Peter Carey — My Life as a Fake

Alfred A. Knopf 2003 Hardback, 290pp. In Melbourne in the 1930s, a conservative young poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach the country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at 24 and entirely the product of Chubb's imagination. Not only does the magazine fall for the hoax, but its editor is prosecuted for publishing obscenity. During the trial, someone uncannily resembling the man in the faked photograph of the invented McCorkle leaps to his feet. At this moment the horrified Chubb is confronted by the malevolent being he himself has manufactured. Using as a springboard the Ern Malley hoax, Peter Carey wickedly and ruefully explores how the phantom poet taunts, haunts and otherwise destroys his maker; pursuing Chubb from Melbourne to the seedy, sweaty, tropical chaos of Kuala Lumpur. Front cover is a little stained, pages have foxed, still in good readable condition. (ISBN: 9781740512466). Good.