He was nineteen.įor the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.Īfter four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History - a short story collection - was published in 1974. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was a student there between 19 - after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived. He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943. Although love proves to be the ultimate gamble for Oscar and Lucinda, the story never strays too far from the terrible possibility that even the most thunderstruck lovers can remain isolated in parallel lives.Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Yet even the unconvincing plot turns are made up for by Carey’s rich prose and the tale’s unpredictable outcome. Their final high-stakes folly–transporting a crystal palace of a church across (literally) godforsaken terrain–strains plausibility, and events turn ghastly as Oscar plays out his bid for Lucinda’s heart. When the two finally meet, on board a ship bound for New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming (but unexpressed) mutual affection. Oscar plays the horses while at school, and Lucinda, now an orphaned heiress, finds comfort in a game of cards with an odd collection of acquaintances. Neither of these coming-of-age stories quite explains how the grownup Oscar and Lucinda each develop a guilty passion for gambling. “Dear God,” Oscar prays, “if it be Thy will that Thy people eat pudding, smite him!” Lucinda’s childhood trauma involves a beautiful doll bought by her struggling mother with savings from the jam jar in a misguided attempt to tame the doll’s unruly curls, young Lucinda mutilates her treasure beyond repair. Young Oscar, denied the heavenly fruit of a Christmas pudding by his cruelly stern father, forever renounces his father’s religion in favor of the Anglican Church. In the early parts of this lushly written book, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists’ childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher’s kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees.
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