Books & Poetry

Carey moves on from the contrived hoax poet plot of ‘My Life as a Fake’ to an elaborate art forgery storyline in ‘Theft: A Love Story’. Loud has been the gossip about the supposed inspiration for the love story in Carey’s new novel, but the enduring relationship in ‘Theft’ is the one between out-of-fashion painter Michael ‘Butcher Bones’ Boone and his ‘damaged’ brother Hugh, rather than that between Boone and his unlikely lover Marlene, wife of the son of Jacques Leibovitz, the late great artist whose name is mentioned in the same breath as Picasso, Leger and others.

Marlene turns up one night at the house in New South Wales that Butcher shares with Hugh, her Manolo Blahniks no match for the coursing mud and flood waters of the swollen creek. That she’s in the neighbourhood to authenticate a Leibovitz owned by Boone’s chum Dozy Boylan, the mere existence of which is news to Butcher, is the detail that kicks off a plot that takes us, eventually, to New York via Tokyo.

There are two narrators – Butcher and brother Hugh – who switch chapters. The effect is frustrating, Hugh’s idiot savant routine with contracted syntax and Tourettes-style BURSTS OF CAPITALS testing the reader’s patience. Well, this reader’s anyway. It’s arguable whether any information or even nuance is revealed via Hugh’s narrative that could not be related in his brother’s. The action speeds up when it leaves Australian soil, but the Tokyo settings are sketchy, over-dependent on the names of neighbourhoods, a lazy shorthand that conjures little of the speed, vastness or sensual richness of that city. New York is a long time coming and over too quickly for the amount of plot that has to be shoved in – almost as if Carey was in as much of a rush to be done with it as I was.