Every tree in the avenue was planted for a local boy that died.
#A LONG WAY FROM HOME PETER CAREY SKIN#
Here is Bachhuber: “Who would be a man locked inside his skin with only prayer and filthy thoughts for company? Is that God’s plan, that good men should buy disgraceful photographs upstairs from the milliners on Little Bourke Street?” And here’s Irene on Bacchus Marsh: “If there is a prettier war memorial than our Avenue of Honour, I never heard of it. The author has such a good ear, such a gift for catching the rhythms of everyday talky, funny rumination, his sentences as crammed with colourful know-how and telling detail as an old attic, or a passage from James Joyce. These two rich, ripe voices, beautifully realised on the page, are the joy of the novel and at the heart of its achievement – just as Ned Kelly’s voice was at the heart of Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang. The author has such a good ear, such a gift for catching the rhythms of everyday talky, funny rumination He tries to save himself through reading books and knowing things, winning quiz shows, poring with longing over the maps of a lost Europe he has never even visited. The son of a Lutheran pastor in Adelaide, he feels disastrously misplaced in the brash Australia of this era. No wonder Irene develops a soft spot for poor Bachhuber, who is such a different type of man: crucified by his sexual yearning, poisoned if he ever drinks alcohol, melancholy and gentle and gullible. (His backstory is a feast in itself, with his history in early aeronautics and party tricks with gelignite.) Once Dan is dead, however, Titch begins to develop his own patriarchal swagger, hanging out in bars with the loud power-brokers, imitating their boozing and womanising. She has loved and supported tiny Titch through the early years of their marriage because she hated how he was bullied by his braggart of a father, Dan. Irene is plucky, capable, generous and impulsive. Irene and Bachhuber narrate the novel’s story in more or less alternating chapters, and part of the narrative is the growing attraction between them.
#A LONG WAY FROM HOME PETER CAREY HOW TO#
Carey relishes all the detail of their preparation: Irene worrying about the dust in the outback clogging the Holden air cleaner, stretching a stocking over its wire mesh as an extra filter Titch showing their neighbour Willie Bachhuber how to “remove the shackle bolt from the leaf spring”, jacking the spring up “so the eye moves along the wood to the spot where the shackle can be fitted”.īachhuber navigates: brilliantly, because he loves maps and once worked as assistant to the map librarian of the state library. Driving a car is all in the bum, he unromantically explains, “and her bum is a perfect instrument for the job”. Titch Bobs is the best car salesman in rural Victoria, and enters the trials as a publicity stunt for his new car showroom he takes along his wife, Irene, mother of their two children. This novel is his opportunity to write with love about both the landscape and the engineering. Carey’s parents ran a motor business in Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, where the book begins: as a boy he followed the trials with passionate enthusiasm, and he understands their romance from the inside – testing the genius of the cars’ engineering, and the ingenuity and skill of the drivers, against Australia’s raw and resistant natural landscape.
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