The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
Philip Landon

Peter Carey. Jack Maggs. Knopf, 1998. 306 pp. $24.00.

Peter Carey’s five previous novels have been lauded for their “Dickensian” wealth of incident and characterization. In Jack Maggs Carey takes his Victorian forefathers by the sideburns, bringing Dickens himself back to life in the figure of a ruthless and driven young novelist, Tobias Oates, who writes lucrative, sensational accounts of accident victims, destitutes, and criminals. Jack Maggs, a transported convict returned from Australia, offers perfect fodder for the novelist: “ ‘It’s the Criminal Mind,’ said Tobias Oates, ‘awaiting its first cartographer.’ ” Unlike Magwitch in Great Expectations, however, Maggs resists exoticization.
Dickens’s complicity with vindictive Victorian criminology is especially distasteful to the Australian Carey. Yet even as he forces us to rethink Dickens, Carey treasures the teeming, panoramic nineteenth-century form for its ability to accommodate human diversity—what Iris Murdoch calls the “contingency” of the social world. In Carey’s hands, the novelist’s searchlight sweeps ever further into the margins, picking out the once unspeakable—homosexuality, prostitution, extramarital pregnancy, back-street abortions.
Dickens, too, used to be celebrated for extending the range of fiction to include the outcasts in the periphery. Hindsight has revealed the latent coerciveness of his social conscience and the violence that informs the conventions that contain multiplicity in Victorian fiction: melodramatic closure, pseudoscientific categorization of social types. Carey eschews such pat devices. He weaves instead a staccato sequence of brief scenes and multiple, overlapping perspectives, evoking a world of irreducible complexity beyond the scope of any single account.
Given the literary conceit on which it rests, Jack Maggs makes for a great comparison to Great Expectations, and it is worth a heap of essays on its main themes: the pitfalls of fiction, the blind spots of Victorian ideology, social discipline. [Philip Landon]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Jack Maggs by Peter Carey Philip Landon Peter Carey. Jack Maggs. Knopf, 1998. 306 pp. $24.00. Peter Carey’s five previous novels have been lauded for their “Dickensian” wealth of incident and characterization. In Jack Maggs Carey takes his Victorian forefathers by the sideburns, bringing Dickens himself back to life in the figure of a ruthless and driven young novelist, Tobias Oates, who writes lucrative, sensational accounts of accident victims, destitutes, and criminals. Jack Maggs, a transported convict returned from Australia, offers perfect fodder for the novelist: “ ‘It’s the Criminal Mind,’ said Tobias Oates, ‘awaiting its first cartographer.’ ” Unlike Magwitch in Great Expectations, however, Maggs resists exoticization. Dickens’s complicity with vindictive Victorian criminology is especially distasteful to the Australian Carey. Yet even as he forces us to rethink Dickens, Carey treasures the teeming, panoramic nineteenth-century form for its ability to accommodate human diversity—what Iris Murdoch calls the “contingency” of the social world. In Carey’s hands, the novelist’s searchlight sweeps ever further into the margins, picking out the once unspeakable—homosexuality, prostitution, extramarital pregnancy, back-street abortions. Dickens, too, used to be celebrated for extending the range of fiction to include the outcasts in the periphery. Hindsight has revealed the latent coerciveness of his social conscience and the violence that informs the conventions that contain multiplicity in Victorian fiction: melodramatic closure, pseudoscientific categorization of social types. Carey eschews such pat devices. He weaves instead a staccato sequence of brief scenes and multiple, overlapping perspectives, evoking a world of irreducible complexity beyond the scope of any single account. Given the literary conceit on which it rests, Jack Maggs makes for a great comparison to Great Expectations, and it is worth a heap of essays on its main themes: the pitfalls of fiction, the blind spots of Victorian ideology, social discipline. [Philip Landon]

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