Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith “A prickly futurist fantasy … gaudy … extravagant.” — Los Angeles Times “Carey’s work has a wild, chance-taking quality … in harmony with the spirit of this age. If he keeps on … he will prove to be one of its finest novelists.” — Chicago Tribune “His books have an odd, tangential beauty, an airy poise — Hogarth by way of Chagall…. Carey’s fund of stories seems so inexhaustible that he should seriously think of making charitable donations to the needy…. His need to fall head over heels for each and every one of his characters is one of his greatest strengths as a novelist.” — The New Yorker “A rich, wry and funny novel of perseverance over physical, societal and family deformities.” — Boston Globe “Captivating [and] evocative … a compelling story…. Most accomplished.” — Miami Herald “Carey’s most inventive book yet — surpassing even The Tax Inspector and the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda…. The book is like a fantastical, action-packed dream — you just don’t want it to end.” — Details “Given Peter Carey’s bubbling imagination and intoxicating language, any new novel from the Australian author is an event…. A cross between John Irving’s A Son of the Circus and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent…. This novel is a cleverly detailed imagining of a possible future.” — San Francisco Chronicle

I would like to thank Kenneth de Kok who guided me through the shoals of Dutch and Afrikaans, translated some of my dialogue, and provided me with the name Voorstand; Charles Poulbon of Perth, Western Australia, who first alerted me to the joys of pigeon racing; Ronni Burrows of Ronni Reports for her highly efficient research on a number of arcane subjects; and Dr Brian Waldron who read a very early draft and was therefore Tristan Smith’s first diagnostician.

I owe especial thanks to Alison Summers, my wife, whose careful reading and thoughtful questions helped me to discover, chart and report the emotional and geographical territories of this novel.

Republic of Efica

‘In foreign countries,’ Bruder Mouse said, ‘they put animals in cages and keep them locked up and kill them.’

‘You can’t frighten me,’ said Bruder Duck. ‘There’s a great world out there and I plan to see it. I’m going to fairs, and puppet shows, and I’m going to cross oceans and have all sorts of adventures.’

‘You want to be fat and rich,’ said Bruder Mouse. ‘You want to find gold.’

‘It’s true,’ said Bruder Duck, ‘that if I chanced to stumble over a nugget I would thank the Lord for my good fortune and if I found an object of value I might buy cheaply, I would not refuse the blessing.’

‘But what of the issue?’ said Bruder Mouse.

‘What issue?’ said the Duck, who was busy eating the cheese pudding again.

‘That they have Sirkuses in foreign countries, where they put God’s creatures in cages. They have butcher shops where they sell our Bruders’ flesh.’

‘If what you say is so,’ said the Bruder Duck, ‘then I would change their minds.’

‘How would you do this?’ asked the Mouse.

‘I would do doody and fall over,’ said the Duck. ‘I would make them laugh.’

From Bruder Duck’s Travels , Badberg Edition

The Dog, the Duck, the Mouse

The Dog, the Duck, the Mouse

They lived their life in a tent

The Duck played the fiddle

The Dog had a piddle

The Mouse ran off with the rent.

Oh God we laughed till we cried

We sighed and wiped our eyes

We kissed the Dog we cuddled the Mouse

With the Duck right by our side.

The Dog, the Duck, the Mouse

Came in braces and baggy pants

They were no moles

But they purchased the holes

We had been left by chance.

Oh God we laughed till we cried

We sighed and wiped our eyes

We kissed the Dog we cuddled the Mouse

With the Duck right by our side.

Efican folk song

circa

351

EC

(Source:

Doggerel and Jetsam: unheard voices in the Voorstand Imperium

, Inchsmith Press, London)

My name is Tristan Smith. I was born in Chemin Rouge in Efica — which is to say as much to you, I bet, as if I declared I was from the moon.

And yet if you are going to make much sense of me, you have to know a little of my country, a country so unimportant that you are already confusing the name with Ithaca or Africa, a name so unmemorable it could only have been born of a committee, although it remains, nonetheless, the home of nearly three million of the earth’s people, and they, like you, have no small opinion of themselves, have artists and poets who are pleased to criticize its shortcomings and celebrate its charms, who return home to the eighteen little islands between the tropic of Capricorn and the 30th parallel, convinced that their windswept coastline is the most beautiful on earth. Like 98 per cent of the planet’s population, we Eficans may be justly accused of being provincial, parochial, and these qualities are sometimes magnified by your habit of hearing ‘Ithaca’ when we say ‘Efica’.

If I say ‘Voorstand’ to you, that is a different story entirely. You are a citizen of Voorstand. You hold the red passport with the phases of the moon embossed in gold. You stand with your hand over your heart when the Great Song is played, you daily watch new images of your armies in the vids and zines. How can I make you know what it is like to be from Efica — abandoned, self-doubting, yet so wilful that if you visit Chemin Rouge tomorrow morning we will tell you that the year is 426 *and you must write your cheques accordingly.

If you were my students I would direct you to read Efica: from penal colony to welfare state , † The Caves of Democracy, ‡and Volume 3 of Wilbur’s The Dyer’s Cauldron. * But you are not my students and I have no choice but to juggle and tap-dance before you, begging you please sit in your seats while I have you understand exactly why my heart is breaking.

*

426 by the Efican Calendar, sometimes written as 426

EC

,

but most commonly as 426. The calendar begins with the discovery of Neufasie (later Efica) by Captain Girard.

†

Nez Noir University Press, 343

EC.

‡

Macmillan, London, 1923.

*

Artcraft Press, Chemin Rouge 299

EC.

My maman was one of you. She was born in Voorstand. She was able to trace her family back to the ‘Settlers Free’ of the Great Song. Had things been different I might have been a Voorstander, like you, and then there would have been no trouble. But when my maman was eighteen she came to Chemin Rouge to be a model in a fashion advertisement.

She became famous, within Efica, for her role in a local soap opera, and then she was notorious as a founder of the Feu Follett †Collective, a small radical theatre group which was always in trouble with our local authorities for its opposition to the country of her birth.