''If I had only stayed in bed, I would not be where I am today, struggling in a web of mystery that I doubt I ever shall untangle." This is Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London poetry magazine, recalling a trip to Kuala Lumpur in 1972. She was talked into going by a raffish old writer called John Slater, a family friend. The reasons for the trip are unclear, but may have something to do with plot requirements.
Walking the streets, Sarah and Slater notice a shabby man reading Rilke while he minds a bicycle repair shop. Slater says "Christ" and moves Sarah on. The next day, when she possibly should have stayed in bed, Sarah goes to give the man a copy of her magazine: it includes "a very fine translation of Stefan George, which I expected a reader of Rilke would admire".
Slater later admits to knowing the man but warns that he's best avoided. He is, in fact, Christopher Chubb, a failed Australian poet, now remembered only for a hoax he played on the editor of a pretentious literary magazine in Melbourne in 1946. He invented a young, working-class poet named Bob McCorkle, who died tragically, and sent the editor a sheaf of dreadful, mock-modernist poems with a letter that was meant to have come from McCorkle's sister: "I am no judge of poetry myself, but a friend who I showed it to thinks it is very good . . . I enclose a 2fd stamp for reply."
The poems were cobbled together from snippets of Ezra Pound, old army manuals and anything else Chubb could think of, but the editor was taken in and plugged them as "work of the greatest importance". We never learn how Chubb then showed his hand, but he evidently did, and to his surprise the tabloid papers treated the hoax as big news. They weren't interested in poetry; they just liked the idea of an avant-gardist being made to look foolish.
In an afterword, Peter Carey explains that all this is based on the real-life "Ern Malley" affair, Malley being the horny-handed bard created by a couple of "talented anti-modernists" to dupe the editor of a magazine called, oh dear, Angry Penguins. Australian readers, writes Carey, will spot the connection, as the case was very well known. The spoof poems quoted, and even the sister's letter, are borrowed from the archive.
I suppose the afterword ought to be a hoax, too; these days Carey moves in smart circles in New York, where William Boyd and David Bowie launched the biography of a non-existent artist, Nat Tate, in 1998. Perhaps Carey hopes that, just as eminent guests at the book launch claimed to be long-time admirers of the painter who never was, his US and British critics will boast their casual knowledge of a scandal that never happened.
Anyway, from there the story takes off into the picaresque realm that Carey often likes to explore. Chubb explains that the authorities decided the McCorkle poems were obscene. At the editor's trial, a madman "nearly seven feet in height", with "wild dark eyes", showed up, bearing an alarming resemblance to the montage photo of McCorkle that Chubb had faked to lend the hoax additional credence.
The reader now sees why the novel bears an epigraph from Mary Shelley's Fran-kenstein. This "creature", convinced that he is McCorkle, stalks Chubb menacingly and kidnaps his adopted baby daughter. Chubb pursues the creature and the little girl to Malaya, following a trail of improbable clues for years. The poem Chubb shows Sarah is not by him but by the creature. It is a work of unmistakable genius.
Carey depicts a Malaysia full of bandits, superstitious yet sophisticated villagers and Cambridge-educated rajas. At one point, we get a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, as an eccentric Tamil schoolmaster tells Chubb about his experiences during the Japanese occupation. Carey handles the different narrative voices confidently, though Sarah's tones, those of a quietly determined Kensington lesbian, are probably the most engaging. After she has to negotiate with Chubb's daughter for the poems, she says: "I tried to smile, but I am not very good at that sort of thing and doubtless I looked as grotesque as a de Kooning."
But the novel, though stylish, vivid and distinctive, does not say as much about the strange roots of literary inspiration as it purports to, and in the end the storyline comes to a not very satisfactory crash-stop. Sarah's caveat about mysteries left unresolved proves a bit too well founded.
