Counterfeit Folks

But when they reach Kuala Lumpur, Slater vanishes, leaving Sarah to fend for herself in the rain. On one of her walks in the city, she happens to see a white man in a sarong, with ulcers on his legs, sitting in a bicycle shop reading Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus. Although, as she says rather crossly, in his eyes there is no flicker of ‘‘racial connection’’, she feels an undeniable literary kinship, one that makes her rush back to get him a copy of The Modern Review, the literary journal that she edits, because she thinks he might like a particularly good translation in that edition. And that is how the Rilke-reading white man, Christopher Chubb, comes to the hotel to tell Sarah his fantastic story.

At the first level, then, we have as narrator a lesbian Englishwoman who tries to publish good poetry, and who is always hoping to find the contemporary equivalent of The Waste Land; at the next level, we are told the story of Christopher Chubb and his creation, the ‘‘fake’’ Bob McCorkle, the equivalent of Ern Malley, who comes to life to torment Chubb. And the narration is set not in Australia, not in the mother country England, but in Malaysia — where Chubb, whose literary standards have hitherto been so impossibly high, has begun to speak in the musical cadences of Malay English: ‘‘Can or cannot?’’ he asks. ‘‘I don’t want your money-lah,’’ he tells Sarah. And ‘‘Don’t lebeh, you,’’ he says to Slater, ‘‘this is my home now.’’

An intense, complex plot, and an economical, almost elliptical telling take us through a dense list of themes: colony, empire, provincialism, class, race, difference, and literary creation.

Though based in New York, the Australian Carey has always drawn upon myths and stories from his own continent for the substance of his novels. In his Booker winning True History of the Kelly Gang, he fictionalised the story of the outlaw and people’s hero Ned Kelly, a story so authentic that its cadences and rhythms brought to life the geography of the entire land. And in retelling the story of Bob McCorkle, Christopher Chubb, Sarah Wode-Douglass and all the other people we meet in this taut, racy literary thriller set in Southeast Asia, he has brought to life the dark geography of yet another country, whose name is fiction.