocity of Captain Logan's Moreton Bay penal colony. Maggs also carries evidence that Logan inflicted more whippings than any other camp commandant in the colony. His back betokens applications of the "double cat". Invented in Australia, the multi-stranded lash was used to discipline the lags. If caught, Maggs'll immediately be hanged, but his quest overcomes his fear of the noose. He's seeking someone important in his life. But fate throws impediments in his way. Among them is Peter Carey's appropriation of Charles Dickens as an investigative journalist.

Carey's engrossing story is his finest effort. He's created a character that only an author imbued with accounts of transportee [convicts, lags] travails could achieve. The Australian penal colony system was the antithesis of our concept of Victorian morality. Escaped prisoners were rare in Australia - there was nowhere to go. A lag returning to England was unheard of. In any case, the character of every lag underwent a change. They became two people; one the Englishman of a previous life and the other the result of the dehumanizing conditions suffered in that remote continent. Carey captures that duality with finesse and ardor. Driven by his quest, Maggs must adopt a servant's mien, even as his past experiences and cunning born of survival places him above the devious people he encounters daily. He has, after all, been sent to Australia, not for his crimes, but through an unparalleled act of self sacrifice. Maggs must mentally dodge and weave, moving between the worlds of Percy Buckle, Tobias Oates and the street urchin he was before being sent across the seas. Carey's fashioned a tormented figure set in the chaotic venue of 19th Century England.

Equating Carey with Charles Dickens is misleading. Dickens was an investigative journalist turned novelist. In a later age, Theodore Roosevelt would brand such people "muckrakers". Carey's isn't reporting what he's observed, driven by championing the poor Dickens divulged to his Victorian readers. Carey's account is pure fiction, no matter how many real characters and true life conditions he imparts. His creative qualities quite set him apart from Dickens. Simply setting this story in mid-19th Century London doesn't limit it to a Dickensian framework. Dickens, his outlook confined to the British Isles, couldn't have written this book. Carey's Australian background brings subtle nuances to Jack in his characterization. It's unlikely that any Anglo-American author could impart the moods Carey achieves in his portrayal of Maggs. This book is a true prize. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]