Carey grew up in Bacchus March and there is a nostalgic sheen to the novel's depiction of its small-town setting. In style and substance, the initial stages are at times reminiscent of the early Carey of Illywhacker and The Tax Inspector. Like a number of Carey's recent novels, it makes effective use of two narrators, its chapters alternating between the recollections of Irene Bobs, the young wife of a local car salesman named Titch Bobs, and those of her neighbour Willie Bachhuber, who is moderately famous for being the reigning champion on a dodgy radio quiz show, and who gets himself suspended from his day-job as a schoolteacher after he disciplines one particularly obnoxious student by hanging him out the window. It is respectfully and in certain respects cautiously conceived, but one that ultimate finds an ingenious way to reflect upon the original sin of dispossession and its ongoing consequences.Ī Long Way from Home begins in Bacchus Marsh in 1954. A Long Way from Home is his attempt to correct this, and it does so in full awareness of the sensitivity of its task. Peter Carey has long been interested in questions of national identity, but as he concedes in a note accompanying the advance copy of his new novel he has "avoided a direct confrontation with race, and the question of what it might mean to be a white Australian".
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